“I would not trust any of our predictions because reality has so far exceeded them by such a great degree that we’ve been reduced to spectators just like you, watching this amazing phenomenon and just doing our best to try to help everybody get their apps done and get them on the store.
Maybe it’ll be a billion dollar marketplace at some point in time. This doesn’t happen very often. A whole new billion dollar market opens up. 360 million in the first 30 days, I’ve never seen anything like this in my career for software.”
– Steve Jobs
Steve Jobs severely underestimated the App Store business.
Most people in our industry are about to do the same for a brand new marketplace.
This will be bigger than Apple App Store, AWS Marketplace, or any other comparable marketplace.
Let’s dive in.
In today’s edition
- The Next Great Marketplace
- How big could this get?
- Tribute to Gordon Moore. It’s 2023, does Moore’s law still apply?
1. The Next Great Marketplace
It may look minuscule today and most people have missed it.
OpenAI announced their plugin marketplace.
Wait, Abhijeet, are you getting excited about a plugin marketplace?
Let me share why this is a big deal.
A. Fastest Growth Ever
As you might already know this, OpenAI’s ChatGPT is the fastest growing technologic history.
B. Monetization of AI
ChatGPT is now a monetized asset through it’s premium subscription ChatGPT Plus as well as it’s integration into Microsoft’s ecosystem of search and productivity apps.
C. ChatGPT now has a marketplace
OpenAI released a new plugin marketplace for ChatGPT.
This blows open the barn doors for even more innovation on top of the fastest growing tech platform.
Just take the example of OpenAI’s browser plugin. With this plugin, you are no longer restricted to ChatGPT’s training dataset which is limited until 2021.
With this plugin, you can:
1. Use Bing API to search the entire internet
2. Integrate information across multiple data sources on the internet
3. References sources with click-throughs to verify claims, so less chances of ChatGPT “making things up”
2. How big could this get?
Ok I get it, ChatGPT’s marketplace is riding on the fastest tech adoption wave and it is making money. But how big could this get?
To answer that question, you don’t need to look much further than Apple’s App Store.
Apple’s Services business clocked in $78B by the end of 2022, most of it being App Store revenue. As you can see in the graph, this is larger than revenues of McDonalds and Nike put together.
So how large could ChatGPT’s marketplace become? Your guess is as good as mine. But let me offer a couple of views:
- ChatGPT plugins could soon include all the major B2B and B2C applications that exist today, ranging from SAP to Instagram.
- ChatGPT’s marketplace might be a stop gap as of today and might eventually become part of Microsoft’s marketplace as part of Azure Marketplace or by itself.
So yeah, it will be yuuuuge 🙂
So What?
If you are a technology OEM or a platform, the time to pay attention to this marketplace is now. This will be the place to be while the foundations are being built for this potential skyscraper.
3. Tribute to Gordon Moore. It’s 2023, does Moore’s law still apply?
Gordon Moore, one of Intel’s co-founders and a Silicon Valley titan has passed away.
He was part of the original “traitorous eight” who founded Fairchild Semiconductor, which became an incubator for many other Silicon Valley companies — including Intel and AMD.
He was one of the OG of Silicon Valley.
You might be familiar with his name because of “Moore’s law,” his 1965 prediction that processors would roughly double in transistor count every year. (A decade later, he changed his estimate to be one doubling every two years).
So does this law hold true now?
If you look a transistor count over the last 50 years (chart below), the trend has been pretty close to intact.
In fact, new AI-specific chips from NVIDIA and Tesla are keeping the trend intact.
A great example of detecting a signal based on data and making a prediction that hold true till today!
Wrapping Up
That’s it for this edition.
It is going to be an exciting few weeks: we are not out of the woods yet on the current banking crisis. Plus we have manufacturing and employment numbers coming in.