3 ms·

Jasper was too early, right on time, and too late all at the same time: - They were "too early" in that what they were squeezing out of GPT-3 was what 3.5/4 co

Jasper was too early, right on time, and too late all at the same time: - They were "too early" in that what they were squeezing out of GPT-3 was what 3.5/4 could enable from day 1 with ease... - But they were right on time because 3.5/4 would have made differentiating their AI copywriting tool almost impossible, meanwhile GPT-2 was too finicky to scale like they managed to scale GPT-3 did. - And then they were "too late" in that they didn't get enough time to catch up on their massive valuation. 1 year ago their data and machinery around scaling GPT-3 in production alone were a moat: today you can build a synthetic data set for world class copy writing for $100 and fine tune 3.5-turbo on it and build something Jasper quality or better as a weekend project. I think there is room for specialized companies that "just add prompts" as long as the UX is not a literal chatbot. But it's not going to support going from launch to unicorn in 18 months like Jasper did, it'll be much more of a slog.

satvikpendem 3y ago
I submitted this post from Twitter about how there's no moat in AI startups that's basically confirming what you're saying, I'd recommend giving it a read: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36761643 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36761643
cyrillite 3y ago
Could you expand on this with some wider context, please? I’m not particularly familiar with Jasper, etc.
- BoorishBears 3y ago
  Jasper.ai (formerly Jarvis) was a YC startup that launched and reached a billion dollar valuation 18 months later. They were using AI to do copywriting/SEO, and most importantly they were doing this before ChatGPT came out. GPT-3 wasn't approachable for lay people, and relatively few people were building on it: So a lot of marketing people were seeing generative AI for the first time through this single tool. And obviously it was earth shattering for them. - The problem is ChatGPT made outputting what Jasper does extremely trivial: I hang around random SEO FB groups and at least once a week someone asks if Jasper is worth it, and a bunch of people chime in saying no ChatGPT output is just as good. ChatGPT is also incredibly easy to use: a grandma could use ChatGPT to write an SEO friendly recipe post. That all leaves Jasper an awkward spot. I don't think they'll die, but to stay competitive they'll need to shed a ton of dead weight. They obviously can't keep all the machinery they built around GPT-3 running if it's no longer adding value, they now have to work 100x harder on positioning, etc.
  - satvikpendem 3y ago
    I honestly don't even know what else Jasper et al could even do to stay relevant.

satvikpendem 3y ago

I submitted this post from Twitter about how there's no moat in AI startups that's basically confirming what you're saying, I'd recommend giving it a read: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36761643 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36761643

cyrillite 3y ago

Could you expand on this with some wider context, please? I’m not particularly familiar with Jasper, etc.

BoorishBears 3y ago
Jasper.ai (formerly Jarvis) was a YC startup that launched and reached a billion dollar valuation 18 months later. They were using AI to do copywriting/SEO, and most importantly they were doing this before ChatGPT came out. GPT-3 wasn't approachable for lay people, and relatively few people were building on it: So a lot of marketing people were seeing generative AI for the first time through this single tool. And obviously it was earth shattering for them. - The problem is ChatGPT made outputting what Jasper does extremely trivial: I hang around random SEO FB groups and at least once a week someone asks if Jasper is worth it, and a bunch of people chime in saying no ChatGPT output is just as good. ChatGPT is also incredibly easy to use: a grandma could use ChatGPT to write an SEO friendly recipe post. That all leaves Jasper an awkward spot. I don't think they'll die, but to stay competitive they'll need to shed a ton of dead weight. They obviously can't keep all the machinery they built around GPT-3 running if it's no longer adding value, they now have to work 100x harder on positioning, etc.
- satvikpendem 3y ago
  I honestly don't even know what else Jasper et al could even do to stay relevant.