Is OpenAI (ChatGPT) the poison pill for most AI startups?

Lazar Radenovic
1 reply
Imagine you are creatin a business whose purpose is to analyse PDF documents, simplify the interpretation, and help answer questions about these documents. Imagine you invested 3 years into building your own machine learning algorithms that do exactly that only to find out that ChaptGPT does it better! WoW – huge opportunity – You can simply leverage ChatGPT APIs to enhance your business and you will do much better than before – right? …. WRONG. The fact tat you can do it, also means that 1,000s of other companies can do the same exact thing at the same exact time. Your novel idea is no longer novel as there is no crucial IP you own anymore, instead it now all belongs to OpenAI, because they do it better. This is not meant to diss OpenAI, on the contrary, they made a huge step forward for AI in general, but companies that are trying to make a living in this space should be very careful. Because now you have a shortcut to a super powerful AI that is shared by everyone else, and as such any novel solution you can think of will be instantly commoditized to a point where it cannot be profitable. Think of what WordPress did for web designers / developers. So, what do you think – will the general access to powerful AI without AI specialists lead to a race to the bottom for most AI use cases and start-ups?

Replies

Hashnimo
Imagine investing 3 years into developing a PDF analyzer and almost 7 years into creating an AI, only to release the latter for free to the public. I think these are certainly triggering factors.