The ChatGPT wrapper product boom is an uncanny valley hellscape
Here we go again: I'm so tired of crypto web3 LLMs.
I'm positive there are wonderful applications for LLMs. The ChatGPT web UI seems great for summarizing information from various online sources (as long as you're willing to verify the things that you learn).
But a lot fo the "AI businesses" coming out right now are just lightweight wrappers around ChatGPT. It's lazy and unhelpful.
Probably the worst offenders are in the content marketing space.
We didn't know how lucky we were back in the "This one weird trick for saving money" days. Now, rather than a human writing that junk, we have every article sounding like the writing voice equivalent of the dad from Cocomelon.
Here's an approximate technical diagram of how these businesses work:
Part 1 is what I like to call the "bilking process." Basically, you put up a flashy landing page promising content generation in exchange for a monthly subscription fee (or discounted annual fee, of course!). No more paying pesky writers!
Once the husk of a company has secured the bag, part 2, the "bullshit process," kicks in. Customers provide their niches and the service happily passes queries over to the ChatGPT (or similar) API. Customers are rewarded with stinky garbage articles that sound like they're being narrated by HAL on Prozac in return. Success!
I suppose we should have expected as much. With every new tech trend comes a deluge of tech investors trying to find the next great thing. And when this happens, it's a gold rush every time.
I will say I'm more optimistic about "AI" (aka machine learning, aka statistics).
There are going to be some pretty cool applications of this tech eventually—but your ChatGPT wrapper ain't it.