[Cumpiler69]

>A smart vendor will shift into that space - they'll use that LLM themselves

It's a bit late to start shifting now since it takes time. Ideally they should already have a product on the market.

[TeMPOraL]

There's still time. The situation in which you can effectively replace your OCR vendor with hitting LLM APIs via a half-assed Python script ChatGPT wrote for you, has existed for maybe few months. People are only beginning to realize LLMs got good enough that this is an option. An OCR vendor that starts working on the shift today, should easily be able to develop, tune, test and productize an LLM-based OCR pipeline way before most of their customers realize what's been happening.

But it is a good opportunity for a fast-moving OCR service to steal some customers from their competition. If I were working in this space, I'd be worried about that, and also about the possibility some of the LLM companies realize they could actually break into this market themselves right now, and secure some additional income.

EDIT:

I get the feeling that the main LLM suppliers are purposefully sticking to general-purpose APIs and refraining from competing with anyone on specific services, and that this goes beyond just staying focused. Some of potential applications, like OCR, could turn into money printers if they moved on them now, and they all could use some more cash to offset what they burn on compute. Is it because they're trying to avoid starting an "us vs. them" war until after they made everyone else dependent on them?

[anon84873628]

To the point after your edit, I view it like the cloud shift from IaaS to PaaS / SaaS. Start with a neutral infrastructure platform that attracts lots of service providers. Then take your pick of which ones to replicate with a vertically integrated competitor or manager offering once you are too big for anyone to really complain.

[bayindirh]

Never underestimate the power of the second mover. Since the development is happening in the open, someone can quickly cobble up the information and cut directly to the 90% of the work.

Then your secret sauce will be your fine tunes, etc.

Like it or not AI/LLM will be a commodity, and this bubble will burst. Moats are hard to build when you have at least one open source copy of what you just did.

[SoftTalker]

And next year your secret sauce will be worthless because the LLMs are that much better again.

Businesses that are just "today's LLM + our bespoke improvements" won't have legs.