Andrew Chen, general partner at A16Z and author of the book Cold Start Problem, has written Revenge of the GPT Wrappers: Defensibility in a world of commoditized AI models.
It is one, of many, indicators of how fast the AI world is moving. In 2023 ‘GPT wrapper’ was used to belittle AI companies that built applications on top of LLMs. Fast-forward to early 2025 and there is now more respect to product, brand and network effects (which are traditional signs of a good application-layer technology company). Maybe not coincidentally the top Swedish AI startups are all, to larger or smaller extent, ‘GPT wrappers’ and that might not be a bad thing at all.
