American AIGC unicorns begin layoffs

"I didn't expect it to be so soon", "It's a bit ironic, the company that makes AI tools has not let other humans lose their jobs before their employees lose their jobs?"

After Jasper released the news of layoffs, industry insiders commented so.

On the morning of July 12, Dave Rogenmoser, the founder of the American AIGC unicorn Jasper, announced on LinkedIn that in view of the rapid changes in the industry, the company will start layoffs in order to focus more and adjust resources.

(On the left of the picture, in July 2023, jasper started layoffs. On the right, in November 2022, 0 Jasper employees left)

In October last year, Jasper just announced the completion of financing of 125 million U.S. dollars, with a valuation of 1.5 billion U.S. dollars and an estimated annual revenue of 75 million U.S. dollars. It is one of the fastest-growing unicorns in the AIGC field. AIGC is currently in full swing. The World Artificial Intelligence Conference just held in Shanghai is unprecedentedly grand and the industry is thriving. AIGC is just at the time of employing people, and there are even media reports that it cannot recruit people with a million annual salary.

Jasper layoffs at this time, the contrast is indeed a bit big. However, it is also expected.

Jasper is a generative artificial intelligence writing assistant developed based on GPT-3, mainly used for marketing copywriting.

GPT-3 is a natural language processing model released by OpenAI in June 2020. At the end of 2020, OpenAI launched a small private test to developers. Jasper founder Dave Rogenmoser's entrepreneurial project Proof was almost suspended at this time, and half of the company's employees were fired. The emergence of GPT-3 attracted the attention of Dave Rogenmoser, and Rogenmoser used his relationship in Y Combinator to get a limited number of internal test places.

At this time, GPT-3 is far less intelligent than the current ChatGPT, and requires high-precision prompts to control it, which gives entrepreneurs an opportunity. Rogenmoser's team used GPT-3 to develop a tool to help customers improve advertising conversion based on their previous experience in the marketing field. Once it was launched, it received an unexpected response from users. This tool changed its name several times and finally named Jasper.AI.

Jasper provides more than 60 copywriting templates suitable for various use cases, supports more than 25 languages, and targets users including enterprises, media professionals, marketers, bloggers, agencies and freelancers, etc., and provides three package modes, Enterprises, teams and individuals can choose flexibly.

In October 2022, Jasper received $125 million in financing led by Insight Partners, with participation from Coatue, Bessemer Venture Partners, IVP, Foundation Capital, Founders Circle Capital, and HubSpot Ventures. The company's valuation reached $1.5 billion. Data shows that as of December 2022, Jasper AI has 143 employees, more than 1 million people have tried Jasper through a free trial, and the number of paying customers exceeds 70,000. The annual revenue in 2022 is estimated at 75 million US dollars.

However, with the unexpected release of ChatGPT by OpenAI on November 30, 2022, Jasper has suddenly become the one who will be eliminated from the star of the AIGC track.

Compared with the paid Jasper, ChatGPT was free when it was launched. It accumulated more than 1 million users in just 5 days, 10 million users in 40 days, and 100 million monthly active users in 2 months.

Even after ChatGPT Professional Edition charges $20/month, it is still much cheaper than Jasper.

"Original from the same root, why is it too urgent to fry each other?" In the face of the devastating ChatGPT and GPT4, people can't help but wonder, what is Jasper's moat, and how can it survive?

(Since ChatGPT went online, Jasper's website traffic has been declining. Data source: similarweb)

Ren Xin, the former vice president of JD O2O, believes that Jasper still has value, and this value is not at the AI level, but at a higher level. Including an easier-to-use interface than ChatGPT, comprehensive marketing scenario writing templates, etc.

Investor Zhu Xiaohu is more straightforward, thinking that companies like Jasper, which are based on the secondary development of ChatGPT, have only a dead end in the face of GPT-4.

According to incomplete statistics, there are as many as 34 GPT casing products like Jasper. Many of them have a first-mover advantage. However, in the face of OpenAI's dimensionality reduction blow, what to do in the future is still confusing.