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Ask HN: What's the verdict on GPT wrapper companies these days?

12 points NewUser76312 | 1 comments | 07 Jul 25 20:10 UTC | HN request time: 0.206s | source

Do you use any, do you find them valuable, do they do something the foundation model companies are not doing?

I wondered this about a year ago and wanted to revisit the question.

Today I did some research on Product Hunt and also looked through various recent YC companies. What hit me immediately was - wow! - there are some really good designers (or maybe it's with AI now) putting together slick product demos and 1-3 min vids. Most of the products I came across are AI for various things like creating office docs, sending emails, creating presentations, web scraping, making mobile apps, managing meetings and relationships, etc.

However, when I get past the flashiness and start investigating a bit, I don't really see what's special or setting these products apart from a foundation model + rudimentary RAG in some cases. In fact, many file-related and memory-dependent applications can be done perfectly well via the base Open AI chat website today. To give credit where it's due, I think some of these products have better 'flows' via various prompt engineering tricks. Enough to justify a big monthly stipend over my existing OAI/Anthropic subscriptions, I don't know.

But my overall take when I see many of these, is that they are probably not startups, at least not ones that I see lasting. They have to go more and more niche to get away from the tentacles of increasingly capable foundation model capabilities. The big ones that seem to be enduring and doing well are Perplexity and Cursor, they seem to have grown quickly enough in the early days to attract a lot of resources and talent to keep building features. So maybe the foundation models can only do ~60% of what they do, while for the products/startups I described above, that number is more like 90%. My conclusion is to be somewhat bearish on 'GPT wrappers', perhaps until more creative ideas (e.g. physical-world use cases) come to fruition, because the SaaS space seems rough.

1. muzani ◴[07 Jul 25 23:15 UTC] No.44495522[source]▶
Cursor is not merely a wrapper. There's a lot of optimization going on under the hood. At the very least, it indexes the whole codebase and can search it. That's not including the agent stuff, MCP, context management, etc.

Perplexity might have been a wrapper some time ago, but today, it's far more. I tried asking it for the meaning of the lyrics of a certain song in my head but only gave it the band name, not the song. It picked the wrong band-song at first, but noted that similar questions were asked for the exact song in my head. If I ask GPT/Gemini/etc, it will say, "I know the band, but which song?"

I think this sort of invalidates the rest of the question - most of the things that people just assume are wrappers are not. The things that are only wrappers die out pretty quick because people would just ask ChatGPT instead of Essay Writer 2025.