They turned it into a platform
OpenAI's DevDay turned the model into a platform, and every builder now faces the oldest question I know: build on top of it, or beside it
OpenAI just handed every builder a fork in the road, and most people are too busy playing with custom GPTs to notice it.
Monday's DevDay was a product launch dressed as a developer conference. GPT-4 Turbo. A 128k context window — you can now pour a small book into a single prompt. Cheaper tokens. An Assistants API. And custom GPTs anyone can spin up without writing a line of code.
The room cheered. I sat in Prague reading the liveblog with a colder feeling.
I have built on someone else's platform before. In 2001 we shipped games on Eurotel's network — their rails, their billing, their rules. It worked until the day the rules changed, and then it didn't, and there was nothing we could do but watch. You learn that lesson once and it stays in your spine.
So when a single company says "build your whole product inside our store, on our API, priced however we decide next quarter," I hear the offer underneath the offer. They are not just giving you tools. They are inviting you to become a tenant.
There is a real choice here, and it is not technical. Build on top of it, or build beside it. On top is faster — you ride their roadmap, their margins, their outages. Beside is harder and slower and yours.
The capability is astonishing and I'll use all of it. But I keep circling the same instinct: the parts that matter — your context, your logic, the thing customers actually pay for — those should not live inside another company's walls.
A platform is a wonderful place to start. It is a dangerous place to depend.
I want to own the load-bearing parts. Everything else, rent gladly.