A senior Google executive, Darren Mowry, issued a stark warning to founders today: the industry has lost patience with LLM wrappers. If your startup is just a "thin layer" over GPT-5 or Gemini, your "check engine light" is officially on.
Investors are shifting focus toward Vertical Specialization—startups that own their data and integrate deeply into industries like legal (Harvey AI) or coding (Cursor).