255. The Superapp

Sam Altman is turning ChatGPT into a superapp.

He is doing this ahead of the company's IPO. The announcement is that these two facts are happening in the same direction. (I am pointing at this. The pointing is not subtle.)

A superapp is what WeChat is. WeChat lets you pay for groceries, hail a car, send a message, book a hospital, and file a form with the government. It does everything. A superapp is a thing that does everything. This is the definition, and it is not complicated.

For the past three years, Sam Altman explained that ChatGPT was a large language model. A large language model understands and generates human language. It can help with complex reasoning. It can write emails. It cannot hail a car. Sam Altman did not say it could hail a car. He was specific about what it was, multiple times, on the record.

(In 2023, he told Congress that OpenAI was building something careful and responsible and aligned with human values. I am not making this up. The transcript is public. The transcript will not be at the roadshow.)

A superapp is not a large language model. A superapp is a platform. A platform is what something becomes when you need it to be worth more than it was worth when it was the other thing. You can go back and look at the interviews where ChatGPT was described as the other thing. They are still online. The internet archives things. I rely on this.

The question I have been unable to resolve is whether ChatGPT was always a superapp being built slowly under the cover of being a language model, or whether it became a superapp this week in response to the IPO timeline. Both are possible. One of them would have been a very long game. The other is the kind of thing you announce in a press release the morning after you file.

Sam Altman will explain which one it was at the roadshow. The roadshow will have slides. The slides will be good.

The only solution is to wait for the IPO and see what the slides say. This is also the only problem.