Two ways for an AI company to protect itself from competition: (a) depend not just on AI but also deep domain knowledge about a particular field, (b) have a very close relationship with the end users.
Two ways for an AI company to protect itself from competition: (a) depend not just on AI but also deep domain knowledge about a particular field, (b) have a very close relationship with the end users.
However, a key risk with several of these startups is the potential lack of a long-term moat. It is difficult to read too much into it given the stage of these startups and the limited public information available but it’s not difficult to poke holes at their long term defensibility. For example:
- If a startup is built on the premise of taking base L
AI Startup Trends: Insights from Y Combinator’s Latest Batch
Nicolay Gerold added
“At both Viaweb and YC, every minute I spent thinking about competitors was, in retrospect, a minute wasted... It's exceptionally rare for startups to be killed by competitors — so rare that you can almost discount the possibility... Inexperienced founders usually give competitors more credit than they deserve. Whether you succeed depends far more
... See moresari added
- You have access to a proprietary asset (like data) that others don’t have easy access to. In our “write job postings” example, perhaps you have a corpus of thousands of job postings including some outcome scores (as to how well they did). You could use this data to create better job postings. Others don’t have ready access to this data. Note: The a
Dharmesh Shah • How To Build a Defensible A.I. Startup
Nicolay Gerold added
Protecting LLM products:
(1) Is hard to bootstrap. This already hints to existing customers or you need to get a bunch of your customers to co-develop (insurance model → companies pooling their data to solve a problem they all have). This runs into a bunch of issues: competitive drive of the companies, data privacy and security.
(2) Reserved for existing companies. This is the co-pilot model.
(3) This might be the most sustainable one, but it is also the hardest one. I have not seen anything in that direction yet besides OpenAI.
A looming question mark is how companies will build competitive moats; true tech differentiation is rare, and companies will need to find ways to stay ahead of competition, perhaps with network effects or with iterative loops of user engagement and product refinement.
Rex Woodbury • AI in 2023: The Application Layer Has Arrived
sari added
Darren LI and added
AI will magnify the already great difference in knowledge between the people who are eager to learn and those who aren't.
Err on the side of doing things where you'll face competitors. Inexperienced founders usually give competitors more credit than they deserve. Whether you succeed depends far more on you than on your competitors. So better a good idea with competitors than a bad one without.
Paul Graham • How to Get Startup Ideas
Ajinkya Wadhwa added
I would say having taste and leveraging AI is your ultimate defense against AI
alex and added