I work for a foundational AI company. I guess we're technically AI infra. We're inherently "narrowly" focused since our origin (which was well before the recent hype in past 2-3 years).
Our customers are really the type of AI infra companies being talked about in this article. And yea, the new ones I work with everyday are often a dime a dozen. A revolving door of small startups trying to make the same general purpose AI infra targeting other traditional "boring enterprise infra" companies.
The ones that I'm seeing get the most traction, have the best products, and best chances of success have zeroed in on specific niches and sub-industries. (Think AI infra that helps B2B2B companies where that last "B" is like Roofing companies and the value provided is helping Roofing companies easily and drastically scale their outbound and inbound marketing and sales.)
The startups I work with that make me scratch my head are the ones trying to build "disruptive" AI infra that does nothing different, provides nothing special, other than potentially nice UI/UX, and is liable to have their lunch eaten by either natural iterations and improvements of our own services they essentially just white label, or some other incumbent.
To me, it's like trying to create a new company to compete against Walmart and Target on groceries because they're too massive scale to win against "a well tailored customer experience" but then forgetting Costco, Aldi's, Trader Joes, and Whole Foods exist. And why would any of those aforementioned companies feel the need to acquire you rather than casually crush you as they go about their business either ignoring you as you wither or taking your good ideas and incorporating them into their own offering?
It's not impossible, just has to make sense and even then a certain degree of "the stars aligning" is required. Which is why there inevitably can only be a small group of winners out of this massive sea of hopefuls.
And I of course can only shrug my shoulders if asked if the AI infra startup I work at is differentiated, necessary, and lucky enough to be at the finish line with the survivors at the end. (We're finding our PMF and potential road to incumbency mainly with two-ish markets: old and new school enterprise infra and non-tech Fortune 500 type of companies.)