OpenAI GPT Store Is a Wake-Up Call For GPT Startups

In AI, narrow but deep beats broad but shallow

This article is a selection from The Algorithmic Bridge, an educational project aimed at bridging the gap between AI and people.

It doesn’t matter how much you tweak and improve a car with a small engine to make it faster; it will always be worse than a car with a big and powerful engine.

This is the dilemma that so-called thin-wrapper AI startups like Jasper and Askyourpdf — businesses built as an application layer on top of an LLM like GPT-4 — face in competing against model-building companies like OpenAI, Google, or Meta, which release better models every year and new features every month, all of which threaten to kill entire spaces where these GPT wrappers are trying to survive.

ChatGPT’s birth was the inflection point. How could Jasper, one of the first GPT wrappers and likely the most successful, compete now against a GPT-4-backed ChatGPT with just some fine-tuning on top that increases the price of the service 4x as a result? Three-quarters of Jasper’s customers pay $80/month whereas ChatGPT Plus is just $20/month.

Once OpenAI gets out its bigger engine (GPT-4.5 or GPT-5, likely much cheaper than $80/month), it won’t matter how good is Jasper’s fine-tuning of GPT-4. It…