Most start-ups are doomed. If you can build it in a weekend, they can too. But they didn't. And you have a weekend's head start.
Good execution remains differentiated. It just requires continuous iteration, evolution and improvement.
If you build an MVP over a weekend and then pivot 100% of your efforts to fundraising and marketing, as has been the trend over the past decade, yes, you're screwed. You're building dollar apps for another App Store.
Most of the arguments the author levels would have worked against the first waves of computerization, digitisation and the emergence of the Internet, in some cases more powerfully. Yet the prediction didn't hold. Capex and IP weren't sole, or even strong, predictors of new-entrant success. For Exhibit A to the first part, see Softbank.
Levels is a good example of this.
While we're sitting here waxing poetic about moat or no moat and what to do with these AI things, he's made some 7 figures in cold hard cash revenue from building and shipping things people want.
Not a problem if you are an individual with no intent to scale, but a big problem if you are investor looking to invest 8 figures.
Once you have a few thousand users giving you cold hard cash to use your service, you also have access to way _way_ better product development and marketing information. Not to mention a lot of data you can use to fine-tune your AI in ways that a competitor starting from scratch couldn't dream to replicate.
This is a big part of why you see all these BigTech companies adding AI features. Their existing user-base is the moat.
This one AI will be able to do everything you ask it, or give you any interface you desire, should you need one - even creating a real world-like interface inside 3d/vr systems.
It's kinda depressing - the first to succeed in AI (assuming they don't kill us all), will become the top company in the world (if not the only company we need at all, because nobody can compete at all, by the time the next competitor gets to AGI - they'll be 50 generations improved, and it's just a runaway loop of self-improvement.
But with the underlying basis for everything being open source, everything you learned with "continuous iteration, evolution and improvement" can be copied relatively easily.
The models may be open (or available to anyone who can pay). But so was TCP/IP and the App Store.
Nobody is going to win on the tech alone because nobody has ever won on the tech alone. If your founding team has the relationships to get you ensconced at a beachhead of customers, and your technical team can move fast enough that inertia keeps them put, you have a solid shot at denying that space to other entrants.
I think people who know how to code and code for their day job really underestimate how hard it is to build these things. Even the weekend projects. A ton of these "weekend" projects, took a weekend to build, plus years of learning and research into the best most efficient ways of building those kinds of apps.
Building a startup is completely different from your faang / unicorn software engineer dayjob. Where everything is perfectly and comfortable setup for you. There is a team dedicated to making sure your code is deployed every day. The test harnesses are already built. You have dedicated designers telling you exactly how everything should look. It's all easy.
This is like the twitter clone effect. It's a cliche at this point, the casual "I could build twitter in a weekend". Why aren't there a million reddit clones? Why aren't there a million instagram clones? Why aren't there a million notion / canva / figma clones?
If it were that easy to replicate these things they would be out there.
Ok, but why aren't there a thousand "made in a weekend" clones that at the very least function but have no users?
> Many of today's 'AI startups' are essentially just a landing page with a few hundred lines of code generated by GPT-4 to connect with the OpenAI API
This is a strawman. Most of the AI startups that have raised significant money are not that.
There are.
When Reddit switched from Lisp to Python, a number of Lisp users had negative things to say about that, and made their own clones over short time intervals to show just how superior Lisp is. There are a bunch of open source clones now: https://github.com/topics/reddit-clone
Twitter is even more trivial to clone, and this has more results: https://github.com/topics/twitter-clone
I'm not going to track down all the attempts to commercialize clones of either that shut down after a month, but they're out there.
Because you are using social network to connect/interact with other people? If I'm making a simple AI tool powered by LLM then I don't need other users to make it useful for you.
> This is a strawman. Most of the AI startups that have raised significant money are not that.
It's not a straw man argument if adding a condition to your statement is necessary to refute it. In fact, having to do so is essentially the definition of a straw man.
You know what powerful competitors have a habit of doing? The thing that keeps them powerful? Buying those with a head start.
If you go for their core business, sure. Otherwise, this is cartoonish.
If you go for a full frontal attack on their core business, you'll probably get crushed. Short of that... working at a fang will make anyone not very scared of them.
Never forget that "powerful competitors" are slow. Very, very slow, even past 200 employees. Meetings and arguments increase the latency of delivering new products and services. Incentives start to be misaligned that make it difficult to continue delivering at the same quality ( why should I put in 2X to build 100X value, when I'm only getting 0.02%? ) Worry more about the startups that start alongside you.