So? 73% of Saas startups are DB connectors & queries.
If tekens aren't profitable then prices per token are likely to go up. If that's all these businesses are, they're all very sensitive to token prices.
73% of AI startups are just prompt engineering
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Re: 73% of AI startups are just prompt engineering
#12Prompt is code.
Prompt is specification, not code.
Re: 73% of AI startups are just prompt engineering
#1373% of AI startups are building their castle in someone else's kingdom.
Re: 73% of AI startups are just prompt engineering
#14And out of that 73%, 99% of them don't even do the obvious step of trying to actually optimize/engineer their damn prompts!
https://github.com/zou-group/textgrad
and bonus, my rant about this circa 2023 in the context of Stable Diffusion models: https://gist.github.com/Hellisotherpeople/45c619ee22aac6865c...
Re: 73% of AI startups are just prompt engineering
#15Prompt engineering and using an expensive general model in order to prove your market, and then putting in the resources to develop a smaller(cheaper) specialized model seems like a good idea?
Re: 73% of AI startups are just prompt engineering
#16When people are desperate to invest, they often don't care what someone actually can do but more about what they claim they can do. Getting investors these days is about how much bullshit you can shovel as opposed to how much real shit you shoveled before.
Thus has it always been. Thus will it always be.
Re: 73% of AI startups are just prompt engineering
#17One of the biggest problems frontier models will face going forward is how many tasks require expertise that cannot be achieved through Internet-scale pre-training.
Any reasonably informed person realizes that most AI start-ups looking to solve this are not trying to create their own pre-trained models from scratch (they will almost always lose to the hyperscale models).
A pragmatic person realizes that they're not fine-tuning/RL'ing existing models (that path has many technical dead ends).
So, a reasonably informed and pragmatic VC looks at the landscape, realizes they can't just put all their money into the hyperscale models (LP's don t want that) and they look for start-ups that take existing hyperscale models and expose them to data that wasn't in their pre-Training set, hopefully in a way that's useful to some users somewhere.
To a certain extent, this study is like saying that Internet start-ups in the 90's relied on HTML and weren't building their own custom browsers.
I'm not saying that this current generation of start-ups will be successful as Amazon and Google, but I just don't know what the counterfactual scenario is.
Re: 73% of AI startups are just prompt engineering
#18Prompt engineering and using an expensive general model in order to prove your market, and then putting in the resources to develop a smaller(cheaper) specialized model seems like a good idea?
Are people down to have a bunch of specialized models? The expectation set by OpenAI and everyone else has set is that you will have one model that can do everything for you.
It’s like how we’ve seen basically all gadgets meld into the smart phone. People don’t have Garmin’s and beepers and clock radios anymore (or dedicated phones!). It’s all on the screen that fits in your pocket. Any would-be gadget is now just an app
Re: 73% of AI startups are just prompt engineering
#1973% of AI startups are building their castle in someone else's kingdom.
-1: there's lots of "kingdoms" (openai, anthropic, google, plus open source) - if one king comes for your castle, you can move in minutes.
Re: 73% of AI startups are just prompt engineering
#20So? 73% of Saas startups are DB connectors & queries.
If tekens aren't profitable then prices per token are likely to go up. If that's all these businesses are, they're all very sensitive to token prices.
Not with open weight models you can deploy yourself. Different economics but not venerable to price increases.