
It’s a truism in tech that every new computing platform opens the door to an entirely new generation of software companies. The client-server era that took off in the 1990s brought Oracle and SAP, while cloud computing gave birth to Salesforce and a host of “software as a service” companies.
Large language models are shaping up to be the next platform to launch a thousand entrepreneurial dreams. With generative AI available on tap from companies such as OpenAI and Anthropic, there has been a blizzard of “smart apps” designed to make work easier. The speed at which some of these are winning users, and their surging valuations, is setting new records in the software world.