Wrapping My Head Around AI Wrappers

Summary

“That’s just an AI wrapper.” The put‑down feels familiar to people developing something new using Artificial Intelligence. The push-back feels just as familiar. “Everything is a wrapper. OpenAI is a wrapper around Nvidia and Azure. Netflix is a wrapper around AWS. Salesforce is an Oracle database wrapper valued at $320 billion,” says Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas.For those not familiar with the term “AI Wrapper,” here’s a good definition.It is a dismissive term that refers to a lightweight application or service that uses existing AI models or APIs to provide specific functionality, typically with minimal effort or complexity involved in its creation. A popular example of an AI wrapper are apps that enable users to “chat” with a PDF. This type of AI application allows users to upload a PDF document, such as a research paper, and interact with an AI model to quickly analyze and obtain answers about the specific content. In the early days of ChatGPT, uploading documents as part of the prompt or creating a custom GPT was not possible, so these apps became very popular, very fast.AI Wrapper Meme: An API call to OpenAI under the hood.In my view, this AI wrapper debate misses a larger point. Wrappers are not all the same. Some enjoy a brief run and last only until big platforms bundle them into their suites. But products that can live where work is done, builds proprietary data and learns from usage, and/or withstand incumbent distribution advantages can endure. The wrapper label is a distraction from what I think actually matters: (1) Is it a feature or a product, and (2) How big is the market segment.Let’s first look at that earlier example of a wrapper that lets you chat with a PDF. Such a tool solves one narrow problem of answering questions about a document. It does not create new documents or edit existing ones. It typically does not capture any unique data, or learn from user behavior. So to me, it is a capability rather than an end-to-end solution. A means to an...