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My small, no name company has lost its mind with AI

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Re: My small, no name company has lost its mind with AI

#31

Post by threeseed »

bb611 wrote: post #22
threeseed wrote: post #17

> CEO openly says AI will cause the loss of “millions of jobs”. My partner let go two people and replaced them with ChatGPT. No joke. It can accelerate many business tasks e.g. copywriting, customer service, proof-reading, product design exploration, marketing campaigns etc. And its ability to do all of this in multiple languages and in different tones can be a really big deal for some businesses.

Can you share what jobs those people performed?

My partner runs a B2B ecommerce company with revenue ~$5m with lots of different products coming from a range of suppliers all over Asia.

And the jobs were the sort of generalist types you see in most small businesses and startups. Examples of tasks mostly involving writing e.g. emails to suppliers and customers, marketing copy for products/campaigns, website content. But also coming with potential new products and how they can be branded/marketed.

And the reason they were hired specifically is because most of the team doesn't have English or Mandarin as their first language and so they needed native speakers. And since ChatGPT's problem is inaccuracy not writing well it's really suited to them.

Re: My small, no name company has lost its mind with AI

#32

Post by distortedsignal »

janalsncm wrote: post #15
Fatboyrunning wrote: post #3

The absence of real applications incorporating this stuff is damning. Where are the killer apps?

ChatGPT is the killer app . It’s a Google killer. It is better than the SEO listicle garbage filling the internet. Even if it’s not always accurate it’s still better in a lot of circumstances. There’s a reason Sundar rushed Bard out of the gate even though it is clearly inferior.

I’ll push back on this, at least in its current iteration. I just asked it to list some restaurants near my apartment (major intersection in San Jose) and it wasn’t particularly close. While there are several restaurants less than half a mile from the intersection, ChatGPT listed restaurants from several miles away.

Given the “weights in a matrix” architecture of ChatGPT, I’m not sure it’s possible to store enough data to make the query practical to answer. Say there are a couple hundred intersections in my city. You have to store the token of “restaurant name” “close to” “intersection” for each intersection. I don’t know the size of Google’s Maps DB, but I would guess it’s several Gigabytes per city. From my understanding of the theory, you would need to store BOTH the LLM weights AND the Maps data for ChatGPT to have a shot at generating good answers for that type of query.

I’m happy to be wrong here. If I’m misunderstanding something, please let me know.

Re: My small, no name company has lost its mind with AI

#33

Post by spaceman_2020 »

intelVISA wrote: post #11
justrealist wrote: post #4

> - got the OK to feed entire repos and proprietary information into ChatGPT without a care because “we got the pro version” > Our main product is CRUD app that is designed like something straight out of 2010, complete with outdated frameworks If it's a small startup with a simple CRUD app, why this a problem? 99% startups die from lack of execution, not because someone stole their proprietary secrets or source code.

Simple CRUD apps don't really need a startup to be fair, they could be done as a side project these days.

A 30 year old “startup” I consulted with once was a very badly designed SaaS app that had somehow been in business for three decades. At first, I couldn’t figure out how this awful app could be in business when there were competitors on the market with better UX/UI and marketing.

But then I learned that the bad UI had very specific features that professionals in their target industry desperately needed, and that the bad UX was so deeply embedded in their workflows that changing any of it would collapse entire multimillion dollar businesses.

Re: My small, no name company has lost its mind with AI

#34

Post by julianlam »

brtkdotse wrote: post #27
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was a good article in the Washington Post, discussed on HN a week or two ago (would have to do some searching), about people who have already lost their jobs due to ChatGPT. Copywriting is definitely going to get decimated. Other jobs, like medical transcription, were already on the way out due to speech recognition tech even before generative AI blew up. And before people make "buggy whip manufacturer" argumen…

> like medical transcription There’s no way this is remotely legal, right? Unless it’s some sort of on-prem product? > making wider sections of the populace unemployable faster than new job areas open up This is a real threat to the fabric of society and will require us to rethink things like UBI and taxing the means of production rather labor.

Whether having AI do it is legal or not, I cannot say, but I do know that medical transcriptions are routinely sent out of the hospital for lower-paid third-parties to do it.

Re: My small, no name company has lost its mind with AI

#35

Post by taylorfinley »

This post reads like a neoluddite AI-skeptic trashing someone for trying new things. Every CEO should be trying to automate human tasks with AI right now--not to fire all the humans, but to increase their efficiency. Good on your CEO for trying. Sounds like they've largely failed to execute, which is a valid thing to criticize, but at least they're trying. The CEO of my company has also been trying, and we've done some really cool things.

I've been hearing a lot of AI criticism lately from folks who clearly haven't gotten deep with GPT-4, like geohot/George Hotz's recent interview on the Lex Friedman podcast. There are a ton of valid things to criticize about AI and LLMs, but I've built things with GPT-4 that are incredibly impactful for our business--a tool to turn a Zendesk ticket thread into internal and external support guides, for example. Yes, there are limitations. But sticking your head in the ground saying "it's all a parlor trick" won't age well.

Re: My small, no name company has lost its mind with AI

#36

Post by langsoul-com »

intelVISA wrote: post #11
justrealist wrote: post #4

> - got the OK to feed entire repos and proprietary information into ChatGPT without a care because “we got the pro version” > Our main product is CRUD app that is designed like something straight out of 2010, complete with outdated frameworks If it's a small startup with a simple CRUD app, why this a problem? 99% startups die from lack of execution, not because someone stole their proprietary secrets or source code.

Simple CRUD apps don't really need a startup to be fair, they could be done as a side project these days.

A business requires sales, and support. Not just dev

Re: My small, no name company has lost its mind with AI

#37

Post by lelanthran »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #23
threeseed wrote: post #17

> CEO openly says AI will cause the loss of “millions of jobs”. My partner let go two people and replaced them with ChatGPT. No joke. It can accelerate many business tasks e.g. copywriting, customer service, proof-reading, product design exploration, marketing campaigns etc. And its ability to do all of this in multiple languages and in different tones can be a really big deal for some businesses.

There was a good article in the Washington Post, discussed on HN a week or two ago (would have to do some searching), about people who have already lost their jobs due to ChatGPT. Copywriting is definitely going to get decimated. Other jobs, like medical transcription, were already on the way out due to speech recognition tech even before generative AI blew up. And before people make "buggy whip manufacturer" argumen…

> And before people make "buggy whip manufacturer" arguments,

I've always wondered about that argument.

Weren't buggy whip manufacturers making lots of other things at the same time?

After all, a buggy whip is almost certainly used much longer by the new owner than a cars is, so I wouldn't expect a large amount of the economy to be comprised of buggy whip sales, because

a) Not many people had their own buggy (down need a buggy whip while riding a horse, only when a buggy is being pulled)

b) Those that owned a whip didn't replace them every 3-5 years anyway.

Did buggy whip sales go from 3% of GDP to nothing?

To me it always felt like a made-up "lesson" on how progress moves.

Re: My small, no name company has lost its mind with AI

#38

Post by ars »

brtkdotse wrote: post #27
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was a good article in the Washington Post, discussed on HN a week or two ago (would have to do some searching), about people who have already lost their jobs due to ChatGPT. Copywriting is definitely going to get decimated. Other jobs, like medical transcription, were already on the way out due to speech recognition tech even before generative AI blew up. And before people make "buggy whip manufacturer" argumen…

> like medical transcription There’s no way this is remotely legal, right? Unless it’s some sort of on-prem product? > making wider sections of the populace unemployable faster than new job areas open up This is a real threat to the fabric of society and will require us to rethink things like UBI and taxing the means of production rather labor.

It's not going to happen. There is a huge shortage of people right now. We have WAY more work that needs doing vs available people to do the work.

Re: My small, no name company has lost its mind with AI

#39

Post by petters »

justrealist wrote: post #4

> - got the OK to feed entire repos and proprietary information into ChatGPT without a care because “we got the pro version” > Our main product is CRUD app that is designed like something straight out of 2010, complete with outdated frameworks If it's a small startup with a simple CRUD app, why this a problem? 99% startups die from lack of execution, not because someone stole their proprietary secrets or source code.

Correct, not all things listed in the featured article are bad.

Exploring ChatGPT/copilot for developer productivity also seems correct, for example.

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