The AI craze has led to many products “leveraging AI” when in reality they are just using OpenAI or Anthropic under the hood. People call these, and I loathe the word, “wrappers”. I have seen everything from AI Logo generators to AI Language training passing by AI Email Assistant and AI Photo Editors. My favourite wrapper is https://anotherwrapper.com/. Another Wrapper allows you to build your own OpenAI wrapper by leveraging its own OpenAI wrapper. Inception, amirite?
Anyway, I am not actually here to hate on “wrappers”. Rather the opposite. I think they get undeserved hate. Plenty of good products have been created by customizing existing products.
To name a few SaaS services piggybacking on cloud providers:
- OpenAI is wrapper for Azure and Microsoft
- Zoom is a wrapper for Oracle Cloud
- Netflix is a wrapper for top AWS
- Vercel is a wrapper for AWS
- Backblaze is a wrapper for AWS
But, you could also argue the same applies to hardware:
- Apple is a wrapper for Foxconn
- NVIDIA is a wrapper for TSMC
And there are even SaaS products built on other Digital products!
- Lemon Squeeze is an Stripe wrapper
- Geoguessr is a wrapper for GoogleMaps
- Namecheap is a wrapper for ICANN
And some are not digital products necessarily!
- Visa/Mastercard are wrappers for payment processors like Adyen or WordlPlay or Stripe
- VentureCapital firms are wrappers for people’s wealth
Finally, we have lots of wrappers In libraries due to the many abstractions to make certain use cases easy
- Nuxt.js is a wrapper for Vue.js which in turn is a wrapper for Javascript which in turn is a wrapper for Java/C
As a final reflection, this leads me to humans actually…Are Humans a wrapper for Mitochrondia? On a more serious note, the more you work on developing systems, the more dependencies you realize you have. Without knowing it, you are building upon several layers of abstracted code, or using services that do exactly that. Ideally, never have critical dependencies on other companies, but it wont necessarily matter. The Big Wave of cloud provider wrappers (ie: services built on AWS like Heroku or Vercel) still exist many years after being created and serve a different target market than AWS for example. It’s a wrap!
Picture of the Day
Word of the Day
Sinister is an adjective that gives the impression that something harmful or evil is happening or will happen,
There’s a sinister side to their character
Sinister stems from the Latin word “sinistra” meaning “the left-hand side”. In many cultures, the left was associated with unluckiness, weakness, or the devil. The right hand was considered the fortunate one. Bonus Fun Fact: the adjective “dexterous” which describes being skilled, comes from the Latin word “dexter” which means “right” in Latin.
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