Many startups have started over the past few years, trying to build infrastructure (shovels) for companies to integrate LLMs, or specific chat copilots trying to cater to a specific usecase. Most are dead in the water once OpenAI subsumes their feature set.
... is what people who don't understand positioning will parrot time and time again.
Jasper isn't having a good time, but you'd think the fact anyone can produce better output than they did after spending millions of dollars in GPT-3 based pipelines for $20 a month would mean they're dead dead.
But instead they went and changed their positioning, changed who their target market is, adjusted the UX, the messaging, and the feature set, and now it's a product that has a place even if OpenAI can give all of your marketers an internal ChatGPT (unless your plan is to have 100 different "GPTs" for every marketing task in your company)
tl;dr: People fail to realize that OpenAI can offer your startup's core value proposition tomorrow morning, and it doesn't matter if they don't offer it in a format that resonates with your target users.
You could have a cure to cancer and you'd still have to market it correctly.
That's the complete opposite of reality: Jasper could only fight to survive because they were a wrapper.
Imagine if Jasper had raised and built their own GPT-3 alternative from the ground up at 100x the cost targeted at writing: it wouldn't have generalized like OpenAI's models given the different goals in training, they'd have spent orders of magnitude more, they'd currently be scrambling to partner with some non-OpenAI provider to play the role OpenAI does for them today...
Jasper "only" had to start integrating new APIs to keep up with the SOTA in quality, and instead of burning precious runway on R&D they get to focus on rebranding and driving home that positioning.
What isn't a wrapper? Honestly everyone turns they nose in the air and claims all superiority bit I challenge you to find a use case that isn't just a 'wrapper'
