This analysis matches my current experience. I'm at a small startup and I've been trying my best to push them to invest in AI features. The company is willing

This analysis matches my current experience. I'm at a small startup and I've been trying my best to push them to invest in AI features. The company is willing to invest very trivial amounts of time/effort in AI embellishments but they are extremely slow to move on any kind of transformational technologies. I had a call with the CEO recently and he was saying that he wasn't interested in foundational AI technologies. I don't mean foundational models (as if a small B2B startup could even consider such a thing). I don't even mean medium/large scale fine-tuning work. I mean, he wasn't interested in investigating broadly applicable AI capabilities which could apply to multiple product features. I think of it like "dipping the toe into AI" strategies. You get a couple of days to try out some prompting and then spend the vast majority of the time bolting the LLM output onto an existing feature. What I believe we need are a few big companies to emerge where the new LLM stuff is at the very core of the business so it can show startups how it should be done. I can't even blame this company for being hesitant to invest - there is no proven track record to judge potential success against. At least old-school SaaS feature development work has some basis for projecting revenue. The margin for error on deep LLM features is completely unknown.