Marketing mostly (uses AI)
Ask HN: Why call it an AI company if all it does is call open AI API?
41–50 of 62 posts
Re: Ask HN: Why call it an AI company if all it does is call open AI API?
#42Why call it "OpenAI" when it is probably the biggest blackbox thing out there.
The name is how they poached most of Google's ML team. Of course, in hindsight all they did was move to Microsoft.
Re: Ask HN: Why call it an AI company if all it does is call open AI API?
#43It makes perfect sense - if you reorient your thinking.
AI companies come in two flavors.
(1) Build a novel AI for a pre-existing purpose
(2) Use a pre-existing AI for novel purpose.
It's "I didn't realize _AI_ could do that!" vs. "I didn't realize AI could do _that_!"
Engineers found company type 1. Product people found company type 2. Both are valuable, but for different reasons.
Re: Ask HN: Why call it an AI company if all it does is call open AI API?
#44[deleted]
Re: Ask HN: Why call it an AI company if all it does is call open AI API?
#45Almost every question like this can be answered with the word "engagement" It's the hot topic of the moment, people are searching it. Businesses market to what people are searching. Is it lying? Sure, I could be convinced. Is it illegal? Nah. Will people do it no matter what we think about it? Forever. I'd focus on your own marketing rather than worrying about whether other people are lying. You don't need to call yo…
haha this is funny. imagine i say i work as a mathematician but actually i run the cash register?
That would be the same as OP's example. I think it'd be fair to say you utilise mathematics in your role.
Dunno what situation would involve you wanting to say that though, maybe the job history bit of a very light resume? Haha
Re: Ask HN: Why call it an AI company if all it does is call open AI API?
#46I am working on an AI-related project that isn't "making AI" but rather leveraging the APIs. I did a little soul-searching about whether to use a .ai domain (which of course is actually an Anguilla domain) or a .com, and my inner nerd beat my inner marketer but maybe only temporarily.
When I launch, I will absolutely describe it as an "AI thing" -- because it's using "AI" tech to do stuff you couldn't do otherwise.
Is your product a dev tool that happens to do something with OpenAI sometimes? Or is it a specialized interface to OpenAI? In the latter case, I would say it's misleading to not describe it as an "AI" product, because people (should) want to know whether they're going to be interacting with our new Insect Overlords.
Your case may be different, but that's my thinking as someone doing AI-adjacent work who is by no means an AI researcher.
Re: Ask HN: Why call it an AI company if all it does is call open AI API?
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why would you even care about hair splitting definitions rather than whether you need what the company offers?
The people that are making these silly distinctions aren’t the ones making meaningful buying decisions. And if they are, they’re very bad at their jobs.
It's not only attaching your product to hype trains, any claims about a product's capabilities directly from the vendor should be taken with a grain of salt.
Re: Ask HN: Why call it an AI company if all it does is call open AI API?
#48> “It’s just like building on top of AWS or GCP.”
If you applied your logic to the use of cloud services then companies like Vercel shouldn’t call themselves a hosting provider because they use AWS. “It’s just a UI that calls the AWS API”
Re: Ask HN: Why call it an AI company if all it does is call open AI API?
#49This is purely a positioning thing. Customers will understand "AI company" to mean "a business that uses AI to solve my problem," and nothing more. The insider perspective matters extremely little (, unfortunately.)
It's like McDonalds positions themselves as a food company while their majority revenue comes from real estate[1]. It doesn't matter to the consumer that their business internals involve the renting of property to their franchisees. What people see are the broken ice cream machines and the burgers.
A two-minute UI that makes a call to OpenAI is just as sellable of a product as someone offering social media templates written by a Llama instance running on their own servers. And during the gold rush, that's all that matters. H sure hope we'll see more nuanced descriptions later down the road: AI-powered, AI-integrating, and AI-adjacent :)
[1]: https://www.wallstreetsurvivor.com/mcdonalds-beyond-the-burg...
Re: Ask HN: Why call it an AI company if all it does is call open AI API?
#50> It’s just like building on top of AWS or GCP. Yes, but companies still use "hosted on the cloud" as a feature in enterprise SaaS.
Starting a response with “you realize” is so condescending. I wish people would just make their point neutrally.
You’re right. Edited to be less of a jerk.