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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

#161

Post by hattmall »

Torkel wrote: post #134
threeseed wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think most people I know offline hate interacting with chat bots as products It's hilarious to me when people are bringing back chat bots as a concept. We had chat bots a few years ago and it was something that almost all larger companies had built strategies around. The idea being that they could significantly reduce call centre staff and improve customer experience. And it wasn't just that the quality of the co…

I work in a small team with increadibly good programmers. ChatGPT as of right now is not good enough to replace asking one of them for help when I am stuck. But it is good enough to replace stack overflow. Look forward. A year ago I would have so agreed with what you say. But look where we are already. And think about what will come. My god. We're in for a ride here. Saying that chatbots sucked last time we tried tha…

But you still don't, or can't, solve the fundamental issue of giving chatbots actual power to do things. And, if you can give the chatbots power to do the thing the customer wants them the chat bot is likely the most inefficient way to do it. It should just be part of the website / app.

Giving them power you don't provide users means they need to be able to discriminate. Even humans are vulnerable to social engineering, but the nature of each human being different makes it not scalable. If you figure out an empowered chatbots prompt injection soft spot you could potentially scale the fraud which is a dangerous problem.

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

#162

Post by satvikpendem »

laxd wrote: post #158
satvikpendem wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As in LLMs have human-like understanding in a way that previous chatbots did not, they can both understand and emit human text.

... they can both understand and emit human text. Yikes! We are headed towards customer service hell. At least I'd like there to be some human feelings while I'm getting fucked.

Why is that yikes? Navigating a UI is oftentimes easier than calling in and being placed on hold. Not in all cases, as I've said, but many.

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

#163

Post by hattmall »

EMM_386 wrote: post #150
BillFranklin wrote: post #7

This is a nice post, and I think it will resonate with most new AI startups. My advice would be don't build an AI product at all. To my mind an "x product" is rarely the framing that will lead to value being added for customers. E.g. a web3 product, an observability product, a machine vision product, an AI product. Like all decent startup ideas the obviously crucial thing is to start with a real user need rather than…

> This is regardless of quality, bots are rarely as good as speaking with a real human being. I actually have enjoyed my limited experience with Amazon's customer service bots. And that's only because I have an account with them since forever. And I can see why they are now the target of refund scammers. In many cases, the conversation is as simple as "I recently bought [x] and I would like to return it" resulting in…

You don't even need chatbots for that though. You can just open a return and if the default action is replacement without return it's the same thing.

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

#164

Post by brandall10 »

threeseed wrote: post #73
BillFranklin wrote: post #7

This is a nice post, and I think it will resonate with most new AI startups. My advice would be don't build an AI product at all. To my mind an "x product" is rarely the framing that will lead to value being added for customers. E.g. a web3 product, an observability product, a machine vision product, an AI product. Like all decent startup ideas the obviously crucial thing is to start with a real user need rather than…

> I think most people I know offline hate interacting with chat bots as products It's hilarious to me when people are bringing back chat bots as a concept. We had chat bots a few years ago and it was something that almost all larger companies had built strategies around. The idea being that they could significantly reduce call centre staff and improve customer experience. And it wasn't just that the quality of the co…

The main issue with traditional chatbots is they rarely provide extra value over simply reading the policy of a particular web property or doing things that you could look up yourself on your account. I don't need a UPS bot to ask for my tracking # to just regurgitate what I can see in 5 seconds. That is beyond frustrating to gate keep an agent that will actually access a driver or center who last had my seemingly lost package, or troubleshoot why the system hasn't shown movement in over a week.

The only time the human connection is helpful is when a business makes a mistake that can't really be addressed. A chatbot, esp. with the power of GPT-4, has the potential to be considerably more helpful than the average call center employee who likely is not a native speaker or your language.

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

#165

Post by FullstakBlogger »

ryandrake wrote: post #128
fillskills wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. Avoid the “If have hammer, everything looks like a nail” strategy. Find a customer pain point and use the right blend of tools. You can also make a new tool where tools dont exist

Being a "AI startup" makes about as much sense as being a "Python startup." What does your company do? We do Python! OK, but what problem are you solving? Lots of them, but what's important is we solve it using Python code!

It's funny you say that, because that's more or less how non-tech people seem to think about programming. It's not naturally intuitive to them that renaming files, rocket trajectory simulation, and data analytics are fundamentally different problems, and that a computer is just a tool that anyone can learn to program if they already understand those problems.

I know someone who's relied on the same consultancy company for all things tech related since the early 90's. If they don't know how to do something, like build a website, they just outsource it on upwork or something, and charge a 10:1 markup.

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

#166

Post by klabb3 »

osigurdson wrote: post #138
BillFranklin wrote: post #7

This is a nice post, and I think it will resonate with most new AI startups. My advice would be don't build an AI product at all. To my mind an "x product" is rarely the framing that will lead to value being added for customers. E.g. a web3 product, an observability product, a machine vision product, an AI product. Like all decent startup ideas the obviously crucial thing is to start with a real user need rather than…

>> This is regardless of quality, bots are rarely as good as speaking with a real human being I avoid calling organizations as I know I will be on hold forever, when I finally do get through to someone usually they provide another number to call and the process repeats. I just want the thing done, as fast as possible - I don't care if I talk to a real person or not. The reason chatbots haven't helped the process so f…

> I avoid calling organizations as I know I will be on hold forever, when I finally do get through to someone usually they provide another number to call and the process repeats.

This just gave me a business idea for an “AI startup”…

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

#167

Post by [deleted] »

laxd wrote: post #158
satvikpendem wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As in LLMs have human-like understanding in a way that previous chatbots did not, they can both understand and emit human text.

... they can both understand and emit human text. Yikes! We are headed towards customer service hell. At least I'd like there to be some human feelings while I'm getting fucked.

[deleted]

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

#168

Post by laxd »

satvikpendem wrote: post #162
laxd wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

... they can both understand and emit human text. Yikes! We are headed towards customer service hell. At least I'd like there to be some human feelings while I'm getting fucked.

Why is that yikes? Navigating a UI is oftentimes easier than calling in and being placed on hold. Not in all cases, as I've said, but many.

Phone queues are frustrating. But I'm not there to get mindless text generated back at me. I've already experienced it. Reminds me of all the dystopian art trying to depict the human despair and powerlessness of facing the system that society has created.

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

#169

Post by brandall10 »

krainboltgreene wrote: post #107
brandall10 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a huge win to be had though with "this is my natural language data, give me natural language insights at a 100 foot view, at a 50,000 foot view, etc". This is one of the big pulls OpenAI is hoping for w/ GPTs/Assistants.

Too bad this costs a few million (only if you're using insanely subsidized hardware).

OpenAI just launched their RAG with the Assistants feature that can ingest a fair bit of documents you choose to upload. So while not enterprise grade just yet, there is immediate utility on the horizon and of course other services have provided something like this for months now.

To the parent's point, when the dust settles something like this will probably be commoditized at scale and will likely have a sizable impact on society.

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

#170

Post by Terr_ »

BillFranklin wrote: post #7

This is a nice post, and I think it will resonate with most new AI startups. My advice would be don't build an AI product at all. To my mind an "x product" is rarely the framing that will lead to value being added for customers. E.g. a web3 product, an observability product, a machine vision product, an AI product. Like all decent startup ideas the obviously crucial thing is to start with a real user need rather than…

> I think most people I know offline hate interacting with chat bots as products.

At my company a chatbot is one of the main products, but I think the key is that it is used in bulk/triage situations where there's 0% chance a company would ever hire humans to do it instead.

So the real question is whether to to use a complex tax-filing-like form, or a chatbot, and whether either of those routes are done well.

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