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Don't build AI products the way everyone else is doing it

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Re: Don't build AI products the way everyone else is doing it

#111
post #3

> The solution: create your own toolchain No thanks. I have an actual job & customer needs to tend to. I am about 80% of the way through integrating with the OAI assistant API. The real secret is to already have a viable business that AI can subsequently improve . Making AI the business is a joke of a model to me. You'd have an easier time pitching javascript frameworks in our shop. Our current application of AI is a…

Did you read the article or are you responding to what you imagine it says? > a whole toolchain of specialized models, … all of these specialized models are combined with tons of just normal code and logic that creates the end result They are not referring to a toolchain as “write a compiler”. They are referring to it as “fine tune models with specific purposes and glue them together with normal code”. It’s a no-brai…

> They are referring to it as “fine tune models with specific purposes and glue them together with normal code”.

> will be technically out competed by their competitors because fine tuned models are better.

I disagree that fine tuning is the way to go. We spent a large amount of effort on that path and found it to be untenable for our business cases - not from an academic standpoint, but from a practical data management/discipline standpoint. For better or worse, we don't have super clean, structured data about our business. We also aren't big enough to run a full-time data science team.

Picking targeted feature verticals and applying few-shot learning w/ narrowly-scoped, dynamic prompts seems to give us a lot more value per $$$ and unit time. For us, things like the function calling API are fine-tuning, because we can now insist that we get a certain shape of response.

I have a hard time squaring an implied, simultaneous agreement with "supermodels are generally not the right approach" and "fine tuned models are better". These ideas seem (to me) to be generally at odds with one another. Few-shot learning is still the real magic trick in my book.

Re: Don't build AI products the way everyone else is doing it

#112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So the secret to building a viable AI business... is to build a viable business, with AI?

"what problem am I trying to solve?" if you can answer that question and justify AI as an optimization (and all the gray area fallouts that comes with early adoption) then you have a chance at building a viable business with AI. Having a solution and looking for problems to solve (or create) isnt the mentality of an entrepreneur but of a grifter, in my crass cynical opinion. But I can't deny that you ma still make mo…

Having a solution to an unknown problem and working towards finding a problem the solution fills can be rewritten as: Having a problem and looking for a solution.

Calling that grifting is strange.

Re: Don't build AI products the way everyone else is doing it

#113
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m trying to build that already personally. My plan is mbsync to Maildir storage, then process all emails using Haystack. Then trigger a pipeline on each new email with the goal of proposing some actions. Still bouncing around various approaches in my head, but all seems very doable already.

Personally I would put this functionality into an email client.

I was leaning towards the opposite and thinking about some way to support many email clients by perhaps leveraging IMAP to store drafts generated by the AI backend.

Another idea I had was to output it’s results into a ticketing system and allowing it to attach related documents and information it finds to be reviewed by a human and provide optional pre-configured actions.

Re: Don't build AI products the way everyone else is doing it

#114
post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"what problem am I trying to solve?" if you can answer that question and justify AI as an optimization (and all the gray area fallouts that comes with early adoption) then you have a chance at building a viable business with AI. Having a solution and looking for problems to solve (or create) isnt the mentality of an entrepreneur but of a grifter, in my crass cynical opinion. But I can't deny that you ma still make mo…

Having a solution to an unknown problem and working towards finding a problem the solution fills can be rewritten as: Having a problem and looking for a solution. Calling that grifting is strange.

I did say it was a crass opinion.

But just because the audience doesn't know the problem doesn't mean you (the entrepreneur) don't ask the question. I'm sure that not many people were asking for faster horse buggies in the late 19th century, but you certainly ask it and try to find a solution. Note that the problem doesn't have to be pressing to be asked.

Re: Don't build AI products the way everyone else is doing it

#115
post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> data and no meaningful dataset is 100% representative and 100% accurate IMHO And? What point are you trying to make here?

That it will be inaccurate. A lot.

This drug only helps 80% of patients, it’s useless.

Re: Don't build AI products the way everyone else is doing it

#116

The issue here isn’t AI, it’s not shovels and goldrushes, and it’s not about building how others are doing it. It’s fundamental value. It’s who is creating value that cannot be destroyed. Who owns the house is determined by who builds the foundation first, and that means those that control the ecosystems. All others will play, survive, rent, and buy inside of those ecosystems. If you’re not building fundamental value…

    It’s fundamental value
Yes!

    value that cannot be destroyed
Or taken

    Who owns the house is determined by who builds the foundation first, 
    and that means those that control the ecosystems
Maybe. Most platform plays in tech fail or barely make ends meet, while their renters make bank and impact.

   we risk investing and building straw houses when brick was available
There's no magic bias that solves the build-vs-buy question.

More importantly, the article is encouraging people to stick with the structure of the problem and solution as you would normally for building products, and use AI at the edges rather than the engine.

IMHO that's much controllable for developers than a full-on dependence on black-box LLM's, and it's even better for the AI providers: they're much more likely to help with a narrowly-defined solution.

Even openai is emphasizing incrementalism. It fits available tech, and it counters bubble bias.

Re: Don't build AI products the way everyone else is doing it

#118
I built a no-code, serverless platform and intend to use AI to compose the HTML components together. ChatGPT seems to be good at this based on initial tests. It was able to build a TODO app with authentication which syncs with back end in the first try using only HTML tags. My platform allows 'logic' to be fully specified declaratively in the HTML so it helps to reduce complexity and the the margin for error. The goal is to reduce app building down to its absolute bare essentials then let the AI work with that.

Re: Don't build AI products the way everyone else is doing it

#120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So the secret to building a viable AI business... is to build a viable business, with AI?

"what problem am I trying to solve?" if you can answer that question and justify AI as an optimization (and all the gray area fallouts that comes with early adoption) then you have a chance at building a viable business with AI. Having a solution and looking for problems to solve (or create) isnt the mentality of an entrepreneur but of a grifter, in my crass cynical opinion. But I can't deny that you ma still make mo…

"what problem am I trying to solve?" if you can answer that question and justify AI as an optimization...

Replace "AI" with "a machine" and you've just define Industrial Revolution.

Having a solution and looking for problems to solve (or create) isnt the mentality of an entrepreneur but of a grifter

Why? If the steam engine had just been invented, would it be only justified to use it for whatever problem the original inventor had conceived it?

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