It is ironic that this article seems to focus on the business logic, considering that is the same myopia at these AI companies.
Not that physical/financial constraints are unimportant, but they often can be mitigated in other ways.
Some background: I was previously at one of these companies that got hoovered up in the past couple years by the bigs. My job was sort of squishy, but it could be summarized as 'brand manager' insofar as it was my job to aide in shaping the actual tone, behaviors, and personality of our particular product.
I tell you this because in full disclosure, I see the world through the product/marketing lens as opposed to the engineer lens.
They did not get it.
And by they I mean founds whose names you've heard of, people with absolute LOADS of experience in building a shipping technology products. There were no technical or budgetary constraints at this early stage, we were moving fast and trying shit. But they simply could not understand why we needed to differentiate and how that'd make us more competitive.
I imagine many technology companies go through this, and I don't blame technical founders who are paranoid about this stuff; it sounds like 'management bullshit' and a lot of it is, but at some point all organizations who break even or take on investors are going to be answerable to the market, and that means leaving no stone unturned in acquiring users and new revenue streams.
All of that to say, I do think a lot of these AI companies have yet to realize that there's a lot to be done user experience-wise. The interface alone - a text prompt(!?) is crazy out-of-touch to me. The fact that average users have no idea how to set up a good prompt and how hard everyone is making it for them to learn about that.
All of these decisions are pretty clearly made by someone who is technology-oriented, not user-oriented. There's no work I'm aware of being done on tone, or personality frameworks, or linguistics, or characterization.
Is the LLM high on numeracy? Is it doing code switching/matching, and should it? How is it qualifying its answers by way of accuracy in a way that aids the user learning how to prompt for improved accuracy? What about humor or style?
It just completely flew over everyone's heads. This may have been my fault. But I do think that the constraints you see to growth and durability of these companies will come down to how they're able to build a moat using strategies that don't require $$$$ and that cannot be easily replicated by competition.
Nobody is sitting in the seats at Macworld stomping their feet for Sam Altman. A big part of that is giving customers more than specs or fiddly features.
These companies need to start building a brand fast.