Most AI startups are going to fail. Especially if they're not proactively making their own LLM outside of the beast of OpenAI. The winner will be the most cost-efficient build of an LLM and affordable input/output token cost.
I wonder, what is an AI startup in this context? If AI is the product your selling, yep, your are in trouble! But if AI is a capability you use in your product, you might be ok.
If the AI is using OpenAI, they're at risk the pivot. When GPT4 launched with plug-ins—a bunch of startups were deprecated or forced to pivot because their at the hands of OpenAI. The real winners are going to be low cost tokenization in input/output and low cost built