MIT student asked a question earlier today that a lot of young founders are quietly wondering about: "Won’t the frontier labs just do everything?" Yes it's true that OAI/Ant are shipping at incredible pace, but it's quite easy to avoid their blast radius and build amazing startups: OpenAI is not going to build a cattle-herding drone, buy an old F-150 and drive from ranch to ranch like the founder of one of the fastest-growing YC W26 startups, Graze Mate. Anthropic is not going to integrate with dental insurance verification systems (Lance). Google is not going to navigate NATO procurement (Milliray). The value is in the last mile, not the model. Sales cycles require humans who understand the customer. And most importantly, the market is expanding, not shrinking: AI isn't cannibalizing the existing 1% software spend — it's unlocking the other 5-6% that was going to humans. That's a much bigger market for startups yet-to-be-founded than the one the labs are playing in. Now, what DOES seem risky? A thin UI layer on top of ChatGPT with no domain expertise; a general-purpose chatbot or assistant; or a product that gets obsolete when model capabilities improve. But — tools for specific industries; "full-stack" AI companies that actually are the service (AI law firm, AI accounting firm, AI uranium exploration company); or generally products where the customer doesn't want a tool but an outcome — are defensible ideas for startups.

@raphaelschaad the blast radius framing is right. labs optimize for capability, not for the last-mile fit problem. that's still a wide open field for builders who actually know their user.