Fordel StudiosOpenAI and Perplexity are launching AI shopping assistants, but competing startups aren’t sweating it
What Happened
Startup founders building AI shopping tools think general-purpose models are too broad to deliver truly personalized shopping experiences.
Our Take
Startups saying 'generalist models can't do personalized shopping' is right, but not because they're smart—it's just obvious. GPT-4 doesn't know your style, budget quirks, or local inventory.
Vertical AI (trained on fashion data, price history, your past purchases) will always beat horizontal. That's not revolutionary, that's just how specialization works.
OpenAI and Perplexity are throwing models at this anyway because they have distribution and hype. Startups'll win the segment, lose the market. Bigger always wins.
What To Do
Build vertical, not horizontal—train on domain-specific data if you want to compete.
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