Comment by behnamoh | Hacker News Reader

Comment by behnamoh | Hacker News Reader

With each announcement, OpenAI kills yet another class of startups. I wonder if there are areas that OpenAI (and other AI companies) can't enter because those seem to be the only viable startup ideas in the long-term.

Currently, OAI does all the following:

- offers flagship models

- offers lite models

- offers easy finetuning of their models

- offers structured output and guaranteed JSON output.

- offers parallel tool/function calling which remains unmatched.

- has low API costs.

- offers a nice UI for their models

- offers Mac, iOS, Android, Windows app clients.

- offers image generation capabilities INTEGRATED with their language models.

- offers two-tier subscription plans for ordinary/pro (team) users.

- offers custom GPTs which can be used by ordinary people to create GPT experiences tailored to specific tasks (no need to build a website on your own).

- allows users to easily share chats!! (it took Anthropic a long time to have this feature, and even now it's not as good as OpenAI's solution).

- offers prompt caching and task scheduling to further save costs.

- offers unrivaled voice-to-text models at different sizes (Whisper).

- offers text-to-voice models that feel much more natural than the competition.

- has outstanding documentation.

- sets the standard for API (all other companies have to follow their conventions, such as `messages`, `.choices[0].message.content`, etc.)

- has the most capable team to, idk, build AGI/ASI...

I wouldn't say this kills a class of startups. Being constrained to a single model provider is quite limiting for this kind of use case. What if you get better cost/performance results by distilling into an open source model? In a landscape that changes so rapidly, there's a lot of value in provider-agnostic tooling.

> - offers unrivaled voice-to-text models at different sizes (Whisper).

It may be (close to) the best, but Whisper is nowhere near good enough.

So, if you're got a great idea for how to massively improve on that (I don't), there's a business opportunity there.

Pick an industry and OpenAI will never compete with you. They are going for the AGI dream, they want to be a company valued at 50T. They will never settle for doing any actual grunt work.

That OpenAI will kill every startup that build a product on top of their technology isn't really a good signal for using OpenAI as a technological platform …

Lots of companies are just wrappers around an API. Can be compared to Apple "killing" startups that sold flashlight apps to the first Iphone

Maybe it's better to build specific applications with OpenAI's products (e.g., using the API to automate a specific business process in your company) than to build a company offering a generic additional functionality like a UI or fine-tuning or custom prompts. Or at least, that seems like the target audience that OpenAI wants to sell their product to.

I wouldn't put their API costs as low. There are a few decent competitors. They only recently caught up with Claude and for example for coding deepseek is much cheaper. Others also got the cheap prompt caching before OpenAI caught up. They may have good features, but pricing is still meh.

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