iASince the introduction of ChatGPT, adding “AI” to everything has become the dominant trend in IT. We considered AI for iA Writer. But obviously, we had to make sure not to destroy everything we had built over the last 15 years. We did not want our app to become an AI feature.
The recent troubles at OpenAI indicate that the company lacks identity and direction. The old board was set up to keep what was left of OpenAI’s openness open. The new board composition at OpenAI now includes representatives from Microsoft. It marks a transition towards unlimited profit, with the safety board dismissed, the not-for-profit aspect disbanded. But the impression it made remains. A Dalí elephant with long thin legs.
Panic pushed everyone to get on board without thinking. Old and new products became AI apps, often overpromising and following a simple recipe:
- Integrate ChatGPT
- Overpromise
- Rebrand GPT as proprietary AI
This trend led to a monotonous market of AI-this-and-AI-that. Companies large and small jumped into the ChatGPT lifeboat, trashing the uniqueness of their product. The result was just as predictable...
AI apps running on ChatGPT take the risk of becoming obsolete overnight. It’s easy for ChatGPT to integrate successful apps as a new feature. This is no longer speculation. It’s what happened to a wide range of startups already.
- Become indiscernible from competitors
- Loss of character and reason to be
- Competing with ChatGPT
- Getting Sherlocked
Steven Lipton@ia For an app meant to focus someone by using the bare bones approach of Markup for formatting and wiping away all feature creep, it seems strange to be even looking at the possibility. However, your article does a lot to explain why you would -- especially the long-term life of an app company. As a user, I'd prefer other things than anything needing AI, such as a way to organize individual documents into a manuscript. My thinking doesn’t need replacing, it needs a way of expressing.