We're shutting down CrowdPrisma, a bootstrapped applied AI company that was formed two years ago by my friend and I (both ML engineers) to solve free-text survey analysis. A ton of really important information can only be gathered by open-ended surveys and as NLP models were maturing it seemed like a nice and relatively niche market to go after.<p>I think we had a unique value proposition as our NLP engine was fairly sophisticated and we also integrated its output nicely with other non-text variables (check our demo on the site).<p>Getting significant business traction was difficult (for reasons which would warrant its own blog post), but now with GPT4, Office Copilot, etc coming online it'll be near impossible.<p>We learned a ton from the experience and wouldn't change one bit, but I do wonder, how many other companies must be out there like us..<p>Although it might seem like there's a generative AI startup frenzy going on atm (which is great), I do have the suspicion that in most domains, large tech companies will dominate the market, due to several reasons (another blog post maybe).. Will see.. anyways, interesting times ahead..
The only way you can make that claim is if you had X% (for a large X) of your paying customers leave and start using GPT4 instead, resulting in an unsustainable drop in revenue. My guess is you never had those customers, and your company never gained any traction at all. Hard to blame GPT for that.
It looks like your product is based on top of NLP tech, not the NLP tech itself. That's great because here's the good news: none of your customers care what you use as your back end. All they care about is whether you can solve their problem or not. With GPT-4 that capability should have improved.
As other comments have mentioned - I would see Chatgpt not as a startup killer, but an opportunity. Automatic surveying based on GPT just got a lot more viable. You still have significant headstart over others who would be approaching the same. Sure, you will have to throw out a lot of code, but you got customers, market recognition.<p>"Auto surveying" - give the "model" some basic information about the app/business and let it figure out what questions to ask, ask follow-up questions to customers and just come to me with the list of improvements by priority for customers. "AI product manager" Something like that is going to be huge, is definitely viable with current GPT model, but would still require a lot of work to get working (especially working around limited context and long term memory of GPT). If you start on this now, are you sure you won't be able to win this market?<p>I've thrown away some old code and replaced by the GPT. A lot less than you, but I am happy, as it ultimately allows my company to get more revenue from customers.
Are you sure that GPT4 won’t help you by bringing more interest into the space? Everyone is talking about AI and you have a 2 year head start.<p>There will also be more funding and M&A opportunities available.
Everybody and their dog is now jumping on the AI bandwagon, which in many cases means they download LangChain, use a prompt they copied from someone's tweet, concatenate it with user input and call GPT.<p>Companies with actual domain knowledge will be in much better position because they will really know how to leverage the full power of these new models instead of being blinded by the bling that (cherry-picked) works nicely in 50% of the cases.<p>My friend and me have a good natured competition in making an AI that writes stories. He's using a custom tuned LLama, I'm calling ChatGPT.<p>Making cutesy little stories is easy. Making anything you'd actually be interested in reading is freaking hard! We're not writers! We don't know enough to prompt/select/guide the AI to do it well!<p>Same in other domains. LLMs are powerful tools but they'll make you more poweful if you have the right domain knowledge (and seems these guys do). Don't give up, leverage it!
I belive there is room for dedicated tools in most areas where gpt4 is good, even if they are built ontop of the gtp4 apis. A dedicated tool can have all the nuance and integrations that the broad tools never will have.
I see you are from the uk - have you approached entrepreneur first? Or any other similar accelerators. If anything i think now is the time to grow. Also i cant find examples of how your products works, nor do i see an api or anything else that would indicate you are have experience in marketing what you built - perhaps bring someone on board to cover that gap?
Seems like a great vertical for AI. Many successful startups have taken commoditized technologies and glued them together in novel and interesting ways. Why can’t you guys do that with GPT4? Don’t confuse the technology you developed with the product you are offering to customers