The hype around ChatGPT, OpenAI\u2019s viral AI-powered chatbot, hasn\u2019t reached a peak yet. That\u2019s the vibe one gets from Y Combinator\u2019s Winter 2023 batch, which features no fewer than four startups that claim to be building a \u201cChatGPT for X.\u201d<\/p>\n
That new ventures are jumping on the ChatGPT hype train isn\u2019t surprising, considering ChatGPT\u2019s virality. By one metric<\/a>, ChatGPT is the fastest-growing app in the world, having reached 100 million users within the first two months of launch. Associating with an app that visible, particularly one that\u2019s in the red-hot generative AI<\/a> space, is bound to get attention \u2014 a fact to which this article is a testament.<\/p>\n The first ChatGPT-inflected startup that caught our eye was Yuma<\/a>, whose customer demographic is primarily \u2014 but not exclusively \u2014 Shopify merchants. Yuma\u2019s platform provides ChatGPT-like AI systems that integrate with help desk software, suggesting drafts of replies to customer tickets that are both \u201crelevant and customized to the support agents\u201d (in theory).<\/p>\n Interestingly, Yuma \u201cgot started by accident,\u201d according to founder Guillaume Luccisano.<\/p>\n \u201cThis is my third YC startup after Socialcam and Triplebyte,\u201d he writes in the Y Combinator database entry<\/a> for Yuma.<\/p>\n By way of background, Socialcam was a mobile photo-sharing app that Autodesk acquired in 2012, while Triplebyte is a recruiting and technical screening platform aimed at enterprise tech companies.<\/p>\n \u201cI released Yuma as a prototype for fun in mid-December 2022, and was overwhelmed with demo requests,\u201d Luccisano said. \u201cThat\u2019s when I knew I was onto something and had to turn this into a real company, once again.\u201d<\/p>\n Yuma isn\u2019t very obviously like ChatGPT, but rather takes inspiration from the chatbot\u2019s technical underpinnings: text-generating AI models. Customers can train Yuma\u2019s AI models on historical tickets, having it mimic the writing style of a brand and optionally automatically translate between languages for service agents.<\/p>\n \u201cThere are thousands of Shopify merchants around the world generating more than $10 million a year. Most of them have taken over some niches and are great at what they do: selling their products,\u201d Luccisano writes. \u201cBut they all have one thing in common: they all hate customer support. It\u2019s a burden for them and a huge source of cost, as they receive hundreds of requests per day \u2026 Yumi is solving this in a few ways.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n Yumi, it should be pointed out, has competition in spades. There\u2019s Writer<\/a>, which deploys home-cooked AI text models to power up enterprise copy. Elsewhere, Forethought<\/a> is attempting to build more accurate customer service chatbots with constrained AI models. And that\u2019s just the tip of the iceberg \u2014 see ventures like Lang<\/a>, Neuron7<\/a> and Ultimate.ai<\/a>.<\/p>\n They\u2019re all chasing after a customer service software market that\u2019ll<\/a> be worth $58.1 billion by 2023, assuming the rather optimistic prediction from Acumen Research comes true. Will Yumi \u2014 and its ChatGPT-inspired tech for that matter \u2014 get ahead of the pack to nab a slice of it? Only time will tell. In any case, it\u2019s a reasonably compelling sales pitch.<\/p>\n Another startup building a \u201cChatGPT for X\u201d is Baselit<\/a>, which is using one of OpenAI\u2019s text-understanding models, specifically GPT-3<\/a>, to allow businesses to embed chatbot-style analytics for their customers. Powered by GPT-3 fine-tuned on \u201ccontextual information,\u201d including database schema, Baselit lets users perform database queries in plain English \u2014 without having to know any code.<\/p>\n Image Credits:\u00a0<\/strong>Baselit<\/p>\n<\/div>\n With Baselit, for example, a marketplace could enable its sellers to ask \u201cWhich of my product goes out of stock most frequently?\u201d and get the answer in natural language. Or a product manager could figure out the answer to a question like \u201cWhy did our gross merchandise value drop last month?\u201d without having to rely on their data team.<\/p>\n \u201cBaselit is [an] AI copilot for analytics,\u201d co-founder Shubham Rana writes in the blog post<\/a> announcing Baselit. \u201cProduct and business teams [can] use Baselit to query and analyze data using plain English.\u201d<\/p>\n Here\u2019s how it works: Customers connect Baselit to their databases \u2014 whether Postgres, Snowflake, Redshift or BigQuery \u2014 and \u201cchat\u201d with said database to get answers to their questions. Baselit auto-generates the relevant structured query language. Then, the results can be exported to a variety of visualization tools, including Tableau, Excel, Google Sheets and Power BI.<\/p>\n Like Yumi, Baselit isn\u2019t all that novel \u2014 other startups such as Borealis AI<\/a> and Y Combinator-backed Defog (which is also in the Winter 2023 batch) do more or less the same thing, or at least claim to. Indeed, the startup\u2019s success might end up ultimately hinging more on its customer acquisition efforts than its tech.<\/p>\n That\u2019s not necessarily the case with Lasso<\/a>, one of the last of the ChatGPT-aligned startups we spotted in the Winter 2023 batch. Lasso, interestingly, combines a ChatGPT-like interface with robotic process automation (RPA) and a Chrome extension. Customers send Lasso descriptions or videos of the processes they\u2019d like to automate and the company uses its internal tooling to build out those automations.<\/p>\n Image Credits:<\/strong> Lasso<\/p>\n<\/div>\n The Lasso platform can be used, for instance, to scrape an email for a sales prospect, look through a prospecting tool and save the summarized results to a document. \u201cWe want to let anyone regardless of timeline or budget automate the work they do by using natural language or simply sending Lasso the workflow in a screen recording,\u201d co-founder Lucas Ochoa writes in an introductory blog post<\/a>.<\/p>\n Lasso\u2019s going head to head with RPA behemoths like UiPath and Automation Anywhere, along with the deluge of startups<\/a> in the RPA and workflow automation space. But Ochoa argues that Lasso solves many of the setup problems associated with incumbent RPA solutions while remaining license-free.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s extremely time consuming and expensive to build out robot process automations using traditional tools like UiPath, not to mention the initial consultant setup fees, which most people are forced to pay if they don\u2019t have the resources in-house,\u201d he writes. \u201cLasso makes it \u2026 cheaper and faster to build any robotic process automation using natural language on Chrome.\u201d<\/p>\n How well Lasso works in practice remains to be seen. But the founding team\u2019s experience instills some<\/em> confidence. Ochoa and Lasso\u2019s other co-founder, Gautom Bose, previously worked at Google, where their team was tasked with applying the tech giant\u2019s LaMDA<\/a> text-generating model to commercial products. As a part of Google\u2019s Creative Lab 5 (an experimental R&D group), they helped to launch apps like the AI Test Kitchen<\/a> and the Pixel Buds Pro<\/a>.<\/p>\n Potentially to Lasso\u2019s benefit is the general appetite for workflow automation tools. In a recent survey<\/a> from Formstack, 62% of companies say they\u2019re using workflow automation tools, while 44% say their businesses have made a significant investment in workflow automation tools over the last 12-24 months.<\/p>\n Plus, while RPA VC funding has fallen from the heights it hit in 2018, it remains a large tranche. In 2020, backers poured $296.4 million into startups in the RPA space, according<\/a> to Crunchbase.<\/p>\n![\"Lasso\"](\"https:\/\/techcrunch.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/04\/63f65c94d610f76b3400615f_dashboard.png\")
<\/p>\n
![\"ChatGPT\"](\"https:\/\/techcrunch.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/04\/ezgif-1-4dab60f757.png\")
<\/p>\n