[HN Gopher] Wrapping my head around AI wrappers
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Wrapping my head around AI wrappers
Author : nowflux
Score : 45 points
Date : 2025-11-15 17:44 UTC (5 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.wreflection.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.wreflection.com)
| jgalt212 wrote:
| > But Cursor and other such tools depend almost entirely on
| accessing Anthropic, OpenAI and Gemini models, until open-source
| open-weight and in-house models match or exceed frontier models
| in quality.
|
| I'm not sure I agree with this because even though Cursor is pay
| north of 100% of revenues to Athropic, Anthropic is selling
| inference at a loss. So if Cursor builds and hosts its own models
| it still has the marginal costs > marginal revenues problem.
|
| The way out for Cursor could be a self-hosted much smaller model
| that focuses on code, and not the world. This could have
| inference costs lower than marginal revenues.
| bogzz wrote:
| I suppose supermaven is d'oing something to that effect.
| xnx wrote:
| Can you have a useful code model that doesn't understand the
| world? It seems like such a model would be limited to little
| more than auto complete.
| esafak wrote:
| I imagine so, through distillation. Start with an all-knowing
| model, then extract the coding part.
| simianwords wrote:
| what makes you so sure of this?
|
| > Anthropic is selling inference at a loss.
|
| cost of models have gone down dramatically over time.
| jgalt212 wrote:
| True, but they keep using more tokens (Agentic FTW!) and the
| currently most expensive models.
|
| source: https://www.wheresyoured.at/
| mentalgear wrote:
| > But I think the insight lies between these positions. Even if a
| new application starts as a wrapper, it can endure if it lives
| where work is done, writes to proprietary systems of record,
| builds proprietary data and learns from usage, and/or captures
| distribution before incumbents bundle the feature.
|
| Basically the same as MS & Social Media did: build a proprietary
| silo around data, amass enough data, so it will become too big an
| inconvenience to move away from the first provider.
|
| It's good that the EU has laws now to ensure data
| interoperability, export & ownership.
| jrvarela56 wrote:
| I agree with you in spirit but this harms the potential for
| these new products to emerge. You're saying you don't want them
| to be able to accrue a data moat. It sounds good for user
| privacy and optionality later on but it makes it harder for
| these services to get started as they dont see that model as
| possible.
| swyx wrote:
| i recently framed this as "agent labs" vs "model labs" -
| https://latent.space/p/agent-labs - definitely far from proven or
| given that they are a lasting business model, but i think the
| dynamic is at least more evident now than it was a year ago and
| even that is notable as we are slowly figuring out what the new
| ai economy looks like
| _fat_santa wrote:
| Currently working on a SaaS app that could be called an "AI
| Wrapper". One thing I picked up on is once you start using AI
| tools programmatically, you can start doing far more complex
| things than what you can with ChatGPT or Claude.
|
| One thing we've leaned heavily into was using Langgraph for
| agentic workflows and it's really opened the door to cool ways
| you can use AI. These days the way I tell apart an AI "Wrappers"
| vs "Tools" is what is the underlying paradigm. Most "wrappers"
| just copy the paradigm of ChatGPT/Claude where you have a
| conversation with an agent, the "tools" are where you take the
| ability to generate content and then plug that into a broader
| workflow.
| embedding-shape wrote:
| > One thing we've leaned heavily into was using Langgraph for
| agentic workflows
|
| Probably my single biggest mistake so far with developing LLM
| tooling so far has been to try to use Langgraph even after
| inspecting the codebase, because people I thought were smarter
| than me hyped it up.
|
| Do yourself a favor and just write the plumbing yourself, it's
| a lot easier than one might think before digging into it, and
| tool calling is literally a loop passing tool requests and
| responses back and forth until the model responds, and having
| your own abstractions will make it a lot easier to build proper
| workflows. Plus you get to use whatever language you want and
| don't have to deal with Python.
| CjHuber wrote:
| I can recommend looking into DSpy, I haven't felt the need to
| use any other LLM based frameworks though I'm open to
| suggestions
| embedding-shape wrote:
| There really isn't need, all they add is additional code to
| be responsible for, building the same abstractions yourself
| but focused on your use case will be something like 50-100
| lines of code, hard to beat the simplicity, and the
| understanding you'll get.
| TrackerFF wrote:
| What do we call companies that spin up open-source ML models, and
| basically just sell access to said models?
|
| One example is audio / stem separation, object segmentation.
|
| They're not wrappers, but whatever that is one step deeper down
| in complexity.
| jabroni_salad wrote:
| I think those are just inference providers unless they are
| adding something on top of it.
| lubujackson wrote:
| Almost every startup is a wrapper of some sort, and has been for
| a while. The reason a startup can _startup_ is because it has
| some baked in competency by using new and underutilized tools. In
| the dot com boom, that was the internet itself.
|
| Now it's AI. Only after doing this for 20+ years do I really
| appreciate that the arduous process and product winnowing that
| happens over time is the bulk of the value (and the moat, when
| none other exists).
| amelius wrote:
| > Almost every startup is a wrapper of some sort, and has been
| for a while.
|
| The difference is that with AI they will send your data to a
| third party.
| max002 wrote:
| Cant help myself and compare to frameworks, libraries and
| oop... cant we built so fast because of them?
|
| I think of wrapper more as a very thin layer around. Thin layer
| is easy to reproduce. I do not question that a smart collection
| of wrappers can do great product. Its all about idea :)
|
| However its if ones idea is based purely on wrappers there's
| really no moat, nothing stopping somebody else to copy it
| within a moment
| btown wrote:
| OpenAI is just a wrapper around NVIDIA, which is just a wrapper
| around TSMC, which is just a wrapper around ASML, which is just a
| wrapper around Zeiss optics, which is just a wrapper around EUV
| photons, which are just wrappers around quarks, which are just
| wrappers around quantum fields...
|
| A Large Language Model is just a Large Hadron Model with better
| marketing.
| random3 wrote:
| The processor is _built_ of transistors, _built_ of silicone.
| The paper that _wraps_ the box that _wraps_ the processor is
| simply a mindless container. Yes, there's nuance when it comes
| to "wrapper" companies but it in the end they may just be
| wrappers. Back in the "web 2.0" things were called mash-ups and
| everybody didn't try to make them look like companies.
| esafak wrote:
| I would argue that a "wrapper" denotes a product that could be
| replicated with little effort, not that one relies on the
| other. None of your examples fit this definition.
| M4R5H4LL wrote:
| I believe the controversy arises from the notion of "little
| effort" and critics who have never independently pushed
| anything to market. It comes across as dismissive and
| arrogant simply because someone exudes excessive confidence
| in a limited set of skills. I can personally attest to the
| immense demands of building a successful business, and it's
| evident that very few individuals possess the capability to
| achieve that. Therefore, while it may provide comfort to
| avoid challenging oneself and dismiss others' total work, it
| ultimately doesn't benefit anyone and feels more like a self-
| serving "I could, but I never will" attitude.
| chris_pie wrote:
| The potential customer rarely cares whether a service
| provider is running their business well. What matters is
| the product's value added and risks added, as compared to
| just using the underlying tech directly.
| keiferski wrote:
| Marketing, UI, and brand matter a lot. Especially when all of the
| products are functionally "the same" to the average consumer, who
| doesn't care about technical details and benchmarks, etc. It
| reminds me of this great scene from Mad Men:
|
| _This is the greatest advertising opportunity since the
| invention of cereal. We have six identical companies making six
| identical products. We can say anything we want._
|
| https://youtu.be/8SsnkXH2mQY?si=SWPOsGBel1yh3kMd&t=198
| darepublic wrote:
| as others have mentioned -- I think wrapper is a fair term. It is
| not trivial and took untold man hours of research and labour to
| go from nvidia gpus to modern llms. some of the ai products
| really do feel like minimal engineering around calls to openai
| (or claude or what have you)
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