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.
Counterexample- Facebook made Threads which has similar # users as Twitter now.
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.
Ok, but if we have to go looking for it, then its not exactly a juggernaut.
I have also never seen a Threads link. For all the hatred of X, people do actually use it.
75% of Twitter users are bots now, some I'm sure are real people.
But people link almost exclusively to X everywhere, for anything from memes to timely news.
There may be a lot of bots in the comments but the platform is genuinely used by a lot of people, that’s just easily observable.
Meta really, really likes to game their numbers. Take claims of that with a hefty grain of salt.
Don’t believe everything you read if you actually believe this. Threads in no way has close to the same actual usage or users