Spend an afternoon browsing new AI startups and a strange déjà vu sets in. The landing pages rhyme. There is a dark hero section, a gradient somewhere between indigo and violet, a little sparkle or star icon denoting Intelligence, a headline promising to let you “chat with” your documents or data or customers, and a demo video with the same upbeat, slightly anonymous soundtrack. You could swap the logos between fifty of these sites and almost nobody would notice.
Sameness on the surface
Some of this is just design fashion, and design fashions always converge. But the AI cohort has converged harder and faster than most, and the reason is worth naming: when everyone is building on top of the same handful of foundation models, the differentiation has to come from somewhere else, and branding is the cheapest lever to pull. If your product is a thin layer over a model anyone can call, you cannot differentiate on the model, so you differentiate on the gradient.
When the engine is a commodity everyone rents, the paint job is the only thing left to argue about. Hence a thousand identical paint jobs.
Funded by the same money, chasing the same story
