There is a race right now to be the first to market with the latest AI products. To be frank, a lot of these are going to be useless products.

Artificial intelligence is a promising technology with a wide range of potential applications. However, the problem is that a lot of ‘me too’ products are being developed.

There were a lot of startups that copied Facebook when social media was the new thing. The typical pitch would be “it’s like Facebook except…”. These were mostly derivatives of Facebook that provided little incremental value. For example, imagine a social media platform for left-handed people.

AI is undergoing a similar situation. If you hear someone say “it’s like ChatGPT except…” be wary.

In 2022 alone, investors put $4.5 billion into AI startups across 269 deals. These are a lot of companies that will be competing for the same limited amount of corporate and consumer budgets. One VC predicts that “85% of AI startups to be out of business in three years”

Simply put, the world doesn’t need 100s of ChatGPT-like solutions. Julian Senoner, cofounder of EthonAI, put it succinctly when he said; “Many of these companies will fail because they are now jumping onto this hype but essentially they will struggle to find a real problem to solve.”

In order to avoid creating useless products, I think we always have to ask; how does our product provide meaningful value?