In a very short span of four months, AI has made its way into the mainstream thanks to the magic of ChatGPT. It's become so mainstream that it's now a political issue.
From a developer/entrepreneur standpoint, there's something even more interesting than the black box that ChatGPT is, and that's how seemingly everyone is now building AI into their products, or even whole products, using OpenAI's technology.
I'm a builder at heart, and seeing so many thin-wrappers that have little competitive advantage will be a very interesting case study in a year, when first-mover advantages disappear and the hype dies down.
But right now what I'm watching is the number of new "AI" apps that are shipping to the App Store and Google Play.
According to Explorer, our search engine for apps, 398 apps with "chatbot" in their name were released since January across the App Store and Google Play.
For comparison, only 70 apps that match these keywords were released in 2022 and 20 of those were released in December as part of the ChatGPT craze so they don't really count.
Developers tend to react to new things like this quickly but this is even faster than before.
From a developer standpoint, it's interesting to see the power a platform can offer when it builds the core functionality but not necessarily the end product. OpenAI's APIs are now powering apps, platforms, and features across products OpenAI just wouldn't be able to make all on their own in the short amount of time that those products took to launch.
In a way, I see that as the competitive advantage OpenAI has over rival Google who's clearly in panic mode but obviously has a lot invested in the end product more than wanting to be the API that powers other apps.
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