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So i guess the next wave of startups has been killed. I'm not even sure what kind of startup still makes sense as a gpt thin wrapper?
by siva7 3y ago
So i guess the next wave of startups has been killed. I'm not even sure what kind of startup still makes sense as a gpt thin wrapper?
- ethanbond 3y agoNone of them, but here's the thing: they never made any sense.
- RobertDeNiro 3y agoYeah none of them ever did, and that was always very obvious. If you can make it by wrapping a few API calls, you have no moat and anyone can steal your idea/customers.
- dumbfounder 3y agoFirst-mover advantage can be powerful. If you can build a community around your wrapper quickly then you can leverage that community to build a moat.
- vikramkr 3y agoEven if you're doing something with strong network effects you've got to consider cases like facebook which weren't first movers in markets where there are super strong network effects and yet still won. You're not really going to have a 'community' based moat for PDF analyzer tool #5 or retrieval augmented generation knowledgebase parser #300. You're not gonna have a moat based on much else either...
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- constantly 3y agoThey never made sense long term, of course. But, plenty of first movers made a bundle of money making chatgpt wrappers and marketing the hell out of them. In that context, they probably made sense for a small subset of people for a small slice of time.
- alvah 3y agoConversion.ai / Jarvis.ai / Jasper.ai / whatever they’re called today raised $125M at a $1.5b valuation, so it made sense at some point to some people.
- ethanbond 3y ago1) Jasper isn’t exactly what I’d call “thin.” It has e.g. an entire project management suite inside it now. They moved very fast into a vertical SaaS platform, probably because they knew that a thin wrapper was neither a particularly good product nor a defensible one. 2) There are tons of actually thin wrappers that raised a ton of money — contrary to popular belief this does not mean they are good businesses (Jasper, AFAICT, doesn’t seem to fall into the categories of either “thin wrapper” or bad business) 3) Obviously anything being called out as not making any sense allegedly “made sense” to some people at some point otherwise it wouldn’t be worth talking about.
- mycall 3y agoJasper becoming a project management suite in an oversaturated PM market is an odd move.
- ethanbond 3y ago¯\_(ツ)_/¯ yeah not sure if it’s a good type of thick, but it definitely ain’t thin.
- alvah 3y agoJasper was cited in a recent TechCrunch article about the obvious vulnerability of the API wrapper startup business model. I guess we could argue at length about the thickness of the wrapper, but that seems unproductive.
- colesantiago 3y agoThis meme is getting very old and tired. What kinds have been 'killed' I don't see this anywhere.
- Tankenstein 3y agoMany startups have started over the past few years, trying to build infrastructure (shovels) for companies to integrate LLMs, or specific chat copilots trying to cater to a specific usecase. Most are dead in the water once OpenAI subsumes their feature set.
- BoorishBears 3y ago... is what people who don't understand positioning will parrot time and time again. Jasper isn't having a good time, but you'd think the fact anyone can produce better output than they did after spending millions of dollars in GPT-3 based pipelines for $20 a month would mean they're dead dead. But instead they went and changed their positioning, changed who their target market is, adjusted the UX, the messaging, and the feature set, and now it's a product that has a place even if OpenAI can give all of your marketers an internal ChatGPT (unless your plan is to have 100 different "GPTs" for every marketing task in your company) tl;dr: People fail to realize that OpenAI can offer your startup's core value proposition tomorrow morning, and it doesn't matter if they don't offer it in a format that resonates with your target users. You could have a cure to cancer and you'd still have to market it correctly.
- Sai_ 3y agoIsn’t that the crux of the conversation? Jasper had to fight to survive because they were a wrapper.
- tsunamifury 3y agoWhat isn't a wrapper? Honestly everyone turns they nose in the air and claims all superiority bit I challenge you to find a use case that isn't just a 'wrapper'
- sergiotapia 3y agoIf your startup is just a thin wrapper for GPT, it's DOA regardless. Trivial moat is always a trivial moat. You must use LLMs as a launching point to something else, some kind of 10x in a vertical. Being able to "chat" is table stakes and worthless to you as a company by itself.
- dragonwriter 3y ago> I'm not even sure what kind of startup still makes sense as a gpt thin wrapper? Startups don't make sense as thin wrappers around another company's product when that company is aggressively expanding that product is a core offering that the vendor is aggressively working to provide as an integrated solution for as many markets as possible, which very much applies to OpenAI offerings in general, and its chat models especially. A wrapper that also leverages some exclusive special sauce data, algorithm, etc., for which you have a real moat as a key component, that makes some sense. But just a thin wrapper around GPT? That's just asking to have your market eaten by OpenAI. It might make some sense for products where the vendor is a stable, steady-state infrastructure supplier for many markets without any evident interest in entering the same market as the startup, where the uncertainty across markets that they would create by specifically targeting your startups market would hurt them more with their established customers than they would gain from your niche, but even that is risky because it requires lots of potentially-erroneous assessments of how the vendor would expect their other customers to react to them acting in your market.
- hackerbeat 3y agoAI graveyard: https://dang.ai/ai-graveyard https://dang.ai/ai-graveyard see also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38172617 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38172617
- api 3y agoThin wrappers around anything never make much sense. They're trivially replaceable.
- levmiseri 3y agoSome use cases are still valid I hope. E.g. content generation on a massive scale. An example of that that I'm tinkering with: https://meoweler.com https://meoweler.com
- anigbrowl 3y agoCan I ask what the goal is here? It's cool to be able to spin up a nicely designed website (and it is nicely designed and has a good aesthetic), but isn't the content going to be semantically empty? I don't want to be negative but it feels like cheap plastic imitation of a real thing, and the web is already full of spammy low quality content. Aren't you in danger of your products having a very short life cycle and ending up as digital landfill, so to speak?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- levmiseri 3y agoThe quality of the GPT4 content for travel is surprisingly good, although there are of course plenty of hallucinations and I've a new pass for the content set up that gets rid of the worst offenders. This is really just a learning experiment, but building something of this content scale by 1 person was absolutely impossible a year ago. The point was that content generation use cases might be a viable path give OpenAI's thin-wrappers-killing direction.
- tacone 3y agoIt's just commoditization, hard things now becoming a lot easier and value proposition to move up elsewhere. It happened with hardware, operative systems, web tools such as maps etc.
- Workaccount2 3y agoIt was (is) basically a smash and grab. You can spin up a site and a payment processor so fast nowadays that it just takes a weekend of work to go from idea to "Click here to subscribe and get 200 [AI generation] a month!"
- joelthelion 3y agoAre there any good RAG as a service startups?
- danenania 3y agoI think people may be overstating this. OpenAI has obvious brand and distribution advantages for their end-user facing products, but they aren't guaranteed to hit the bullseye and be the market leader in every category. ChatGPT plugins, for example, have never really taken off. Startups like Perplexity and Phind are doing just fine in the "search the web with AI" space that plugins were supposedly going to dominate. I'd say that trying to build a business plugging gaps in OpenAI's infrastructure offerings (fine-tuning, RAG, etc.) is quite perilous, since this is really their core competency. But they've still had just one big user-facing hit so far: ChatGPT. Wrapping OpenAI for a specific use case then building better workflows and UI for that use case than ChatGPT seems like it's still a pretty reasonable strategy. OpenAI isn't going to build the ideal workflow/UI for every use case.
- visarga 3y agoI recently enjoy Perplexity.ai for their superior search+llm integration, while chatGPT usually send stupid search keywords to Bing that I know are not going to help.