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Comment by ssalka | Hacker News Reader

This is a clickbait-y headline, what actually happened is that OpenAI rolled out a new feature for summarizing PDFs, which a few folks had already oriented their startup around.

So now that this previously 3rd party feature is fully integrated into ChatGPT, that effectively kills any separate app trying to do the same thing.

The fact is, building a whole company that is basically a wrapper around ChatGPT never had any moat to begin with, and I'm not at all surprised that OpenAI would see what cool things people are building on top of ChatGPT and decide to offer that functionality themselves. It's predatory for sure, similar to what Apple has done over time by copying iOS features enabled by jailbreaking, but not surprising in the least.

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I don't think it's predatory. I think they had it (and 700 other things) in their roadmap already. Anyone building a startup around OpenAI needs to at least consider: "is this a pretty obvious thing, already on their roadmap?".

If you are building a startup around OpenAI APIs (especially anything that’s a quick, low-hanging fruit, kind of thing where there’s little special sauce), either its misguided or you are putting it on their roadmap.

That's generally true, and OpenAI. especially with GPT-4, seems especially eager to roll features into the core offering.

Fair perhaps, but OpenAI doesn't need to build everything on their roadmap (what company actually does?). They could likely save themselves a good chunk of time to focus on what's really important (zero to one stuff), rather than reimplementing what someone else has already done.

Partnering with these smaller companies could be a good way for OpenAI to foster its community and spread the benefits of AI more widely; instead, my perception is that they're punishing the little guy for having a good idea and being able to act on it quickly.

See comment (not mine): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38092766

How would you know the specifics of relative effort for their plans, unless you have inside info?

They will put anything on the roadmap that anybody successfully built with their API. Like Amazon copies other people's best sellers.

If you use someone's API to start your own company, you are an idiot who didn't learn a thing from the past 20 years.

They should also consider: what happens if OpenAI raises prices 10x?

> So now that this previously 3rd party feature is fully integrated into ChatGPT, that effectively kills any separate app trying to do the same thing.

I honestly take this as a litmus test for people who understand the word "positioning".

There's still a massive market for people who want a place with a UX focused around their documents and a specific task, vs ChatGPT's swiss knife approach.

If anything Google is probably the biggest danger to these startups as they start to launch their copilots for docs... not ChatGPT getting this ability

Yep, when MS + Apple + Google fully integrate ChatGPT and post-ChatGPT tech into their products, it’s basically game over for most “AI” startups. Same as how those same companies commoditized Dropbox into irrelevance.

Dropbox is a great example because they focused on positioning to endure

Now their pitch is more focused on collaboration and versioning, and better tailored towards creatives than home users as it once was

Positioning is what lets you win when your core value proposition becomes common: it won't work as well as when your value prop wasn't common, but it can still be highly profitable

I just looked it up and I was surprised to see Microsoft OneDrive launched only a few months after Dropbox. Seems like it did take a few years for the MS juggernaut to win out.

> Dropbox > Irrelevance

Dropbox's market cap is still 9B.

Small compared to MS, sure. But I would really like to be as irrelevant as it :)

> similar to what Apple has done over time by copying iOS features enabled by jailbreaking

Could you please elaborate? What features are these?

Notifications were copied from Android, which itself copied them from the open source ROM community.

And also some others. The only one I can think of off the top of my head is the unintrusivw brightness bar, which had been available for jailbroken phones long before Apple added it in iOS 10.

Source?

https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/ios-5-notifications-a-deepe...

The App Store.

Yes I remember the founder of pdf.ai trying to collect funding, and chatpdf was already a good tool even before that. There were a lot of creators making a bunch of apps like this.

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