I’d love for someone to try to define “AI wrapper”.
I’m trying to imagine a graph where at some point in time t
the status of a company changes from “wrapper” (not enough “original” engineering)
to “proper company” (they own the IP, and they fought for it!!!)
At what point did OpenAI cease being an NVIDIA wrapper and become the world’s leading AI lab? At what point did NVIDIA graduate from being a TSMC wrapper?
Clearly any company that gets TSMC N2 node allocation is going to win, the actual details of the chip don’t matter super much.
'Wrapper' in this instance is your primary source of value is a prompt.
I think you can think of it as how long would it take someone to come up with the product given enough information about the product.
Take for instance an app that is a "companion" app. It's simplest form is a prompt + LLM + interface. They don't own the LLM so they have the prompt and interface. The prompt is simple enough to figure out (often by asking the app in a clever way) so the interface is left. How easy is it to replicate? If it's like chatgpt, pretty easy.
Now there are a few complications. Suppose there are network effects (Instagram is a wrapper around a protocol), but the network effects are the value. And LLM wrapper can create network effects (maybe there is a way to share or something) but difficult.
OpenAI is not a wrapper on NVIDIA because it would take billions of dollars to train the LLM with the NVIDIA chips (in energy). It would take me a weekend to recreate a GPT wrapper or just fork an open source implementation. There is also institutional knowledge (which is why Meta is offering 1bn+ for a single eng). Or take something like Excel. People know how it works, people have dissected it endlessly. But the cost to recreate even with perfect knowledge is very high, plus there is network effects.
I guess the point I was trying to make is that this:
Is a fast moving target, and the time gets shorter as more money and knowledge gets involved. Put another way: that $1b for talent or chips is a fast depreciating asset.Taking a shot at this, one concrete definition might be that the business model is essentially white labeling, that is, the base LLM is rebranded, but task performance in the problem domain is not functionally improved in some measurable way. As a corollary, it means the user could receive the same value if they had gone straight to the base LLM provider.
I think this might be more narrow than most uses of the term “wrapper” though.
Every company you mentioned is just a wrapper around elemental carbon and silicon.