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Comment by a13n | Hacker News Reader

> I’d argue that the most valuable companies of the AI era don’t exist yet. They’ll be the startups that harness AI’s potential to solve specific, costly problems across our economy—from engineering and finance to healthcare, logistics, legal, marketing, sales, and more.

I feel like the author's concluding point contradicts himself. There is a gold rush and OpenAI is selling shovels.

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I’d say Nvidia is selling shovel factories (training hardware), OpenAI is renting shovels (trained models as a service), and DeepSeek gave everyone a shovel for free.

But Nvidia is also selling steroids (inference hardware) that everyone will need to use their new free shovels.

This analogy may have gotten out of hand.

I thought Nvidia is selling shovels

Nvidia is selling shovels. OpenAI is renting out mining crews

Mickey Mouse animated the shovels with the big spell book, and now they're marching around and need shovels of their own...

This has me imagining it in terms of the game Cuphead. That’s also good for visualizing this I think.

It's that OpenAI is investing tens of billions of dollars in shovels and others, like deepseek, are open sourcing equivalently good shovels.

The vertical specific companies, though, are harder to clone as the invest in the product offering around/on top of AI

> OpenAI is selling shovels.

I think the author argues that OpenAI is not the only one selling shovels, and their shovels won't be always better that others'.

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