Wait til you hear what GPT 5 is
73% of AI startups are just prompt engineering
41–50 of 212 posts
Re: 73% of AI startups are just prompt engineering
#42That's like saying "73% of business is just meetings"
Re: 73% of AI startups are just prompt engineering
#43A long time ago a mentor of mine said, "In tech, often an expert is someone that know one or two things more than everyone else. When things are new, sometimes that's all it takes." It's no surprise it's just prompt engineering. Every new tech goes that way - mainly because innovation is often adding one or two things more the the existing stack.
I'm always more interested in the 'less is more' strategy, taking things away from the already hyper-complicated stack, reviewing first principles and simplifying for the same effectiveness. This is ever more rare.
Re: 73% of AI startups are just prompt engineering
#44The thing that drives me nuts is that most "AI Applications" are just adding crappy chat to a web app. A true AI application should have AI driven workflows that automate boring or repetitive tasks without user intervention, and simplify the UI surface of the application.
Re: 73% of AI startups are just prompt engineering
#45I'm surprised by the number of people who are running head first into AI wrapper start-ups. Either you have a smash-and-grab strategy or you are awful at risk analysis.
Do you want to be right, or do you want to make money? You'll be correct in 5-10 years. Do you wait and do nothing until then?
Re: 73% of AI startups are just prompt engineering
#46Prompt engineering isn't as simple as writing prompts in english. It's still engineering data flow, when data is relevant, systems that the AI can access and search, tools that the AI can use, etc.
Is it, though? Apparently the current best practice is just to allow the LLM untethered access to everything and try to control access by preventing prompt injection...
You still need to find the correct data, and get it to the LLM. IMO, a lot of it is data engineering work with API calls to an LLM as an extra step. I'm currently doing a lot of ETL work with Airflow (and whatever data {warehouses, lakes, bases} are needed) to get the right data to a prompt engineering flow. The prompt engineering flow is literally a for loop of Google Docs in a Google Drive that non-tech people, but domain experts in their field, can access.
It's up to the domain experts and me to understand where giving it data will tone down the hallucinative nonsense an LLM puts out, and where we should not give data because we need the problem solving skills of the LLM itself. A similar process is for tool-use, which in our case are pre-selected Python scripts that it is allowed to run.
Re: 73% of AI startups are just prompt engineering
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
My coffee maker app is quite disappointing.
I imagine you’re being facetious but I wouldn’t count food-related products for the most part. It’s not like Claude is brewing a pot for me anyway lol
Re: 73% of AI startups are just prompt engineering
#48This makes no sense to me? I don't understand why a company, even if it is using GPT or Claude as their true backend, is going to leave API calls in Javascript that anyone can find. Sure maybe a couple would, but 73% of those tested?
Surely your browser is going to talk to their webserver, and yup sure it'll then go off and use Claude etc then return the answer to you, but surely they're not all going to just skin an easily-discoverable website over the big models?
I don't believe any of this. Why aren't we questioning the source of how the author is apparently able to figure out some sites are using REDIS etc etc?
Re: 73% of AI startups are just prompt engineering
#49100% of AI startups are just multiplying matrices
100% of tech startups are just database engineering
It's still early in the paradigm and most startups will fail but those that succeed will embed themselves in workflows.
Re: 73% of AI startups are just prompt engineering
#50People talk about an AI bubble. I think this is the real bubble.
Not really because the money involved is relatively small. The bubble is where people are using D8s to push square kilometers of dirt around for data centers that need new nuclear power plants built, to house millions of obsolete Nvidia GPUs that need new fabs constructed to make, using yet more D8s..
(D8s apparently refers to a specific Caterpillar-brand bulldozer, not some kubernetes takeoff.)