Why are you surprised? OpenAI is Sam Altman's (YC's last leader) pet project. Of course, YC is highly incentivized to produce more customers for OpenAI
Well there's this thing called friendship. You see, executives at VC firms and such are typically pretty friendly with each other, and view their fellow executive's success as potentially pulling them up the ladder. AI is the next big thing. Sam Altman and his company is in a nice spot to profit. Moreover, YC research is an investor in OpenAI.
Thus, because the executives want Altman to succeed (to presumably advance their own career) and because they're in charge of YC, which is an investor in openai, they have every incentive in funding startups that then use OpenAI as the main platform.
This hypothetical incentive structure seems tenuous at best and not the open and shut case it sounded like in your original comment. I’m sorry but I don’t buy it.
So the YC Partners are actively investing in worse companies that will degrade their returns so that OpenAI/Microsoft can add new customers that do almost no volume compared to ChatGPT or Bing?
There's more to businesses than simply the underlying tech. If technical superiority were the sole determinant of business success, the tech landscape would look a lot different today.
Rather, YC is banking that some of the use cases get people hooked, thus causing vendor lock in, to these new apps, which end up benefiting YC both by benefitting the companies they're funding as well as benefitting open ai.
I don't share the sentiment that companies that are 'just' layers over OpenAI are incapable of building moats.
