The idea that bespoke models match this kind of performance is a joke. NLP is solved and GPT-4 is in fact a game changer.
Or build a startup with an actual moat and not build on top of another product doing the heavy lifting.
That's exactly what they tried to do with a technical lead. This is what GPT-4 made obsolete.
Doing it with mere front-end or "execution" or marketing is close to impossible, as those are much more trivial areas and difficult to differentiate yourself. They're also mostly meaningless, as they depend on investment, which has no reason to go to them (as now they would just become one of many wanting to go to the area, and not the one's that has a tech-lead up its sleeve).
It's like they had an idea about a coffee place with their own secret syrup recipe for great tasting coffee, and they worked hard for 2 years on that recipe, hoping someone will invest in them to help them make it into a franchize.
Now someone came along and gives everyone a ready-made syrup mix, in the same exact vein, that is many times better tasting.
And all the suggestions here to "then execute better than others" are like "just use the new mix, and focus on making a better coffee place then, invest in the atmosphere and service" and so on.
Duh, well, everybody can try and do that. And there's no obvious way to differentiate yourself, or get investment to build a franchize just with this. Whereas if they still have their reciple (technology lead) and it still mattered, they'd have a major leg up the competition.
"He worked hard, built a tech lead, and we hope to get investment and beat the market with that"
is a totally different problem, and a much more hopeless situation than:
"He have a dead-end tech, there's a new better tech controlled by others, and we can only beat the competition by coming up with new ideas on execution, things that anybody can attempt, that have nothing to do with the hard tech work we did all those years".