I wondered this about a year ago and wanted to revisit the question.
Today I did some research on Product Hunt and also looked through various recent YC companies. What hit me immediately was - wow! - there are some really good designers (or maybe it's with AI now) putting together slick product demos and 1-3 min vids. Most of the products I came across are AI for various things like creating office docs, sending emails, creating presentations, web scraping, making mobile apps, managing meetings and relationships, etc.
However, when I get past the flashiness and start investigating a bit, I don't really see what's special or setting these products apart from a foundation model + rudimentary RAG in some cases. In fact, many file-related and memory-dependent applications can be done perfectly well via the base Open AI chat website today. To give credit where it's due, I think some of these products have better 'flows' via various prompt engineering tricks. Enough to justify a big monthly stipend over my existing OAI/Anthropic subscriptions, I don't know.
But my overall take when I see many of these, is that they are probably not startups, at least not ones that I see lasting. They have to go more and more niche to get away from the tentacles of increasingly capable foundation model capabilities. The big ones that seem to be enduring and doing well are Perplexity and Cursor, they seem to have grown quickly enough in the early days to attract a lot of resources and talent to keep building features. So maybe the foundation models can only do ~60% of what they do, while for the products/startups I described above, that number is more like 90%. My conclusion is to be somewhat bearish on 'GPT wrappers', perhaps until more creative ideas (e.g. physical-world use cases) come to fruition, because the SaaS space seems rough.
Over time, however, I do think most wrappers are doomed. Prices will inevitably equalize, and AI companies can rapidly capture a lot of market share with little effort — via custom bots, agents and the like. If a wrapper is nothing more than an optimized prompt and a beautiful UI, it will be crushed by the competition one day.
That being said, wrappers that implement proprietary algorithms can still thrive in the long run. Of course, if an app is that good, AI companies might eventually go after it anyway, regardless of how advanced the app is.
who on earth told you about me???? :)
I asked ChatGPT something, and it told me it needs 7 days to create that thing. I asked it to make small incremental dumps every 6 hours, just so I don't get a bunch of BS/hallucinations on Day7. I usually got 4-5 chats running in parallel, so I am definitely over-use.
On the other hand, there are weeks that I don't even log in at all, so..
Perplexity might have been a wrapper some time ago, but today, it's far more. I tried asking it for the meaning of the lyrics of a certain song in my head but only gave it the band name, not the song. It picked the wrong band-song at first, but noted that similar questions were asked for the exact song in my head. If I ask GPT/Gemini/etc, it will say, "I know the band, but which song?"
I think this sort of invalidates the rest of the question - most of the things that people just assume are wrappers are not. The things that are only wrappers die out pretty quick because people would just ask ChatGPT instead of Essay Writer 2025.
The AIs will be eventually trainable to be a wrapper by ordinary people. I.e. they ask for the wrapped thing. "Make my photo look good for LinkedIn". It will do a better job.
I suppose my interest is more in the long-term durability in such companies.
And then (in reverse) Windows had Solitaire and Pinball and now they don't.
Right now ChatGPT does 'ten things'. I believe it will be like Amazon. Allow you to build your shop-in-a-shop, and then once they see that they can jump this number from 'ten' to 'twenty', they will start offering the extra services/products within the same price, and cut the wrappers 'organically'. Unless those wrappers innovate and improve forever. Or until ChatGPT will M&A those small wrappers.
if you can get a gpt wrapper and get thousands of customer, who is going to say it is not a genuine tech company?
I see it that I have a problem, someone solves that problem. I pay $$ per month. Everyone is happy.
I'd say "solution" or "product" and not get stuck on the technical details (for/to which I agree with you but 90% of the people don't care).
When you buy milk you don't buy liquid+container+shipping, you buy food. You consume the food. Belly feels nice. See you tomorrow for another bottle.