Distribution trumps product quality

Building a great product is one of those things that's necessary, but not sufficient. And actually the separation is between those that build really great distribution.

The only moat in human data is access to an audience.

Nick Turley is discussing OpenAI's decision to make ChatGPT free at launch, with "this" referring to ChatGPT and "modeling" referring to AI language models.

Making it free was a big deal. I think anyone could have built something like this. It might not have been quite as good on the modeling side, but I think it would've taken off.

We made this choice with... So it's a little hard to remember, right? Because it's like 18 years, 17 years ago now, 18 years ago almost. In that era, Office was impregnable, right? So software had to be distributed physically, right, it had to be shipped around, it had to be bought and installed. It was harder to use. And so there's a very high transactional cost. Because there's a very high transactional cost, the buyers would always make this decision like, 'Do I want the thing with 1,000 features or the thing with 995 features? I don't know what those last five are, but I might as well have all of them.'