I think more and more people are slowly realizing that LLMs aren't products in themselves. At the end of the day, you need to do something like Midjourney or Copilot where there's some value generation. Your business can't
just be "throw more GPUs at more data" because the guy down the block can do the same thing. OpenAI never had any moat, and it's a bit telling that as early as last year, everyone on HN acted as if they did.
LLMs are like touch screens: technically interesting and with great upside potential. But until the iPhone, multi-touch, the app ecosystem comes along, they'll remain an interesting technological advancement (nothing more, nothing less).
What I'm also noticing is that very little effort (and money) is actually spent on value generation, and most is spent on pure bloat. LangChain raising $25m for what is essentially a library for string manipulation is crazy. (N.B. I'm not solely calling out LangChain here, there are dozens of startups that have raised hundreds of millions on what is essentially AI tooling/bloat.) We need apps--real, actual apps--that leverage LLMs where it matters: natural-language interaction. Not pipelines upon pipelines upon pipelines or larger and larger models that are fun to chat with but actually do basically nothing.
LLMs are like touch screens: technically interesting and with great upside potential. But until the iPhone, multi-touch, the app ecosystem comes along, they'll remain an interesting technological advancement (nothing more, nothing less).
What I'm also noticing is that very little effort (and money) is actually spent on value generation, and most is spent on pure bloat. LangChain raising $25m for what is essentially a library for string manipulation is crazy. (N.B. I'm not solely calling out LangChain here, there are dozens of startups that have raised hundreds of millions on what is essentially AI tooling/bloat.) We need apps--real, actual apps--that leverage LLMs where it matters: natural-language interaction. Not pipelines upon pipelines upon pipelines or larger and larger models that are fun to chat with but actually do basically nothing.