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Comment by jrm4 | Hacker News Reader

So, I'll be honest, I don't understand this market. I get that one can be profitable selling shovels during the gold rush, sure. But I have trouble understanding who is knowledgeable/dedicated enough to try to get their AI app going, but would pay to abstract/outsource this part of the chain.

(I suppose, relately, I have trouble understanding why anyone would just sort of presume OpenAI would be forever the best backend here as well?)

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Here's my hypothesis: since we are still in the gold rush phase of AI, going to market early and pivoting quickly is imperative. Therefore, it is worthwhile to focus on your differentiating factor and outsource everything else. Plus we use the OpenAI API format, so there isn't vendor lock-in - though we hope we provide enough value for you to stay!

And you are right on the money that OpenAI may not be the best backend forever. That's why we also support Anthropic, Groq, and Mistral.

Lots of company are doing this exact business, they all have insane churn rate.

Biggest use case seems to be for people who want to prototype something quickly, they don’t yet want to bother with managing the infra and don’t mind the extra cost since this will be running at small scale. But if the experiment is successful, then the customer churns as it (most of the time) makes little sense to scale ML on serverless. And if the experiment is not successful, they are obviously also going to churn.

A friend of mine works for a very large company and he was telling me about an AI startup they bought for (he thinks) in the ballpark of 8 digits. After they were on boarded he was able to dig into what it was. It's literally a GPT backend with system prompts and RAG. If you have a good sales team you can print money for doing almost nothing right now.

I've seen an AI yearbook photos styled app print money that was serverless.

There's lots of novelty apps atm that, as the other commented stated, just want to get to market as soon as possible to validate an idea

Doesn't everyone ask this question about Okta, like what am I doing farming out my user login?

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