But isn't it the case that the cash cow for Amazon is actually AWS? That is, without AWS would we consider Amazon to be the success we see it as today?
Keep in mind that while the store brings in a majority of revenue, it provides less than 20% of operating income. A majority of operating income comes from AWS (which provides less than 20% of revenue).
Amazon weren't making money because they were expanding rapidly and had a lot of capex.
OpenAI don't make money because they're losing money on inference. If you remove their capex - training costs, which you can't because they have to remain competitive, they'd still be losing money.
Leaders in their market, at first because of a small moat and large advance, then the advance shrink but the brand will stay first for at least a decade due to brand recognition.
The Amazon comp works less, unless openAI start to suddenly build the sell their own chips.
