I was one of the early beta users of Gamma (the presentation app) and have seen the product grow from a very-elegant-presentation maker to AI industry’s darling to..where it is now.
This downward trend is for real and it’s beyond just the attack by foundation model (of course, it is representative of the overall interest).
I believe many such tools (including Canva) are on their way to irrelevancy (won’t shutdown anytime soon, but will lose its novelty).
Let’s talk about the new version
You see - this is same as how Canva or NotebookLM will describe their product.
Right now, I do believe that Gamma 1.0, the classic generator was way more powerful than the new versions that claim to do the work create a hell lot of AI slop.
Gamma won because of AI slop..and is losing because of AI slop..
A lot of these presentation tools won the AI race because they were the first to deliver a wow experience - you have an idea, it will create a well-designed presentation!
But over a period of time, we all learned how to recognize AI slop. Workplaces are calling it loud and clear that AI slop won’t be accepted. So, you know, that’s a reverse effect where a tool is used so heavily that everybody uses and now everybody has a problem with what the other person created :-)
For example, if you are a startup founder, the best way to lose your chance of raising money is do send pitch deck with AI slops. Your investor exactly knows that you created the pitch deck using an AI tool, and they’re going to discard it because you didn’t put in the effort to create it.
What made them successful is the reason why it is also losing, because AI slop is now getting heavily discarded everywhere in the workspace.
Importantly, there is no gamma left in gamma anymore - they productised presentation content blocks in a very elegant manner. But now, you are using AI to create those blocks - it ends up looking like any other AI presentation tool, go deeper and then it looks like any other AI research tool (similar to notebooklm), more deeper and looks like a workspace tool - which is similar to canva. The thing is that they all look same, behave the same and create similar slops.
but then..
The Death of the “UI Wrapper” Moat
When Gamma launched, its core innovation was twofold: a fluid, non-slide canvas (content blocks) and a fast text-to-deck workflow. However, layout logic is easy to replicate, but context is hard to capture.
The Layer 1 Problem: Wrapper apps like Gamma sit on top of foundation models via API. As LLM context windows expanded to millions of tokens and native code generation improved, frontier models learned spatial design natively.
Context Collapses to the Platform: Foundation models host the primary conversation and work environment. Exporting your context out to a third-party app just to format it into slides introduces friction and results in visual “slop” that lacks deep domain / business nuance.
The real slop machines agentic tools are generating better presentations..
Claude and Grok (esp 4.7) are way better than gamma or any other presentation tool. Most importantly, they are part of your workflow.
For e.g. If you’re an early-stage founder vibe coding your product over Claude/Codex - they have much better context about your product, your business, value prop and the offering than any other third-party tool. Most are equally good (actually much better) when it comes to determining the layout, design, so why even worry about using any other tool ?
What’s your take? Do you think that foundation models have started capturing back the value AI native apps created using these models?