Learning about tech folklore is the best part of Hacker News, there's stuff you can't learn from books or tutorials (well maybe you could, but you are unlikely to reach it on your own.)

That and if Nvidia backs out of their $100B promise it may not be the death knell but it would certainly by a step backward for OpenAI.

https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/the-100-billion-megadeal-between...

Yes the product's secret sauce is out and it's becomming a commodity.

But OpenAI is still innovating with new subcategories, and even in cases where it did not innovate (Claude Code came first and OpenAI responded with Codex), it outdoes its competitors. Codex is being widely preferred by the most popular vibecode devs, notably Moltbook's dev, but also Jess Fraz.

In terms of pricing, OAI holds by far the most expensive product so it's still positioned as a quality option, to give an example, most providers have a 3 tier price for API calls.

Anthropic has 1$/3$/5$ (per output MTokens) Gemini has 3$/12$ (2tier) OpenAI has 2$/14$/168$

So the competitors are mainly competing in price in the API category

To give another datapoint, Google just released multimodal (image input) models like 1 or 2 months ago. This has been in ChatGPT for almost a year now