Learning is much easier now. For example, on college level math texts sometimes you get stuck on a problem and aren't sure what you're missing. You could hire a tutor, go to office hours if you're still a uni student, or fumble on mathoverflow hoping for a solution, or wait 5 business days for a questionable response.. but now LLM's can help solve most problems up to the college level.
I feel like being at the bottom of the value chain is a mis-categorization. If you consider base LLM model as their sole offering I agree with you, but these companies have shown an eagerness to eat their way up the value chain. Agent mode, Search, Study Mode, AI code editors, are such examples of products that could be higher-on-the-chain startups but are offered in-house by OpenAI.
This reminds me of Amazon choosing to sell products that it knows are doing well in the marketplace, out-competing third party sellers. OpenAI is positioned to out-compete its competitors on virtually anything because they have the talent and more importantly, control over the model weights and ability to customize their LLMs. It's possible the "wrapper" startups of today are simply doing the market research for OpenAI and are in danger of being consumed by OpenAI.
OpenAI valued at 300B will never be able to produce the same products "wrappers" that these 5 people startups are making. Same reason Facebook could not make Instagram, of Jira could never make bootcamp for example.
Didn't it came out recently that those numbers were bugus, since basically every Instagram account must have a Threads account, and those are not actual active users?
…. Does anyone actually use Threads? I’ve never once seen a threads link and I understood the user count was just because every facebook or IG or whatever user automatically got a generated account?
As with most social platforms, it differs massively per country, it would help a lot if people here spent more time considering the diversity of the world.
Honestly I think this is a problem of over-engineering and simply allowing the user to press a button when he wants to start talking and press it when he's done is good enough. Or even a codeword for start and finish.
We don't need to feel like we're talking to a real person yet.
First of all, congratulations. That's a huge feat and you seem to have overcome a lot of hurdles to make it.
That being said, I find it a bit discouraging that small-team passion projects with even the best product-market fit and minimal marketing spend only reach this level of profitability after 5 years.
Like, I can work at a FAANG, coast, make no real contribution to society and collect a 400K/yr check. Or I could go all in on a cool idea and risk getting no customers. Option 2 sounds more fun, but it's still so much stress and uncertainty for little payoff.
Building a business that earns $250k/year isn't just a fixed income though - you get the money, but _you also now own a business_.
In effect you've earned a $250k income _and_ ~$1 million dollar asset you can sell later (one which will also likely keep growing in value well above most other assets return rates).
The reality is a bit more complicated, but there is definitely significant value in 100% equity in a successful business that will often be larger than your paycheck.
And that's before you get into the flexibility and other upsides of being your own boss, the long-term CV & reputation benefits of this for whatever else you want to do next, etc etc.
