So i guess the next wave of startups has been killed. I'm not even sure what kind of startup still makes sense as a gpt thin wrapper?
Startups don't make sense as thin wrappers around another company's product when that company is aggressively expanding that product is a core offering that the vendor is aggressively working to provide as an integrated solution for as many markets as possible, which very much applies to OpenAI offerings in general, and its chat models especially.
A wrapper that also leverages some exclusive special sauce data, algorithm, etc., for which you have a real moat as a key component, that makes some sense. But just a thin wrapper around GPT? That's just asking to have your market eaten by OpenAI.
It might make some sense for products where the vendor is a stable, steady-state infrastructure supplier for many markets without any evident interest in entering the same market as the startup, where the uncertainty across markets that they would create by specifically targeting your startups market would hurt them more with their established customers than they would gain from your niche, but even that is risky because it requires lots of potentially-erroneous assessments of how the vendor would expect their other customers to react to them acting in your market.
2) There are tons of actually thin wrappers that raised a ton of money — contrary to popular belief this does not mean they are good businesses (Jasper, AFAICT, doesn’t seem to fall into the categories of either “thin wrapper” or bad business)
3) Obviously anything being called out as not making any sense allegedly “made sense” to some people at some point otherwise it wouldn’t be worth talking about.
You must use LLMs as a launching point to something else, some kind of 10x in a vertical.
Being able to "chat" is table stakes and worthless to you as a company by itself.
I'd say that trying to build a business plugging gaps in OpenAI's infrastructure offerings (fine-tuning, RAG, etc.) is quite perilous, since this is really their core competency. But they've still had just one big user-facing hit so far: ChatGPT.
Wrapping OpenAI for a specific use case then building better workflows and UI for that use case than ChatGPT seems like it's still a pretty reasonable strategy. OpenAI isn't going to build the ideal workflow/UI for every use case.
It happened with hardware, operative systems, web tools such as maps etc.
The point was that content generation use cases might be a viable path give OpenAI's thin-wrappers-killing direction.
Here is a sample, it took only a couple of minutes to make: https://pastebin.com/WZpfgWWH
Prompt: Please write a 1000 word long article based off of this text, don't mention the commenters, just weave their ideas into a coherent piece.
I used Claude 2
What kinds have been 'killed' I don't see this anywhere.
Jasper isn't having a good time, but you'd think the fact anyone can produce better output than they did after spending millions of dollars in GPT-3 based pipelines for $20 a month would mean they're dead dead.
But instead they went and changed their positioning, changed who their target market is, adjusted the UX, the messaging, and the feature set, and now it's a product that has a place even if OpenAI can give all of your marketers an internal ChatGPT (unless your plan is to have 100 different "GPTs" for every marketing task in your company)
tl;dr: People fail to realize that OpenAI can offer your startup's core value proposition tomorrow morning, and it doesn't matter if they don't offer it in a format that resonates with your target users.
You could have a cure to cancer and you'd still have to market it correctly.
Imagine if Jasper had raised and built their own GPT-3 alternative from the ground up at 100x the cost targeted at writing: it wouldn't have generalized like OpenAI's models given the different goals in training, they'd have spent orders of magnitude more, they'd currently be scrambling to partner with some non-OpenAI provider to play the role OpenAI does for them today...
Jasper "only" had to start integrating new APIs to keep up with the SOTA in quality, and instead of burning precious runway on R&D they get to focus on rebranding and driving home that positioning.