"We are not a black box that sends everything to someone else's giant API" can be a selling point as businesses become more aware of their cloud dependencies.
Perhaps a better question is what new niches now open up, on top of the AI solutions.
Hugging Face is a nice example - it's mostly a python library, a github clone, and a discussion forum strapped together. "Old" tech used to serve a new and growing niche.
Great Library -> Large Community -> Large Coverage of Models & Datasets -> Larger Community -> Larger Coverage of Models & Datasets -> Revenue -> More Engineers -> Greater Library ...
Not all the steps (->) here are trivial: Contrast HF to Explosion (great folks behind spacy).
There's no point on creating your own GPT before validating your idea and getting some traction.
Amazon didn't build their logistics and freight division first to then start selling books.
Once your product or service is off the ground and more resources are available then you can start moving away from OpenAI.
This could be much simpler that you think, particularly if you designed your systems with this in mind and considering future costs of training LLMs will be a fraction of what they are today.
Don't know how I feel about that, it quacks like a bubble but there is massive value that can be delivered.
Isn't that the textbook definition of a startup?
For example, Tesla vs Nikola. One set of founders had a powerful vision and technical ability to see it through (yes, even Elon, say what you want about him but he has deep technical insights, moreso for his cofounders). The other set had a good funding catchphrase "Electric cars, but with trucks!" and tried to fake their way forward using copious amounts of VC money. Many of these companies sound like "AI, but with ... !"
Right, how many products are just shims over the CPU instruction set.
so no, i don't think that the idea is what counts.
That's what concerns most about this, is how somehow it looks like they've optimized for a bunch of "follower" founders.
How do you figure that? Given the speed that the gpt4 API returns data I feel like it's easily going to cost more than pretty pricy hardware.
It doesn't need to be sustainable nor particularly innovative.
Also, YC seed isn't gonna get you very far when compute alone for training an LLM is in the millions currently.
Maybe it's a good way for YC/HN to find out which things don't work, in a short span of time.
I'm not saying it's going to happen, and I hope it doesn't, but when I did a little analysis for an idea I have it was absolutely the biggest threat I could see. OpenAI has the ultimate vendor lock-in - there literally isn't an alternative right now.
(This is a giant opportunity if you're a billionaire investor. Providing an AI backend is probably the next cloud infrastructure. OpenAI is going to be the AWS of that industry, but there's room for an Azure or a GCP too.)
My first startup was literally just some Javascript and a Postgres database. It didn't even call any external services, let alone one that's truly on the bleeding edge of computer science. I still thought it was a viable business (wrongly, it turned out, but still... I had a dream!).
"Some JavaScript and a DB" is a web service. It does stuff. Sure if it's small or a basic crud then the moat is small
But if I can replace the value proposition of a startup with "open chatgpt and type a short prompt" then there's not much value in it right. Maybe if there's value in the surrounding services.
This is how many successful businesses operate in the "atoms" world.
You take a product or service that's already popular and has a solid channel for distribution, you transform it or add additional value to it and sell it for a profit.
Think about a $8 precut, packaged pineapple at the grocery store.
Once you get your business going and get additional funding or generate cash flow, you can invest in getting rid of some of the middlemen so that you can take their profits too (start growing your own pineapples).
Sounds pretty straightforward, but the selling part is the difficult one.
The value proposition to the sliced pineapple is the time and skill to do it. Sure, it's "cheap" to do it at home (if your time is free and you have a good knife - I pay way less than $8 though ;) )
While I do believe there are startups with good value added, I think a lot of people are just throwing a simple call with very little thought added. And while the service is sellable, your moat is how easy people can duplicate it.
Is your service a product or a feature? If it's a feature OpenAI can just add it to their systems in a day
Especially when these products can be built by a school student in an hour using ChatGPT?
I think the barrier of entry to atoms world companies are quite higher than that.
Is what it is
They sure 'really' are AI companies and totally not just wrappers around OpenAI or ChatGPT's API and giving Microsoft and Google more ideas to absorb for free with another AI bubble waiting to pop as soon as OpenAI increases prices. /s
Then we will see how unprofitable these so-called AI hype 'startups' are.
or rich get richer, poor get poorer and will not have access to AI tools, society will collapse, more jobs will be low paying, most on demand skills would be everything done by physical activity
The great promise of robotics and AI is the possibility of decoupling societal stability from the vagaries of the poor.
Computers, the web, mobile drastically increased the productivity of office workers, but somehow they don't work 15 hour work weeks.
For me, personally - before the startup ecosystem happened in my country, it was extremely difficult to break through. If you worked for a large entity - good for you. If you wanted to do something on your own - you weren't treated seriously, and it was very difficult to get through.
Now, people from anywhere, can visit meetups and hackathons to get up to speed, and gain connections. And accelerators like YC provide resources and mentoring to the ones that are the best.
Also, notice that YC has an open application, and they don't look at your social status, your wealth, nor your connections, when judging your application.
Of course it's not perfect - being from US, or the bay area, helps. Knowing people who got through YC and can help you prepare your application also helps.
But I haven't heard of anyone with a better idea for solving this.
Similarly, lots of companies spent thousands of dollars on a website or a mobile app that no one looks at because they're a small town landscaping business that really doesn't need those things.
The same goes for AI. There are definitely use cases where it will improve how we do things. For some businesses that will make them more profitable and more competitive. A lot of businesses won't adopt it for decades. Some will adopt it when it brings them no real benefits.
AI is a tool. People will often use it poorly, just like every other tool.
I think language models will become a commodity, like a spell checker is today. They might open up the market for translations into more exotic languages (but I don't know how the quality is for such languages and by definition, the market ain't big) and I think every author will use one as part of their workflow (think of technical writers using a language model for the textual parts). Computer games might profit massively in terms of immersion.
No, I don't think that new applications will become that important with language models. I think it's the other way around. There are so many applications that we simply don't need any longer. Language models and image recognition models together will take over the user interface industry. Why bother with web design and user experience if you can just throw the chatbot at your client? That's going to become the real value here.
If I was a junior web developer, I would begin to seek out new programming languages and stacks.
The former are going to mostly be successful, particularly in the place of companies that don't adapt, but the latter are mostly going to be obsolete by the time they'll be several years into it.
AI as a product is a TERRIBLE play. But AI as part of a solution is going to be necessary for nearly every business vertical.
What about all those technologies that just died? Companies that did not embrace Minitel, blockchain or the metaverse seem just fine right now.
