A Viral Reddit article has sparked an animated discussion on the Boom of AI startups, arguing that most AI companies are doomed to failure due to competition from large technologies rather than human productivity.
“It is absolutely breathtaking to see how most IA companies (as I mean, always) try to compare their models to human productivity,” the user wrote. “We have heard all these explosive advertisements on how they can increase the human productivity of XXX%.”
The user says that IA startups are missing the real threat – they are not in competition against humans but against other models of AI, in particular Chatgpt, Claude, Gemini and Deepseek, which already dominate space.
The post underlines the way in which the major technological AI models become “all-in-one Swiss knives”, which makes niche startups andundant.
“Why would he devil would I pay for the random startup model when Big Tech models can already do the same? It makes no sense,” says the user. The Redditor underlines Microsoft Copilot as an example, arguing that this is only an AI model aggregator – Users requests always prefer autonomous AI tools like Chatgpt or Claude.
Another example is AI perplexity, an AI research tool that recently disseminated an ad that compared to traditional Google research. However, the user rejects this approach: “Perplexity made an announcement with the Squid Game Guy to compare perplexity in relation to traditional Google research, completely ignoring the deep research of Chatgpt is their number one competitor (and not on the traditional research of Google).”
The post makes a comparison between the current AI race and the search engine wars in the early 2000s.
“It is again like the early 2000s, where everyone continued to say that search engines will become more popular because more and more users will access the web. During this time, we all know how it happened. Only Google finally won this search engine war, everyone becoming losers.”
If history is repeated, only a handful of AI giants will survive, while the majority of IA startups will fail or be acquired.
With rapidly evolving AI models and the domination of large technologies, many niche AI startups can find it difficult to differentiate or offer long -term value. As a Reddit user summed it up in the comments: “If your startup Ai does not solve a highly specialized problem, he is already dead.”
However, a user commented: “self-hosted open weight models are improving, however. The future of AI concerns specialization, not Jack of all trades like all large companies.
