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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

#191

Post by blackoil »

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!

No, it is more akin to having an Internet startup or Mobile startup. You would need a real problem to solve but there is a pool of 1000s of problems the tech. will be applicable to.

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

#192

Post by wg0 »

MajimasEyepatch wrote: post #103
threeseed wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've worked for a number of enterprise companies. All have moved to Kubernetes. And it's not just geekery by developers who aren't as smart as you. It's because it allows you to treat all of your infrastructure in one way. Whether you are on GCP, AWS or On-Premise, whether you use Java, Spark, Web Serving or ML Training, whether you are deploying direct to Production or go through multiple staging environments etc. I…

Seriously. People make Kubernetes out to be this wildly complicated technology, but if your environment is more complex than just "Here's a glorified VM running on a couple EC2 instances behind a load balancer," it has a lot of benefits and is really not that difficult to set up in this day and age.

Those who think Kubernetes is simple and easy and not complicated at all do most likely only fall in two categories:

a. Someone else is running Kubernetes for them. (GKE, EKS etc)

b. Or they're not running Kubernestes in production yet. (Homelab, staging prototype etc.)

So yes from the point of view of it's APIs and it's object model, it's not complicated.

EDIT: grammar

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

#193

Post by blackoil »

I would give contra advice.

* Never build your own model unless you have proven your model, and you have expertise to build it. Generic models will take you long way before cost/quality becomes an issue. Just getting all the data to train an LLM will be pain. 1000s of smartest people are spending n Billions to improve upon it. Don't compete with them. and if downstream you believe open source or your own is better use it then.

* Privacy is overrated. Enterprises are happy to use Google Docs, Office 365 exchange and cloud and ChatGPT itself. Unless you are in a domain where you know it will be a concern, trust Azure/OpenAI or Google.

* Let it be an AI startup. It should solve some problem but if VC and customer want to hear AI and Generative, that's what you are. Don't try to bring sanity in hand feeding you.

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

#194

Post by osigurdson »

sebastiennight wrote: post #159
osigurdson wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> 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…

Nobody sane should connect a public-facing LLM chatbot to costly real-world actions though... E.G. it's one thing to allow an authenticated User to use a bot to manage their own files/workflow inside an app (we do that), but can you imagine putting in production a support bot with actual empowered features (eg negotiating a rate, issuing a refund) AND the risk of prompt injection? So what will happen is those custome…

I do think that it is within reach to create a human quality chatbot assistant for a given narrow domain. For example, if OpenAI focused all of its energies on creating a good chatbot for a particular problem domain at a particular company I believe it could be achieved. Of course, casual / amateur efforts leveraging ChatGPT / OpenAI APIs to achieve the same thing seem unlikely to produce good results today.

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

#195

Post by hiAndrewQuinn »

deepGem wrote: post #189
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…

For most of us technologists, figuring out user need is way way harder than doing research or building something. That's the reality. So we tend to take comfort in building technology and figuring out the user need later on. Even discovering a real problem, a problem that warrants the expense on technology, is unfortunately out of the comfort zone for a lot of technologists. We often assume that the problem is real,…

Gotta burn the candle at both ends a bit to make it big. Spend some time off in the far vistas of emerging tech - some just looking at how ordinary people live their lives, and thinking about how to improve that.

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

#196

Post by hiAndrewQuinn »

ancientworldnow wrote: post #133
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…

No, it's that chat bots have no actual power to fix most issues. They exist to make it more difficult to escalate up the bureaucracy where there is staff that can actually problem solve, issue refunds, give credits, etc. Chat bots are merely a filter to get rid of easily pacified pushover customers and those who refuse to read instructions or documentation.

patio11's recent "Seeing Like a Bank" makes a pretty persuasive argument that these kinds of first pass filters are in fact very important to ensure that costs can stay reasonable to you and I, the rare times we do actually have a problem and usually have to walk far up the chain of command to get it fixed.

https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/seeing-like-a-bank/

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

#197

Post by seanhunter »

hiAndrewQuinn wrote: post #196
ancientworldnow wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it's that chat bots have no actual power to fix most issues. They exist to make it more difficult to escalate up the bureaucracy where there is staff that can actually problem solve, issue refunds, give credits, etc. Chat bots are merely a filter to get rid of easily pacified pushover customers and those who refuse to read instructions or documentation.

patio11's recent "Seeing Like a Bank" makes a pretty persuasive argument that these kinds of first pass filters are in fact very important to ensure that costs can stay reasonable to you and I, the rare times we do actually have a problem and usually have to walk far up the chain of command to get it fixed. https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/seeing-like-a-bank/

The thing about that line of argument is that the balance between things being sorted by the bot vs needing a human is almost never right.

My current employer has a slack helpbot where you dm the bot and it does a first pass at trying to find the right ticket/form etc to solve your problem. If it can't, it opens a regular helpdesk ticket with the info you have given it so far and the helpdesk sorts your problem out. It's great.

Most corporate chatbots however are not like this. For example, when I went recently to resolve a problem with an insurance policy I got pushed on the website to the chatbot. After going through a bit of annoying to-ing and fro-ing the chatbot told me it couldn't do anything and I had to call up. At this point all the information I had given it while it was trying to resolve my problem is in the dumpster and as far as its concerned, job done. I however have wasted a bunch of time and am back to square 1. Worse than that, when I sit in the (now incredibly long) phone queue to speak to the few human helpdesk agents who remain I have to listen to the recording repeatedly telling me "why not use our super-helpful chatbot".

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

#198

Post by _pdp_ »

Recently, I embarked on a project to create a song as a tribute to my colleagues' exceptional work in a specific domain. My tools? OpenAI for lyric generation, tailored to my specifications, and Suno for vocal and track synthesis. The resulting song was a blend of AI-driven creativity and my vision. However, as I prepared to share this creation on Slack, I pondered the nature of authorship in the AI era. Was I truly the 'creator' when automated processes played a significant role?

This led to a broader realization: the song wouldn't exist without my initial concept and the nuanced curation involved in its completion. It's not merely that AI executed 90% of the work; it's that my 10% contribution leveraged these advanced tools to achieve a 90% outcome, a testament to the power of technology in amplifying human creativity.

In a world where websites, businesses, and SaaS tools can be launched in mere minutes, it's becoming increasingly clear that ideas and the ability to effectively harness technology will be paramount. This shift raises fascinating questions about the future of creativity and the evolving role of the human in the creative process.

My key message is this: "So what if your business heavily relies on OpenAI models?" The unique prompts you craft hold intrinsic value. They don't diminish the time, expertise, and knowledge you invest in shaping the results. Take designing a 3D chair using an AI system, for instance: achieving optimal results hinges on your ability to precisely describe what you need, a skill that itself depends on your understanding and knowledge of design. In this context, delving into classics and broadening your educational horizons is more crucial than ever. It equips you with the nuanced articulation needed to harness AI's potential fully.

P.S. An AI model assisted me in crafting this comment, but the experiences and insights I've shared are my own, as is the majority of the words in this text. The advantage I gain from AI is the better articulation of my ideas. This tool is akin to a dictionary, a grammar checking tool, or a system that translates my native tongue into English.

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

#199

Post by unsubstantiated »

_pdp_ wrote: post #198

Recently, I embarked on a project to create a song as a tribute to my colleagues' exceptional work in a specific domain. My tools? OpenAI for lyric generation, tailored to my specifications, and Suno for vocal and track synthesis. The resulting song was a blend of AI-driven creativity and my vision. However, as I prepared to share this creation on Slack, I pondered the nature of authorship in the AI era. Was I truly…

[flagged]

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

#200

Post by satvikpendem »

immibis wrote: post #175
satvikpendem wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Idk man they're just tools, as long as they get stuff done, I don't care in what medium they do it in. Nothing "dystopian" about it.

They don't get stuff done, and they never will. Have you never experienced a call tree? They're universally useless except for getting you to a human in the approximate right department. An LLM chatbot is just a call tree that says sorry to you if you swear at it. And it's not supposed to solve your problems. Solving your problems costs investors money. It's supposed to make you go away. Recently I wanted to file a c…

> They don't get stuff done, and they never will. Have you never experienced a call tree? They're universally useless except for getting you to a human in the approximate right department. An LLM chatbot is just a call tree that says sorry to you if you swear at it.

Sorry, this is entirely incorrect, for many reasons, not the least of which concerns your universality in extrapolating your experiences to everyone else: "they never will," well, "never" is a long time; "universally useless," obviously not universally useless, if at least some people find use from them; "An LLM chatbot is just a call tree that says sorry to you if you swear at it," incorrect entirely, which belies your misunderstanding of what LLMs actually do and behave like.

I recently had to have an Amazon order refunded, and it happened entirely though a chatbot multiple choice tree, and it wasn't even an LLM, just a dialogue tree. It worked fine, I got the amounts refunded as intended. Now, with LLMs, they are even more useful than what I experienced, as they actually understand your intent as well as a human would. If you disagree with that fundamental premise, then I'm not sure what to tell you other than to use GPT-4 via ChatGPT.

In short, just because you had bad experiences doesn't mean everyone else has as well.

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