Most AI startups for the next couple of years are just going to be scams that work of the back of OpenAI's API. My work place is currently under an onslaught of every person thinking there's a plethora of tools to do there job for them when it's just all OpenAI in the end.
I believe AI is here to stay and will revolutionize the work place. I just feel way to many people are going about it the wrong way.
Which kinds of GPT startups will thrive?
11–20 of 87 posts
Re: Which kinds of GPT startups will thrive?
#12They need to find a niche that won't be threatening to any of the big honchos. Possibly marketing themselves as "lawyer AI", "MBA AI", "MD AI" etc. Ideally if there was some common opensource base like Linux distros but for GPT models, constantly getting updated and fine-tuned with anyone simply pulling them and using them when needed.
I can't imagine what kind of liability insurance would be needed for a GPT solution aimed at such heavily regulated fields as law, medicine or finance. You can add all the caveats you want, but I suspect ml chat is stuck in the uncanny valley of not good enough to be trusted and not bad enough to be a toy.
Yeah I dunno about that one lol. Open AI backed solution for Law, already has deals with some of the biggest law firms in the world.
https://twitter.com/ai__pub/status/1644735555752853504
https://www.lawnext.com/2023/04/harvey-ai-raises-21m-in-a-se...
Microsoft plans for Medicine
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/04/gpt-4...
GPT-4 is more than good enough. People have no idea what's coming. There just needs some sort of supervision or oversight (and right now, it'll work with rather than completely replace practitioners).
Re: Which kinds of GPT startups will thrive?
#13The described step function changes are super apt and mostly overlooked by the pure hype crowd (although the step functions enabled by AI should really be what the main hype ought to be about!)
That said, once you get into the step function changes, the GPT-wrapper accusation might quickly become akin to a "AWS-wrapper" one, with traditional moats getting more important than AI-native ones.
We've had internet-enabled businesses without technical moats (but very real other moats, be it UX, social platform effects or a great b2b sales process) for the longest time, and might just see the same thing play out in AI native land
Re: Which kinds of GPT startups will thrive?
#14Not many of them. Google or Microsoft can see what works for these startups and then put it in their own products. If you don't own the model, you don't have a safe business.
right,
or giant corps will treat such startups as marketplace app creators for their LLM API and kinda "outsource" the innovation, while providing the platform and enjoying API income?
Re: Which kinds of GPT startups will thrive?
#15It'll generally be the same as with other startups.
Using GPT of course isn't a moat in and of itself.
So, it'll be companies that can do the following:
1) Build a product that people love
2) Then, reach those people, eventually at scale
3) Then, monetize those users
4) Then, build some kind of moat to enable pricing power
For now, most AI startups are best focusing on #1. This is where most GPT powered tools fall short.
ChatGPT is popular because it was so good that people had to keep coming back and using more of it, and they had to tell other people about it. ChatGPT's utility was measured against a pre-ChatGPT world.
The bar is now higher, because that means whatever you're building has to meet the same 10x or 100x better than existing alternatives bar, except now your users live in a world where ChatGPT exists.
In short, the GPT startups will thrive are those that can build products that are 10x better than whatever users are doing now.
Re: Which kinds of GPT startups will thrive?
#16Not many of them. Google or Microsoft can see what works for these startups and then put it in their own products. If you don't own the model, you don't have a safe business.
In theory the same was true about the SaaS wave and the mobile wave.
In practice, many startups have built valuable businesses around things that Google could've done, but didn't do successfully.
The same will be true in the AI wave.
In theory, FAANG-co could do it. In practice, they can't.
The exceptions to this will be the things where the winner is determined by a dimension that Google will always win on. In practice, those things are rare.
Re: Which kinds of GPT startups will thrive?
#17Not many of them. Google or Microsoft can see what works for these startups and then put it in their own products. If you don't own the model, you don't have a safe business.
right, or giant corps will treat such startups as marketplace app creators for their LLM API and kinda "outsource" the innovation, while providing the platform and enjoying API income?
That’s assuming there is API income to be had. Assuming the “We Have No Moat” memo is accurate, the open source models may soon catch up to GPT4-level performance—and especially if inference compute requirements drop to consumer-level specs, there won’t be any money on the table.
Re: Which kinds of GPT startups will thrive?
#18It'll generally be the same as with other startups. Using GPT of course isn't a moat in and of itself. So, it'll be companies that can do the following: 1) Build a product that people love 2) Then, reach those people, eventually at scale 3) Then, monetize those users 4) Then, build some kind of moat to enable pricing power For now, most AI startups are best focusing on #1. This is where most GPT powered tools fall sh…
Practical takeaways:
Build deep relationships with your customers, understand their world, and have a high shipping cadence pushing out new versions of your product multiple times a week until you build something so good that they'd be really disappointed if they couldn't use it anymore.
Re: Which kinds of GPT startups will thrive?
#19I think there are a few opportunities for startups that want to leverage GPT technology: 1) Fine tuning base models with data that big tech doesn't have access to. E.g legal, medical, support data. Offering custom fine-tuned private hosted models for companies that can't leverage the base models APIs due to data privacy and lack of domain specific training. 2) Using GPT on the backend to do data transformation that t…
I would not be so sure about #1, OpenAI has been very cagey about what exactly the newer models are trained on.
Re: Which kinds of GPT startups will thrive?
#20I think there are a few opportunities for startups that want to leverage GPT technology: 1) Fine tuning base models with data that big tech doesn't have access to. E.g legal, medical, support data. Offering custom fine-tuned private hosted models for companies that can't leverage the base models APIs due to data privacy and lack of domain specific training. 2) Using GPT on the backend to do data transformation that t…
I want to agree, but I think that’s what I thought at the dawn of Web 2.0 — no way slapping a basic CRUD UI on top of an open-source database will ever power anything but the most trivial use cases.
Turns out knowing Excel and programming and NOT knowing business and design (at that point in my career) might have cost me a couple bucks.