'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:

  how long would it take someone to come up with the product given enough information about the product
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.