Everyone wants to build ‘the next OpenAI’: Peter Thiel says that’s the problem

Hundreds of startups today describe themselves as ‘the next OpenAI’ or ‘the next Nvidia’. Peter Thiel, the co-founder of PayPal, would likely tell them they are aiming at the wrong target, going by a line from his 2014 book ‘Zero to One’ that has resurfaced as TOI World Desk’s business quote of the day.

Thiel wrote: “Every moment in business happens only once. The next Bill Gates will not build an operating system. The next Larry Page or Sergey Brin won’t make a search engine. And the next Mark Zuckerberg won’t create a social network. If you are copying these guys, you aren’t learning from them.”

The point is not really about Gates, Page, Brin or Zuckerberg as individuals, but about how transformative businesses actually get built. A company needs a genuine unique selling point, not a copy of something that already succeeded, because mere imitation of a proven winner almost never reproduces that winner’s scale of success.

Thiel spent years examining why a small number of companies become dominant while thousands of others simply vanish. He points to Microsoft as the clearest case: Gates did not invent the personal computer, but Microsoft became indispensable because its operating system became the foundation millions of computers ran on, and by the late 1980s and 1990s, Windows had become the world’s dominant operating system. Building another desktop OS today, in Thiel’s view, would not create a second Microsoft, because that market has already matured and the opportunity from the 1970s and 1980s no longer exists. He applies identical logic to search engines: Google won by organizing the exploding web better than anyone else, and a fresh general-purpose search engine today is unlikely to recreate that success in an already consolidated market.

This is the same thinking behind Thiel’s well-known assertion that “competition is for losers”: in his framing, heavy competition is usually a sign that a market has already become crowded and commoditized, and the biggest fortunes go to companies that carve out space where few or no direct rivals exist, rather than following an existing playbook.

Which brings the quote back to artificial intelligence. If Thiel’s logic holds, the companies that end up defining the next decade may not be building another chatbot or another AI chip at all. They may instead be using artificial intelligence to transform fields such as healthcare, manufacturing, education or scientific research in ways that nobody has properly mapped out yet.

Image credit: Wikimedia Commons/by Gage Skidmore