Right now, AI companies profit much more from wrappers, which pay API prices, instead of regular users, who pay loss-leader subscriptions. There’s little incentive for them to bother competing with wrappers today.

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.

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NewUser76312 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

Good comment, agree for the most part.

>wrappers that implement proprietary algorithms can still thrive in the long run.

This is true, but they need to defend from multiple fronts. Do you believe in Perplexity long-term, or a) OpenAI moving into search, or b) Google moving their search into AI.

It's an interesting hybrid product where I suppose the winner is unclear, because it seems Perplexity has executed fast and strong thus far.

	▲	thimabi 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		> Do you believe in Perplexity long-term, or a) OpenAI moving into search, or b) Google moving their search into AI. I must confess that I’ve never used Perplexity, as ChatGPT works incredibly well for me. Never felt the need to try something new, and maybe that says something about Perplexity’s future. Ironically enough, I find Google’s AI-based search awful, so for me ChatGPT has replaced Google for the most part. If I had to guess, I concur that the winner in this space is still unclear. And that fierce competition is very good for us as customers.

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HenryBemis 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> regular users, who pay loss-leader subscriptions

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..

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bravesoul2 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

The bitter lesson will probably happen and the wrapper won't need to exist. Just ask the agent for what you want. More like a concierge than a shopping mall.