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Comment by throwaway4837 | Hacker News Reader

If you live in SF and have gone out to casual bars or restaurants, you meet/hear people talking about ChatGPT. In particular, I've been hearing a lot of people talking about their startups being "a UI using ChatGPT under the hood to help you with X". But I'm starting to get the feeling that OpenAI will eat their lunches. It's tried and true and it worked for Amazon.

If OpenAI becomes the AI platform of choice, I wonder how many apps on the platform will eventually become native capabilities of the platform itself. This is unlike the Apple App Store, where they just take a commission, and more like Amazon where Amazon slowly starts to provide more and more products, pushing third-party products out of the market.

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When I look at the kind of ideas floated around for ChatGPT use, it kinda feels like watching someone invent an internal combustion engine in 1800, and then use it to drive an air conditioner attached to a horse-drawn wagon. Sure, it's a practical solution to a real problem, but it's also going to be moot because the problem won't be relevant soon. I think the vast majority of these startups and their ideas are going to end up like that.

Fascinating to hear your perspective on this. I think a lot of people will fall out of the sky. Beeing overtaken before even realizing why. In germany most of my friends and collegues working SE tech or digital design, often "haven't even tried this Chat something thing" or stopped at "AI images? These wierd small pictures that look like a cpu is high on drugs?"

And dont get me startet on non-tech friends and family. I think we are taking a leap that will let the digital world of 2022 look like amish livestyle.

Depends. In my bubble (EE and CS students in Germany) everyone is talking about this.

What I find super impressive now is image generation. I remember just 3-4 years ago the images generated by AI on news articles looked like LSD trip hallucinations. Now they can generate extremely plausible images of any scene you describe. It's absolutely wonderful.

RE being overtaken -- when ChatGPT-3 came out, I saw some startup doing "Automatic UI code writing with ChatGPT and design images", but after seeing OpenAI's multimodal GPT-4... it seems like that startup is no longer needed. I think this will be the case for hundreds of startups that are aiming to add 10% on top of CurrentGPT. Put differently, GPT-4 basically 10x'd GPT-3. So all of those startups doing GPT-3 + 10% are being left behind in the dust of GPT-4.

The market will sort this out. If OpenAI decides to make shovels rather than digging for gold (like it should), then the customer facing apps will fight it out for very little margin on top of marketing expenses while OpenAI (or equivalent) is rolling in money.

They're doing the two. They're making shovels and killîng those buying while digging for gold.

The Bill Gates "A platform is when the economic value of everybody that uses it, exceeds the value of the company that creates it. Then it's a platform.” line seems apt - i'm sure they'll figure it out

Yeah it’s less about connecting various APIs and databases than it is about your data.

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