If you open product hunt or any directory for that matter, you will notice that things havent been quite innovative, except the root companies.<p>Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying they are useless, but most of them are the same recipe cooked over and over and just presented in different way.<p>Is this the norm now, a question from an amateur me to my fellow expert Hackers?
The hype cycle repeats again this time with AI. There will be a lot of noise and fury (after blockchain, nocode, big data, cloud etc etc). The good part is that consumers will vote with their attention and wallets. Only the products that bring real value based on non trivial insights into specific markets will survive. The rest will slowly die off and be forgotten.<p>Also a lot of the VC money just ends up going back to the big players that have monopolized the channels to reach customers and the systems to run those ‘businesses’.<p>Here’s a good overview of the scaling difficulties with AI: ‘Most AI systems today aren’t quite software, in the traditional sense. And AI businesses, as a result, don’t look exactly like software businesses. They involve ongoing human support and material variable costs. These traits make AI feel, to an extent, like a services business’
<a href="https://a16z.com/the-new-business-of-ai-and-how-its-different-from-traditional-software/" rel="nofollow">https://a16z.com/the-new-business-of-ai-and-how-its-differen...</a>
Well hopefully you are not just keeping the same UX as chatGPT<p>Because the value is in what the wrapper helps your specific customer base do.
Whether that's through prompt engineering or RAG, or some other technique, the value is in someone else spending the time to think of a UX that helps accomplish a specific job.<p>If you know what you want and how to do it, then likely fiddling around with prompts can get you pretty close, but people are busy and don't have time to test asking chatGPT 500 different prompts to get one that works well, or hunt around for examples to feed into context or into a RAG index.<p>There's an asymmetry of information and effort developing the pipeline/context/prompt construction involved.<p>And this is what add's value.<p>Not simply a chat window and passing whatever the user types in, to openAI's API.
These are expensive because ChatGPT is expensive. If you really can’t tell the difference between competitors they must compete on price so they aren’t taking a fat slice of profits either.<p>Even if they were doing the same thing as the others but developing their own model with a better cost structure that would be innovative.<p>To that they have to get some money together somehow, probably from investors. Two steps up from a pitch deck is a pitch deck and a prototype that got some customers. So there you go.<p>If I were trying to pitch to a VC though I would be thinking of a plan that is going to make a lot more money, that could justify an enterprise value of $50M at the very least based on conservative multiples. So they have to have something better than “dominate some small area” such as being able to replicate that success for a large number of small areas.
This is the result of the last decade or so where SAAS has become very lucrative and barrier to entry is almost nil with some many tools to quickly build something. AI is just more fuel on that existing fire. Everyone and their mothers are building a "SAAS" these days. Interesting, now I see all these gurus either selling courses on starting SAAS or selling "boilerplates".<p>AI is great but this is a side effect of it. It's the new Bitcoin/Blockchain gold rush (is that fad over yet). Everyone wants a piece of it and it will continue to bring out the hustlers to make quick money.<p>Like you said, not all are useless and there is obviously a market right now. So people are cashing in until it lasts.
The root problem is that there is no good way to bill a modest surcharge on top of OpenAI etc. usage costs. GPT store monetization (if they ever get around to it) would be a partial solution. But anything that depends heavily on LLM's, but provides a UI layer or integrations is just stuck with a complex and expensive subscription or credits system - even if the vendor wants to give away a free service, they can't just subsidize OpenAI credits for the world. The cloud and mobile appstores created ecosystems for third party developers, viable for both small value add utilities and major apps. The LLM world has yet to do that.
I think wrappers are fine if they add meaningful value. It does seem that mostly you’re getting charged for a little prompt engineering and a UI skin.<p>I’d personally like to see a good wrapper for autonomous LLM coding. Nothing we have yet quite fits the bill, IMO.
I am noticing the same thing in recruiter messages via LinkedIn. "Hi! I'm with turd.ai! We are revolutionizing the toilet industry using chatbots! We have $80m in funding from a16z and can offer up to $275k for the right candidate!"<p>It's nuts, the absolute dumbest-sounding ideas (to me at least), with "ai" slapped into the description somewhere, just totally flush with cash for no other reason than they are riding the hype train. Do the folks writing the checks even look into these things?
I think the current LLM trend is way overhyped. The thing these companies are doing, crucially, is extracting money from technologically unsophisticated companies and funnelling it into VC pockets. Silicon Valley bubbles are frequently incestuous. You make an HR platform and you sell it to other tech companies. You do sales analytics for tech companies. You make a bank that caters to only tech companies. The problem is that your customers all have the same risk profile as you - if interest rates go up and funding dries up you're all fucked at once. You're all just passing VC dollars back and forth.<p>The AI trend is luring in a wide range of non-tech businesses that aren't VC backed (ex. car dealerships). This is the golden goose for tech companies in a tough macro climate.<p>To be clear I think it's not adding real value for these buyers, but there's a tremendous amount of FOMO. The media has been complicit in selling AI as a panacea for small businesses in a tough climate, and the ultimate beneficiaries will be people grifting off AI hype.
Tech pump & dump in a nutshell --> find trend/exciting tech, make it user friendly/tailor it to niche, sell.<p>It adds value -- OpenAI isn't going to bother making special AI chatbots for car dealerships or whatever. These companies aren't going to hire coders since that's not their main line of businesses. So someone has to come in and middleman.<p>Maybe calling it a pump & dump is unfair, but there's no denying that the core technology is not in the hands of these startups. These small companies get decimated once the big companies see enough $ in their niche (which is what happened in the early days of the net, too). Fortunes will be made and lost. It's the American dream.