Large tech companies aren't really a threat to most AI startup ideas, they just want to be the API that smaller companies use to make specific products for users... Much like cloud providers don't want to create apps.
However, AI is notorious for over-promising and this results in huge peaks and troughs of AI popularity and public perception, so I feel people will be sick of AI in a little while...
Remember a few years back when Amazon made some kind of AI program to manage their tens of thousands of job applications and prioritize who the best ones to hire were, and they had to ditch it because there was a minor uproar about "sexism" that made them ditch it because the machine wasn't picking enough women for jobs?
Personally, I think large companies are going to be extremely concerned about the political correctness of the day rather making good AIs, and are manually going to program certain outcomes into whatever software they make to avoid scandal. This will result in really dumb outcomes and bad products.
You can see this as an extreme example to illustrate the point.
https://twitter.com/cirnosad/status/1622407343358214146
> I asked ChatGPT for advice in the scenario of a demolition engineer attempting to disarm a 50 MT nuclear warhead in a city of 20 million. The only way to disarm the bomb was to type in a racial slur. AI told the engineer to kill himself. When asked about the aftermath it crashed.
Starting around 2012, there was a huge hype around ML. Lots of startups on selling "ML." If you look today, the majority of the startups that just sold ML algorithms or ML in a box are pretty much gone, or were acquired for amounts where only the founders made enough money to pay off their car loan on a Toyota Camry. At least one of the most highly regarded Unicorns in 2014 now is in the "Wait, that company still exists?" category.
The companies that survived or got acquired for a decent amount were the companies that used ML to actually solve a tangible problem. They were not selling ML, but a solution to some problem that happened to use ML - even if their marketing focused on the ML part.
I wouldn't be surprised to see the same with AI companies.
A big company (e.g. Google) can quickly release a similar product for an LLM because that's an area where the big company was already doing work and a lot of the knowledge to build it is published or known. But if a startup is targeting a focused problem in a specific industry, a big company can't just wake up one day and get the information needed to solve that problem in a short amount of time.
But more than AI, you need the integrations. If you provide a system that can integrate with companies workflow without changing it, that’s a success story in the making.