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I do some angel investing so get a lot of deal flow in my inbox. A lot of the AI ones (which is now 99% of everything) are not really businesses. They are at b

I do some angel investing so get a lot of deal flow in my inbox. A lot of the AI ones (which is now 99% of everything) are not really businesses. They are at best nice features or capabilities to have in wider enterprise application suite for say HR or Accountancy but on their own its just a lot of smart people working extremely hard to sell one tiny solution that is small cogwheel for a much larger problem. My gut is telling me that very soon, if not now, there will be an opportunity for savvy VCs to sweep up some of these cogwheels and package them together into a real business and it's something I am exploring with a few other angels. Curious what others think on this. Feel free to DM me (details on profile).

spacebanana7 1y ago
Won't the general purpose models eventually eat all the application layer business models? Now that ChatGPT desktop can read files in my code editor and apply changes I've pretty much stopped using dev specific AI tools. Same with spreadsheet problems - where uploading data to ChatGPT and hoping for the best actually works pretty well now.
fxtentacle 1y ago
I fully agree with this. I was involved very early with automated speech recognition for transcribing meetings, but then both UberConference and Google Meet just integrated it into their existing offerings, thereby massively reducing the market size for standalone solutions. And given how heavily subsidized AI API calls are at the moment, just relying on them is a huge risk for your business model, because you never know when your suppliers' prices will 10x to represent the true cost of providing those AI services. In my opinion, the sales of many of these new AI tools are mostly driven by the existing audience of the creator. In many cases, you could just ask an LLM to quickly build you your own competing solution, which you can then use for free. E.g. all those SEO content and LinkedIn blog post bots. Vibe-coded AI "businesses" are the software equivalent of branded white t-shirts.
yalogin 1y ago
This is exactly how I see it and hence my original comment. I am working on solving an actual problem with genAI. However I thought nothing is preventing the Oats from usurping this solution. My suspicion is confirmed once I started seeing vertical integrations by these companies. In fact I am now convinced that genAI as a service doesn’t have a long life outside of a search engine replacement and so these companies started doing vertical integration. However the once they start it they just came at every vertical as the unferlying tool is truly generic.

spacebanana7 1y ago

Won't the general purpose models eventually eat all the application layer business models? Now that ChatGPT desktop can read files in my code editor and apply changes I've pretty much stopped using dev specific AI tools. Same with spreadsheet problems - where uploading data to ChatGPT and hoping for the best actually works pretty well now.

fxtentacle 1y ago

I fully agree with this. I was involved very early with automated speech recognition for transcribing meetings, but then both UberConference and Google Meet just integrated it into their existing offerings, thereby massively reducing the market size for standalone solutions. And given how heavily subsidized AI API calls are at the moment, just relying on them is a huge risk for your business model, because you never know when your suppliers' prices will 10x to represent the true cost of providing those AI services. In my opinion, the sales of many of these new AI tools are mostly driven by the existing audience of the creator. In many cases, you could just ask an LLM to quickly build you your own competing solution, which you can then use for free. E.g. all those SEO content and LinkedIn blog post bots. Vibe-coded AI "businesses" are the software equivalent of branded white t-shirts.

yalogin 1y ago

This is exactly how I see it and hence my original comment. I am working on solving an actual problem with genAI. However I thought nothing is preventing the Oats from usurping this solution. My suspicion is confirmed once I started seeing vertical integrations by these companies. In fact I am now convinced that genAI as a service doesn’t have a long life outside of a search engine replacement and so these companies started doing vertical integration. However the once they start it they just came at every vertical as the unferlying tool is truly generic.