Long term, you're right. But if you approach the ChatGPT plugin opportunity as an inherently time-limited opportunity (like arbitrage in finance), then you you can still make some short-term money and learn about AI in the process. Not a bad route for aspiring entrepreneurs who are currently in college or are looking for a side gig business experiment.
And who knows. If a plugin is successful enough, you might even swap out the OpenAI backend for an open source alternative before OpenAI clones you.
There is no route to making money with these plugins. You have to get the users onto your website, sign-up, part with money, then go back to gptchat. It's really hard to make that happen, this is going to be much more useful for existing businesses adding functionality to existing projects. Or random devs just making stuff. Making fast money out of it, it seems v difficult.
> It's really hard to make that happen, this is going to be much more useful for existing businesses adding functionality to existing projects. Or random devs just making stuff. Making fast money out of it, it seems v difficult.
Absolutely correct. This is what the AI hype squad and the HN bubble misses again. This is only useful to existing businesses (summarization the only safe use-case) or random devs automating themselves out of irrelevance. All of this 'euphoria' is around for Microsoft's heavy marketing from its newly acquired AI division.
This is a obvious text book example of mindshare capture and ecosystem lock-in. Eventually, OpenAI will just slowly raise prices and break / deprecate older models to move them onto newer ones and pay to continue using them. It is the same decade old tactics.
And who knows. If a plugin is successful enough, you might even swap out the OpenAI backend for an open source alternative before OpenAI clones you.