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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

#211
post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 manage…

I think this is exactly the kind of issue that the startup Klu [0] is trying to solve. Not everybody should be building their own custom toolchains for finetuning/prompting AI models and there is really quite a lot of work involved in data management/evaluation. There's definitely a lot of value in adding some AI features into your applications, but if it's not your core business you shouldn't be spending a lot of yo…

> and there is really quite a lot of work involved in data management/evaluation

This is boring tech already, we have been doing it for the past 2 decades in the web with CRUD. It doesn't make sense to be an openAI + VC-backed tools wrapper

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

#212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I don't really have much beef with your comment as it has pretty substantive points, but I just wanted to remind and let everybody know about a Hacker News guideline outlined on their guidelines under the comments section. Sorry, I just recently re-read the guidelines, so I thought I might point others to it too. I honestly believe there are a lot more people breaking all these guidelines on this site, so the whole t…

> Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data.

Please don't break the guidelines while?

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

#213

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…

> Nobody sane should connect a public-facing LLM chatbot to costly real-world actions though...

As a blanket statement, this isn't right. It depends on the quality of the chatbot versus the magnitude of the real world cost. Speaking as a user, the supermarket chains that process refunds through a chatbot are a success example. It works well in practice in this low stakes real world application.

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

#214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a persistent, but in fact a poorly justified opinion. First of all, according to linked article, they were able to make something much better and cheaper than Chatgpt (for their task obv.) in quite a short period of time. What stops them from making the same feat again? What makes you think, that the same boring bland OpenAI wrappers are going to take off at all, let alone survive till next OpenAI iteration?…

You seem to be conflating a "boring" product with using OpenAI models, but the two have nothing to do with each other. 99% of users don't care what models you're using underneath. They only care how well the product works. "What stops them from making the same feat again?" Hopefully nothing, for their sake, because they're going to have to do it again and again to keep up. Look, I'm not saying this specific product w…

The whole point was not to make something just for sake of making different. The Chatgpt solution was inferior for being too expensive too general a solution for their problem. Which means that everyone else who relies on openai for their product will hit the same limitations and will end up looking like copycat boring bland service.

> I also think it provides a lot less long-term differentiation and competitive edge than the author of the post seems to think.

This is just an opinion. There are many feats OpenAI cann pull, such as stop updating their product, for whatever reason or starting charging too high price.

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

#215

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.

And the ones that can do something would be better served as a simple form. My state has used a chatbot for car registration renewals for years. It works just fine, I can't truly complain, but it's literally just a higher friction way to fill in a short form. Why did it need to be a chatbot?

It’s a state, they need to showcase the modern stuff, both to fund new ideas and to show modernity to the citizen.

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

#216

I appreciate the overall sentiment of the post, but I can't say I would choose anything like the implementation the author is suggesting. My takeaway is to avoid relying too heavily on LLMs both in terms of the scope tasks given to them as well as relying too heavily on any specific LLM. I think this is correct for many reasons. Firstly, you probably don't want to compete directly with ChatGPT, even if you are using…

Their advice isn't "just add a compiler, bruh". Their advice is to see how far you can get solving your problem with ordinary code, then add the most limited AI on top necessary to finish solving the problem.

Their product is a tool to automatically translate a Figma design file to React code. So the ordinary code to solve the problem is a compiler. They're not telling everyone to write a compiler.

Your general criticism of adding compilers doesn't make sense in this context. Their alternative would be using ChatGPT as a compiler, and they convincingly argue that'd be worse. Or are you arguing that it's bad to offer a product that generates react code?

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

#217
post #134

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 it is good enough to replace stack overflow.

For the kind of things I‘m using stackoverflow for I prefer it. It‘s much fast to google and scan the sf page than to wait for GPT to type out an answer and read that.

GPT is only useful if the code needs to be adapted, and I rarely use stackoverflow for that.

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

#218

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…

I would appreciate a situation where the chatbot enters into the conversation along with a human customer service representative. It‘s a conversation among three people with the chatbot having the option to ask the human and the human tuning in a bit when needed.

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

#219
>..when we started talking to some large and privacy-focused companies as potential early beta customers, one of the most common pieces of feedback was that they were not able to use OpenAI or any products using OpenAI.

It's interesting to me that there are apparently companies that won't let OpenAI see their data, but will let a random startup see it. What's going on with that? Does OpenAI have a lax privacy policy or something?

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

#220
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…

I would argue the AI model also made your message more wordy and less likely to be read by other humans. But mostly, since you raise the question of value : I think your song serves as a cool novelty and gift to share, and I've been wanting to do this, so kudos to you. However, the value of the song (as a cool novelty and as a gift) is likely going to plummet exponentially once we are submerged in a deluge of other s…

You are making some broad generalisations. I had a conversation with ChatGPT this morning while exercising. Enjoyed it as much as listening to a podcast.
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