I've seen, and probably you have seen too, far too many prototypes out there created with AI treated as products, because it is that easy to prompt two sentences and get something that resembles a real thing. Do you want a website to sell your old furniture? Done. You want an Instagram clone? Done. What about a full-feature LinkedIn replacement? Done. Except, it is not really done.
Every other week, Anthropic or OpenAI launches a new version of their models, and every other week, the internet is flooded with examples of what those models are capable of. Beautiful designs and prototypes fill up our feeds, giving us, simple mortals, a taste of what the future looks like, on localhost. No link needed.
I am impressed. Are you impressed? Well, you should be. But when I think about this for two seconds, I realized that four years after Sam Altman tweeted about his new chatbot, I haven't seen any real competitor of YouTube, or Figma, or Google, or Instagram created solely with AI. If this thing is so powerful, where is all the innovation? Shouldn't all of us be creating our own version of GTA 6 from our garage – I mean, our couch – at this point?
It turns out a prototype is not a product. Most of what we see on YouTube that was created by the dude, who never touched a line of code before, between two cups of coffee is not even a prototype; it's nothing. If you are generous, you can call it a demo, a draft, maybe?
A real product is hard to build. I'm not saying there aren't people out there creating useful stuff in record time. What I am saying is that you shouldn't be impressed by everything you see online. Don't feel bad if you don't have anything to show up with all the free intelligence available nowadays. Almost nobody has.
A real product has real users, a real market and solves real problems.
When I think about most of the products we use daily, like X.com or Google, I wonder why nobody has a real competitor of these things before. It was not a lack of intelligence or know-how. Many companies were created with this goal in mind, but none succeeded because a product is more than the parts that compound it.
I could prompt a basic Instagram feature in a few hours, maybe a few days, but would it mean I created a product? If nobody uses it or cares, is it still a product? What makes a product is its users. If nobody is using the thing you built, you don't have a product, you have a toy. Have fun playing with it.