“Sam Altman actually said something interesting on the OpenAI town hall a couple weeks ago. Someone asked him 'are you going to kill my startup?' and he was basically like: look, if you as a company are happy when the models improve, you're safe. That's a great place to be.”

Sam Altman's safety test — are you happy when the models improve?

The litmus test for whether your consumer AI app is durable: do you get stronger when GPT-5 ships, or weaker? If model improvements help you, you're on the right side of the labs. If they directly threaten you, you're a thin feature waiting to be eaten.