In old-school economics, it was assumed that humans are rational actors, acting based on selfish motives, and that by understanding this, we would be able to predict economic outcomes. However, this mentality baffled Daniel Kahneman, who together with Amos Tversky researched this topic. Kahneman, who from years in
psychology knew that, in his words,
“[I]t is self-evident that
people are neither fully rational nor completely selfish, and
that their tastes are anything but stable.”
Through decades of research with Tversky, Kahneman demonstrated that all humans suffer from cognitive biases—unconscious, irrational brain processes that distort how we see the world.
Kahneman and Tversky discovered more than 150.
The Framing Effect is one of them, which demonstrates that people respond differently to the same choice depending on how it is framed (people place greater value on moving from 90 percent to 100 percent—high probability to certainty—than from 45 percent to 55 percent, even though they’re both ten percentage points).
This made me think of the latest framing around OpenAI’s announced GPT Store, which will be the app store to build your chatbots, which you can publish and monetize. The part that I found particularly interesting was the framing of “Revenue Share”. That’s a very interesting framing, almost a euphemism for nothing else than “Platform fees.”
Apple charges 30% of all revenue coming from iOS apps in fees. It is, after all, a fee — people pay money to use the creation of someone who sat down and spent time creating it. Don’t get me wrong - without Apple and in this case, without OpenAI it wouldn’t be possible for anyone to even create something like this. They make the platform. It’s interesting to see how the framing here is focused on the positive part - “Revenue” - yes, people want revenue, and currently, being in SF, the epicenter of AI developments, I can feel the gold rush atmosphere. There’s almost a fever going on (for sure non-zero cognitive biases playing a role), people frantically trying to keep up with OpenAI and the opportunities that open up. And this little word “share”, which denotes the existence of a fee, is so innocent on the side. The messaging seems to work. People are excited, and in the last 48 hours, authors created chat bots to chat with their books. Some people try to make their personal assistants. Others replace their hand-crafted RAG system with a custom GPT. Let’s see how much revenue OpenAI will share, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s 70%, as with Apple.