Really? They are a full platform for most popular applied AI, similar to AWS Bedrock and its other AI services, or Google Vertex. They cover vision, language translation, text generation and summarization, text to speech, speech to text, audio generation, image generation, function calls, vector stores for RAG, an AI agent framework, embeddings, and recently with o1, reasoning, advanced math, etc. this is on top of the general knowledge base.
You might be a wee dismissive of how much a developer can do with OpenAI (or the competitors).
I think the point was that despite all this the only thing that you can reliably make is a fancy chat bot. A human has to be in the seat making the real decisions and simply referring to open AI.
I mean there's TTS and some translation stuff that's in there but it's hard to call that "AI" despite using neural networks and the like to solve that problem.
Since when do you need a human in the mix? For example, there are financial risk analytical applications that use prompt templates and function calling , and have no chat bot interface to the end user. This is one of many examples. I think the leap that people miss is that you have to talk to the AI in some way, natural language is how LLM’s fundamentally work and so you have to express the problem space in that mode to it get it to solve problems for you as a developer. For some coders, I guess that is uncomfortable.
You might be a wee dismissive of how much a developer can do with OpenAI (or the competitors).