I think it absolutely makes sense. ChatGPT's strength is how generalised it is as a tool, but openAI will never able to adapt the platform to every single use case. You can absolutely use it to learn a language for instance, but a great AI language learning platform needs a better tailored UI, it needs all kinds of non-AI functionality around it like idk a spaced repetition system, it might need to integrate into other platforms, and good prompting to be effective. AI isn't the product itself, but a component to try to solve a problem. And honestly I wish more startups focused less on simply "AI" and more on the problems it should solve.
If for nothing else openAI won't be able to market itself for every single use case, and so long as people aren't using chatGPT for some use case (even if it could perform the task) there's still an opening.
But any use case that gets large enough and makes money will be absorbed by openai direct, based on the market developed by the startup. OpenAI is using the Amazon model. Let someone else spend the money figuring out which market segments are profitable, then steal them with their inherently better access to the platform.
There are use cases that don’t align with OpenAI/Anthropic’s business model, which is to always use more tokens to get better. As the models improve they become way more expensive, with order of magnitude increases in price. I think there is a lane for detecting what can and should be deterministic after doing it a few times, and making it concrete so you don’t just burn tokens every time.
If for nothing else openAI won't be able to market itself for every single use case, and so long as people aren't using chatGPT for some use case (even if it could perform the task) there's still an opening.