AI Company Pitching 'Proprietary Model' Was Just a 600-Line OpenAI Wrapper
alex_verem · x · 2026-08-15
A PE firm due-diligencing an AI company claiming a "proprietary AI platform" and $4.2M ARR discovered that its "foundational model architecture" was merely an OpenAI API wrapper with a system prompt and a React frontend. The "proprietary model" was just GPT-4o with a temperature of 0.2, consisting of 600 lines of glue code rebuildable in a weekend. The firm walked away from the 12x revenue ask, highlighting the "model dependency" gap in standard due diligence as buyers deploy capital faster than they can evaluate it.
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