Three kinds of AI products work
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Three kinds of AI products work
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Re: Three kinds of AI products work
#2> It’s easy to verify changes by running tests or checking if the code compiles
This is actually a low bar, when the agent wrote those tests.
Re: Three kinds of AI products work
#3From the article:
> Summary
By my count, there are three successful types of language model product:
- Chatbots like ChatGPT, which are used by hundreds of millions of people for a huge variety of tasks
- Completions coding products like Copilot or Cursor Tab, which are very niche but easy to get immediate value from
- Agentic products like Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, and Copilot Agent mode, which have only really started working in the last six months
On top of that, there are two kinds of LLM-based product that don’t work yet but may soon:
- LLM-generated feeds
- Video games that are based on AI-generated content
Re: Three kinds of AI products work
#4[deleted]
Re: Three kinds of AI products work
#5Author forgot about image, video, and music creation. These have all been quite successfully commercially, though maybe not as much artistically.
Re: Three kinds of AI products work
#6This seems to be biased heavily towards products that look like an LLM. And yes, only a small number of those work. But that's because if your product is a thing I chat with, it immediately is in competition with ChatGPT/Claude/Grok/etc, leading to everything the article expressed. But those are hardly the only use cases for LLMs, let alone AI (whatever people nowadays mean by AI)
To name some of the obvious counter-examples, Grammarly and Deepl are both AI (and now partially LLM-based) products that don't fit any of the categories in the post, but seem pretty successful to me. Lots of successful applications of Vison-LLMs in document scanning too, whether you are deciphering handwritten text or just trying to get structured data out of pdfs.
Re: Three kinds of AI products work
#7On agents it’s interesting but not surprising coding has seen so much initial success.
Personally I’m waiting for better O365 and SharePoint agents. I think there’s a lot of automation and helper potential there.
Re: Three kinds of AI products work
#8So the only AI products that work is a chat bot you can talk to, or a chat bot that can perform tasks for you. Next thing you'll tell me is that the only businesses that work are ones where you can ask somebody to do something for you in exchange for money.
Re: Three kinds of AI products work
#9I think this is kind of like saying “Only three kinds of internet products work, SaaS, webpages, and mobile apps”
At the level of granularity selected, maybe true. But too coarse to make any interesting distinctions or predictions.
Re: Three kinds of AI products work
#10In my current project the agent (GPT-5) isn't helpful at all. Damn thing, lying all the time to me.