This seems to be biased heavily towards products that look like an LLM. And yes, only a small number of those work. But that's because if your product is a thing I chat with, it immediately is in competition with ChatGPT/Claude/Grok/etc, leading to everything the article expressed. But those are hardly the only use cases for LLMs, let alone AI (whatever people nowadays mean by AI)

To name some of the obvious counter-examples, Grammarly and Deepl are both AI (and now partially LLM-based) products that don't fit any of the categories in the post, but seem pretty successful to me. Lots of successful applications of Vison-LLMs in document scanning too, whether you are deciphering handwritten text or just trying to get structured data out of pdfs.

Perhaps I'm biased since we're in a document heavy industry, but I think the original post misses a lot of the non-tech company use cases. An insane percentage of human time is spent copy pasting things from documents.

Yeah, the "normal" people I know, use AI in Grammarly or Adobe Express, or a astonished and delighted by NotebookLM, mostly because of the audio overviews--but also because grounding chat with sources gets you better, focused chat.

And, outside of chat, it's less clear that that big labs win all the time. People who care about making films, rather than video memes, often look to Kling or Runway, not just Sora. People who want to make images often have a passion for Midjourney that I've never seen for ImageFX.(Nanobanna for editing often sparks joy, so a big lab can play successfully in such a space, but that is diffferent from saying it is destined to win.)

In the author's defense, LLM's are typically what is associated with AI these days.

> One other thing I haven’t mentioned is image generation. Is this part of a chatbot product, or a tool in itself? Frankly, I think AI image generation is still more of a toy than a product, but it’s certainly seeing a ton of use. There’s probably some fertile ground for products here, if they can successfully differentiate themselves from the built-in image generation in ChatGPT.

This guy is so LLM-biased that he's missing the entire media gen ecosystem.

I feel like image, video, music, voice, and 3D generation are a much bigger deal than text. Text and code are mundane compared to rich signals.

These tools are production ready today and can accomplish design, marketing, previz, concept art, game assets, web design, film VFX. It's incredibly useful. As a tool. Today.

Don't sleep on generative media.