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by padolsey·2y ago·view on hn ↗
> Every tech company minus the few doing core research have been doing this for at least half a year

I'm assuming you mean all those new 'AI wrapper' startups popping up.? I wouldn't say "every tech company". But yeh it seems incredibly easy, definitely an easy win and leaders get to feel ahead of the curve on AI.

2 comments
I agree, in fact I would wager the opposite, that most who claim to be a tech company are simply using OpenAI or another vendor with a turnkey API for things launched recently. Over time I expect more use of fine-tuned models, but fine-tuning is not easy, especially if your goal is GPT parity (or better).
The thing I don't understand about this strategy is that it itself shows that there really is no money to be made here. I mean it's a pretty obvious giveaway that:

1. they don't have the resources to build their own technology and probably never will

2. even if they did have, the best they could do is come up with something very similar to OpenAI's GPT, i.e. a (somewhat) generic AI model. This means that OpenAI can also easily compete with them.

All these companies are doing (if anything) is that they test the market for OpenAI (or Google, MS) for free.

The flaw in your assumption is that perfect tech or tech powerhouses win. I mean, sure when they do, they win big; but the endgame for b2b SaaS is mostly M&A, powered by sales, which is mostly down to c-suite relationships and perception of being one among the market leaders ("nobody ever got fired for buying IBM").

If you can move fast, deliver, expand, and raise money, there's a good chance the AI wrapper lands a nice exit and/or morphs into a tech behemoth. Those outcomes (among others), even if mutually exclusive, are equally possible.

So, if I understand you correctly, the business strategy for an AI wrapper company would be that they acquire customers quickly from a specific niche, build a name, while having very little custom technology and then get acquired by some of the larger players who do have the actual AI tech in-house. And, for them, it would be worth it for the brand/market/existing client base.

Assuming that the advance made in the meanwhile in AI doesn't eradicate the whole thing. I mean say some company builds a personal assistant for managers to supplant secretaries, they become the go-to name and then Google buys them in 2-3-5 years. Unless Google's AI becomes so good in the meantime that you can just instruct it in 1-2 sentences to do this for you.

> get acquired by some of the larger players who do have the actual AI tech in-house. And, for them, it would be worth it for the brand/market/existing client base.

The key is, if the incumbents truly feel they can't breach whatever moat, M&A is the safer bet over agonizing what if (I am thinking "git wrapper" startups that saw plenty competition from BigTech; remember Microsoft CodePlex, Google Code, AWS CodeCommit?). Given Meta's push and other prolific upstarts (OpenAI, Mistral), I don't believe access to SoTA AI itself (in the short term) will be an hindrance for product-based utility AI businesses (aka wrappers).

No, as far as I have seen, the "AI wrapper" companies have been clinging to GPT-4 a lot faster than other tech companies. Many bigger companies deploy GPT-4 very sparingly if at all.