Boris Berat Warns AI Startups Against LLM Wrapper Models

Boris Berat, Co-founder and CTPO of Carna Health, warns AI startups against building business models that rely on the current limitations of frontier models from labs such as OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google. He argues that many companies act as LLM wrappers, creating value through workflows that general-purpose intelligence will eventually commoditize.

Berat describes a parasitoid relationship in which startups provide the revenue and market validation that frontier labs use to develop capabilities that may render those startups obsolete. He suggests that the startup may therefore be paying its most important supplier to become its most dangerous competitor.

To achieve durability, Berat proposes a superintelligence test to determine if a company becomes obsolete or more powerful if superintelligence is achieved. He advocates for building moats around institutional relationships, proprietary data generation, and physical infrastructure, asserting that these assets increase in value as intelligence becomes a commodity.