The AI boom is fake.
Not the technology—the technology is real. I mean the "boom" part. The part where every demo day is 40% AI companies and every founder is raising millions for "AI-powered" solutions.
Because here's what I've noticed after building in this space for months: most AI companies are just different-colored buttons that call the same OpenAI API. That's it. That's the innovation.
I'm not exaggerating. The actual architecture for most "AI startups" looks like this:
user types something → GPT-4 API call → format the output → charge $30/month
And somehow this is worth $5M seed rounds.
Look, I get it. I'm 17, building an AI agent platform, so maybe I'm biased. But I've talked to hundreds of founders at SF networking events, looked at what's getting funded, and the pattern is impossible to ignore. The entire industry is pretending to innovate while actually just arbitraging OpenAI's API with better marketing.
The wrapper economy is insane
Here's the playbook that's working right now:
Take ChatGPT. Add a specific vertical ("for lawyers" / "for marketing" / "for students"). Slap on some custom UI. Charge more than ChatGPT. Raise money on "vertical AI SaaS."
This isn't theoretical. Real companies with real funding:
Jasper raised $125M to be ChatGPT for marketing copy. Copy.ai raised $14M to be ChatGPT for different marketing copy. There are probably 50 companies that are just "ChatGPT but for [specific profession]" that have collectively raised hundreds of millions.
I'm not saying these companies are worthless. They have distribution. They have UI/UX. They solve real problems. But let's call it what it is: they're Shopify stores for OpenAI's API. They're not doing AI research. They're doing sales and marketing.
And that would be fine except everyone's pretending it's innovation. VCs are writing checks like these companies discovered something novel. Founders are going on podcasts talking about "AI infrastructure" when they literally just call an API and format the response.
The whole thing feels like a collective delusion where we've agreed to pretend that integration work is the same as innovation.
Why investors keep funding this (it's worse than you think)
You'd think VCs would see through this. They don't care.
Because wrappers have what VCs actually want: fast growth, clear use case, short time to revenue, obvious exit path. Building real AI infrastructure—novel memory systems, multi-agent coordination, new reasoning architectures—takes years with no revenue. That's a terrible pitch.
But "ChatGPT for X" can hit $1M ARR in six months if your marketing is good.
So you get this perverse outcome where actual innovation gets underfunded and API arbitrage gets overfunded. The people doing hard research on how to make AI systems actually work at scale are starving for capital while someone raises $3M for a ChatGPT wrapper with a nice Figma mockup.
This is how you end up with an "AI boom" where most of the money is going to companies that aren't advancing AI at all. They're just really good at selling access to someone else's AI.
The part that actually scares me
Claude (Anthropic's model) is legitimately better than GPT-4 for most of what I build. Better reasoning, longer context windows, more reliable outputs.
But almost every AI wrapper is built on OpenAI. Why? Because OpenAI invested billions in developer relations. They made integration trivially easy. Anthropic made a better model but worse developer experience.
So inferior technology is winning because it's easier to build on. And now the entire AI economy is dependent on one company's API.
Think about that. If OpenAI changes pricing, raises rate limits, or decides they want to own your vertical, thousands of companies die overnight. But founders keep building anyway because actually doing AI research is too hard.
This is the part that bothers me most. We're building the "AI revolution" on rented infrastructure that can be revoked any time. There's no moat. There's no defensibility. There's just: I hope OpenAI doesn't notice my business exists.
What real work actually looks like
When I say "real AI work" I don't mean it's morally superior or whatever. I mean there's a difference between:
Integration work: Call API → format output → charge users
Infrastructure work: Build the systems that make new capabilities possible
For Nexus, we're building memory architectures. Not just "store the conversation history in a database"—actual hierarchical retrieval systems that can maintain coherent state across thousands of interactions. Agent coordination protocols that work when you have multiple AI agents that need to work together. Context compression that preserves semantic meaning instead of just truncating.
This stuff is hard. It takes months to get right. It doesn't demo well. But it's the difference between "ChatGPT with a different UI" and "capabilities that didn't exist before."
Companies actually doing infrastructure: LangChain building orchestration primitives. Pinecone and Weaviate doing vector databases optimized for semantic search. Modal and Replicate doing model deployment infrastructure. These aren't sexy. They're not growing as fast. But they're building the rails that future AI products run on.
The problem is investors can't tell the difference. A ChatGPT wrapper with 10,000 users looks better in a pitch deck than a memory architecture with 100 users but 10x better performance. So capital flows to wrappers and infrastructure starves.
What happens when OpenAI ships your feature
This is already happening in real-time.
OpenAI released custom GPTs and killed thousands of niche wrapper apps overnight. ChatGPT Enterprise killed B2B wrappers. Vision API killed image analysis wrappers. Every product launch from OpenAI makes an entire category of startups obsolete.
And you can see which founders saw this coming because they pivoted to real infrastructure. The ones who didn't are trying to raise Series A with a product OpenAI now gives away for free.
You cannot build a defensible business on someone else's API unless you're adding real value beyond UI. And "real value" doesn't mean "we have better landing page copy." It means you're creating capabilities that didn't exist before.
Why this matters beyond just AI
This isn't just about AI companies. It's about what an entire generation of founders is learning right now.
Thousands of smart people in their 20s are watching the wrapper game work. They're seeing that the path to startup success is:
Find a hot technology → build the thinnest possible wrapper → raise on growth metrics → exit before the platform owner notices
This is not innovation. This is financial engineering.
And it's training people to optimize for speed-to-exit instead of building things that matter. The survivors won't be the fastest movers. They'll be the ones who built infrastructure that creates new capabilities. But by the time that's obvious, everyone's already learned to play the wrapper game.
We're accidentally teaching the next generation that real innovation is for suckers.
Why I'm building the hard way
Nexus could have been a wrapper. "AI assistant for solo founders" that calls Claude and formats it nicely. That would have been faster, probably grown faster too.
But I watched the 2021 no-code boom. Thousands of companies raised money building Webflow templates and Airtable interfaces. Then Webflow and Airtable shipped native features and killed them all.
The wrapper game is a short-term optimization that destroys long-term value.
If I'm spending years on this, it needs to create new capabilities, not just repackage existing ones. Otherwise I'm building on someone else's platform and praying they don't notice. That's not a company. That's renting shelf space in someone else's store.
And the rent is about to go up.
The question nobody wants to answer
If you're building an AI company: if OpenAI decided to build your exact product tomorrow, would you survive?
If the answer is no, you're not building a company. You're arbitraging an API.
The AI revolution is real. The infrastructure is genuinely transformative. But most of what's getting funded isn't infrastructure—it's arbitrage. Real innovation is happening at companies you haven't heard of because they're too busy building to do PR.
Meanwhile the wrapper economy gets all the funding, all the press, all the credit for "AI innovation."
When the music stops, infrastructure companies will still be here. The wrappers won't.
— Arjun