Could startups disappear in a few years?

Rampant progression in AI has been concerning and fascinating; every day, there is a new update which absorbs the previous work of thousands of people. Tech Giants have utilised this to their advantage. With ample resources and the ability to withstand damage, companies that disrupted the markets in the early 2000s can do it again. In this article, I will explain how the startup culture that boomed ferociously in the last few years could potentially die in the next few years.

The avenue of AI is new for you, me, startup founders and CEOs sitting at the top with a couple of million dollars to spare. Let’s look at what Microsoft did.

Microsoft released its new software Copilot 365, a Generative AI tool that eliminates numerous tasks of Microsoft’s apps. Copilot claims to be the most powerful productivity tool that can only perform tasks using prompts. It allows you to create presentations and analyse bulky data on Excel via prompts. Millions have spent hours mastering Excel by writing codes, creating courses, and organising seminars. It is a realistic and feasible idea for a startup founder to create software that makes Excel easier to use or automates some of its formulae and functions. With a quick Google search, I can see a list of small companies that based their model around being Excel Assistants or implementing some amount of AI into sheets. Microsoft just took a massive blow by taking away Excel’s foundation. However, Microsoft can easily sustain this by adopting AI into its programme and allowing the growth of Excel and its embedded AI software. A lot of the workforce that has spent years trying to create this model cannot. This puts into perspective what other Tech Giants can do.

A startup could spend years trying to ease the complexity of cloud computing against Amazon’s AWS, Microsoft’s Azure, Oracle and VMWare. SaaS companies have invested years into this reality to simplify training and data storage. Like Copilot, if Amazon or Google decide to create an AI Language model which stores data and trains models via prompts, then?

Hundreds of startups have based their business models around virtual assistantships, but this role is easily modifiable and adaptable for OpenAI. ChatGPT’s latest version could have an embedded app allowing users to organise their lives via virtual assistants. Then what about the startups who do this too?

It’s scary to think that tech giants can steal away years of work and new ideas. It could potentially hit the startup culture drastically in the years to come. This is because AI is a clean slate for everybody, and we’re still determining what will remain and what will bid adieu.

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