On ChatGPT Wrappers
While we're on the topic of GenAI use cases, let's talk about wrappers.
As soon as ChatGPT was released, builders started making tools that did nothing else under the hood than passing a user request through to ChatGPT and producing the answer back to the user, maybe with a bit of prompt engineering in the middle.
These tools faced much derision from software engineers ("what are you even doing?") and investors ("what's your moat?") alike. The messaging: If you're not doing anything fancy under the hood, or even training your own model from scratch, get out of here!
But as we've seen before, we shouldn't care about the fancy stuff. Instead, we want to know if an actual problem is being solved.
Bad wrappers
Anything I can replicate directly with minimal effort in ChatGPT or Claude's chat interface would make for a lousy product. I may need to use features like custom instructions or think carefully about the way I prompt the model, but those are solvable problems.
You don't need a special Professional Email tool, you just ask ChatGPT to "Make it sound professional."
You don't need a special Legalese-to-Plain-English tool, you just ask ChatGPT to "Explain this legal document like I'm a normal person."
Tools like that are not more than an attempt at a quick cash grab and indeed deserve the scorn of developers, investors, and users.
Good wrappers
These provide seamless integration and specialized interfaces to help you achieve a task:
Maybe the prompt itself is straightforward, but it would be an unreasonable disruption to your workflow to open a chat window for it.
The underlying AI output could be part of the inner workings of a larger workflow.
Just like with any other technology, a good app would have all the relevant integrations into an existing system.
The amount of extra domain knowledge and context is not easily available to me as a non-expert.
I was inspired by something like https://sommelier.bot (no affiliation) which, on the GenAI side, is not much more than a wrapper around ChatGPT. However, because it integrates into each vendor's own product database and inventory and has been fine-tuned with language around wine recommendations, it works in a way that I cannot simply replicate by going straight to ChatGPT.
This makes it a unified tool that solves an actual pain point and it just so happens that generative AI is the underlying enabling technology.
A question for you
Have you come across a remarkable example of a tool that uses generative AI under the hood? Hit reply and let us know!
