If Your AI Startup Is a Prompt, There Is a Problem

Roughly three-quarters of the AI startups launched in 2024 were essentially API wrappers, and the first wave of shutdowns is confirming it. The lesson is not that wrappers are dead. It is that the prompt is the cheapest, fastest-depreciating layer of the stack, and the companies that mistook the prompt for the product are discovering it the hard way.