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Ask HN: My CEO wants to go hard on AI. What do I do?

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Re: Ask HN: My CEO wants to go hard on AI. What do I do?

#81

Post by Clubber »

simonw wrote: post #20
gwbas1c wrote: post #15

Trends come and go: What's important is that your CEO isn't underinvesting in the product. I once was in a company during the "everyone is going to replace their laptops with tablets next year era." The CEO pushed heavily for mobile, and underinvested in the actual product. A year later, all of our customers were still using their laptops. We were sold to a private equity firm, the CEO was pushed out, and (almost) ev…

I imagine there are a lot of stories like that from the "everything needs to be a mobile app" era. So many companies invested vast engineering resources in building out iOS/Android apps only to later find that their users only interact with their tool once every few weeks, which wasn't often enough for them to earn a place in that relatively tiny list of a few dozen apps that any one individual actually uses. For man…

I remember when the internet got popular (I'm old) and Windows 98 put hyperlinks in the OS and made a lot of stuff single click instead of double click and BOOM! "Internet ready!"

Re: Ask HN: My CEO wants to go hard on AI. What do I do?

#82

Post by Clubber »

>I'm struggling with the CEO being increasingly focussed on investing heavily in AI. I'm not opposed to using this tech at all – it's amazing, and we incorporate a variety of different ML models across our stack where they are useful. But this strategy has evolved to the point where we are limiting resource on key teams aligned with core business to invest in an AI team.

This may or may not be bad. If done right, the majority of the new features will be AI related while the core team will do non-AI enhancements and bug fixes. If they aren't worked to death, the main product will remain stable, just with shifting priority to AI related features over regular features. Maybe 60/40 AI features, shifting to 70/30 over time, etc. Eventually you'll run out of AI ideas or tech.

Having said that, might as well get on the train, AI is a desired skill now so like anything, it'll keep you relevant for a while.

Re: Ask HN: My CEO wants to go hard on AI. What do I do?

#83

Post by TheNewsIsHere »

exceptione wrote: post #69
scarface_74 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Has that founder taken outside funding? If so, it doesn’t matter what their belief system is.

I understand what you mean, but over here bootstrapping is the norm. Also funding can be boring loans from the bank, family loans, or business loans based on trust in the skills of the business owner. So it doesn't always have to be an: you owe me the money, so I own you.

Exactly. Tech has become a place where “funding” has become synonymous with “find a VC to fund you”. Most businesses don’t go that route, and plenty of tech ones don’t either.

Savings, bank loans, lines of credit, private loans between people, local angel investors, and so on are how most businesses bootstrap.

I co-own a technology business that has never taken outside money (well, we do have a credit card) and I’m not really interested in doing that. I think VCs are more trouble than they’re worth because they’re so obsessed with growth that little else matters to them, and we’ve seen where that gets us in terms of customer relationships and product quality. And they always want just enough control to eventually oust executives they don’t agree with.

We’ve built our business up the old fashioned way: from a personal capital contribution from each co-founder and modeling pricing based on what the business needs. Clients who see value in that approach from their critical technology vendors are not impossible to find at all.

Without the runway of functionally blank checks, you do have to continually monitor your business model though.

Re: Ask HN: My CEO wants to go hard on AI. What do I do?

#84

Post by scarface_74 »

TheNewsIsHere wrote: post #83
exceptione wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand what you mean, but over here bootstrapping is the norm. Also funding can be boring loans from the bank, family loans, or business loans based on trust in the skills of the business owner. So it doesn't always have to be an: you owe me the money, so I own you.

Exactly. Tech has become a place where “funding” has become synonymous with “find a VC to fund you”. Most businesses don’t go that route, and plenty of tech ones don’t either. Savings, bank loans, lines of credit, private loans between people, local angel investors, and so on are how most businesses bootstrap. I co-own a technology business that has never taken outside money (well, we do have a credit card) and I’m n…

Can you name one tech company of note that hasn’t gone that route? BaseCamp and who else?

Re: Ask HN: My CEO wants to go hard on AI. What do I do?

#85

Post by TheNewsIsHere »

lenerdenator wrote: post #41
danjl wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At a smart business, you work for your customers. If you're at a company that works for your investors, you're going to have this problem over and over again. In fact, you might as well give up on the idea of planning and decision making based on what would be best for the product and your customers.

> At a smart business, you work for your customers. Well, then you're bound to the amount of money customers can give you. It's usually less than a VC partner with a god complex can give you.

> Well, then you're bound to the amount of money customers can give you.

You’re _always_ bound by what the customer is willing to pay.

Speaking more expansively, it’s just a proxy for whether the market will bear your prices/wants your product, and whether you are in the right place and/or positioning your product correctly.

VCs just add a temporary runway so you don’t have to be as concerned about that.

Re: Ask HN: My CEO wants to go hard on AI. What do I do?

#86

Post by TheNewsIsHere »

ryandrake wrote: post #61
ElevenLathe wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, having a boss sucks. Unfortunately raising investment from other people is not a way to escape it. Note that starting a business with your own capital is not a way to escape it either, since you still have to answer to customers.

Difference is that customers are not (in general) asking to bolt AI onto everything, but investors are.

I think that’s an advantage.

Re: Ask HN: My CEO wants to go hard on AI. What do I do?

#87

Post by TheNewsIsHere »

paulcole wrote: post #77
conartist6 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There can be a bubble of speculation around something that does have real value. Housing for example. What is driving the market to assign such a huge value to models is that they can sell themselves as the solution to any and every problem, even if they aren't

I don't understand what you mean by this. What specifically do you think is going to happen?

Not OP, but what typically happens: a large contraction.

Investors are already contracting the over-investment in AI because it’s so hard to turn an ROI. Satya Nadella was recently on the record as saying he doesn’t think AI has proven a sustainable ROI yet, and that it needs to in order to sustain the current levels of investment. As a matter of cause and effect he is of course right. But no one can predict the timelines and outcomes with exactitude.

Tomorrow Nvidia could be seized by a regulator and frozen, decimating the GPU market. SoftBank could decide they’re going all in on some new thing instead. (Incredible examples, of course.)

Personally I don’t think AI/LLMs/et al are going away. But the way that it’s getting bolted into -everything- is likely to eventually subside.

It’s been interesting to see companies rebrand around AI even when they don’t actually produce or integrate any of those technologies. That’s driving part of the overvaluation of AI at large.

AI and the collection of technologies that get called AI aren’t new. They’re just suddenly in focus and all the rage.

We’ve seen this cycle before in technology and we’ll see it again with something else.

Re: Ask HN: My CEO wants to go hard on AI. What do I do?

#88

Post by shanecp »

Create a CEO Logic Agent that helps the CEO to make better decisions on AI? /s

What CEO is likely looking for are 'PR' points, not often not a real strategy. If they can announce and pretend they're going all-in on AI, that's what's needed.

From your side, having AI mentioned in everything you do will help the conversation. If your code's docs are improved with an AI IDE, you're going hard on AI. Ignore the time you spend on fixing AI's errors.

Doing things for 'funding' and doing things that gets the work done are not always the same. One is a marketing/PR act, the other one is a product development act.

If funding is a real concern, the CEO's approach might be valid, because without funding, you won't have a job, and there won't be a product. So split your time in helping the CEO to achieve what s/he wants in getting the right message out.

As you're saying, if the CEO has built a great team, and great technology, we can't think the CEO is completely ignorant on what's going on.

Your CTO/CIO (if any) will know more about what realistically possible and what's not. If you have an 'AI Team', then there should be a CTO/CIO, and you're not directly talking to CEO about strategy?

Re: Ask HN: My CEO wants to go hard on AI. What do I do?

#89

Post by benoau »

Functionally all any of these companies want is faster work for a fraction of the cost, and since they are dependent on conforming to this plan for the sake of investment you should start considering your future employment.

The lack of roadmap etc, welcome to the wall between technical lead and executive. They have a roadmap, you do not get to see it. I mean you might survive, but they're probably going to reduce their dev headcount significantly and offshore most of them too.

Re: Ask HN: My CEO wants to go hard on AI. What do I do?

#90

Post by lioeters »

paulcole wrote: post #77
conartist6 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There can be a bubble of speculation around something that does have real value. Housing for example. What is driving the market to assign such a huge value to models is that they can sell themselves as the solution to any and every problem, even if they aren't

I don't understand what you mean by this. What specifically do you think is going to happen?

The hype bubble bursts: market experiences a trough of disappointment, then recovers a slope of enlightenment toward a realistic valuation of the new technology.
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