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73% of AI startups are just prompt engineering

pub.towardsai.net

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Re: 73% of AI startups are just prompt engineering

#91

Post by bjt »

Forgeties79 wrote: post #18
IncreasePosts wrote: post #15

Prompt 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…

Having everything in my phone is a great convenience for me as a consumer. Pockets are small, and you only have a small number of them in any outfit.

But cloud services run in... the cloud. It's as big as you need it to be. My cloud service can have as many backing services as I want. I can switch them whenever I want. Consumers don't care.

"One model that can do everything for you" is a nice story for the hyper scalers because only companies of their size can pull that off. But I don't think the smartphone analogy holds. The convenience in that world is for the the developers of user-facing apps. Maybe some will want to use an everything model. But plenty will try something specialized. I expect the winner to be determined by which performs better. Developers aren't constrained by size or number of pockets.

Re: 73% of AI startups are just prompt engineering

#92

Post by nottorp »

zkmon wrote: post #84

But ... what else should they be doing? What's the expectation here? For example, in the 90's, a startup that offered a nice UI for a legacy console based system, would have been a great idea. What's wrong with that?

Actual AI. Not being "AI" users.

Being LLM users would be fine but they pretend they do AI.

Re: 73% of AI startups are just prompt engineering

#93

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

cess11 wrote: post #69
analogpixel wrote: post #30

Where is this guy sitting that he is able to collect all of this data? And why is he able to release it all in a blog post? (my company wouldn't allow me to collect and release customer data like this.)

There's a link in the preview of TFA that unlocks the rest of the article, looks like this for me: https://medium.com/@teja.kusireddy23/i-reverse-engineered-20... The article is basically a description of where to look for clues. Perhaps they've contracted with some of these companies and don't want to break some NDA by naming them, but still know a lot about how they work.

> Perhaps they've contracted with some of these companies and don't want to break some NDA by naming them, but still know a lot about how they work.

This makes literally no sense. Why would any companies (let alone most of them) contract with this guy who seems hell bent on exposing them all.

The article is simple made up, most likely by an LLM.

Re: 73% of AI startups are just prompt engineering

#94

Post by jedberg »

And 99% of software development is just feeding data into a complier. But that sort of misses the point doesn't it?

AI has created a new interface with a higher level abstraction that is easier to use. Of course everyone is going to use it (how many people still code assembler?).

The point is what people are doing with it is still clever (or at least has potential to be).

Re: 73% of AI startups are just prompt engineering

#95

Post by gdulli »

palata wrote: post #29
Forgeties79 wrote: post #18

Earlier 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…

Happy with my Garmin :-)

I still use the Garmin I bought in 2010. I refuse to turn on my phone's location tracking. Also the single-purpose interface is better and safer than switching between apps and contexts on a general purpose device.

Re: 73% of AI startups are just prompt engineering

#96

Post by bdangubic »

KineticLensman wrote: post #80
indymike wrote: post #5

A 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 remember being told that the secret of good consultancy is knowing what to read on your way to the meeting

very true. and these days take a lot less effort than before getting llms to summarize shit which is one task they inarguably shine on

Re: 73% of AI startups are just prompt engineering

#97

Post by jedberg »

octoberfranklin wrote: post #54
scottiebarnes wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every city should have its own municipal chip fabrication plant!

If you break up AT&T the Bell System will collapse!

Not sure if you're familiar, but it did collapse. It's all one company again.

Re: 73% of AI startups are just prompt engineering

#98

Post by furyofantares »

Another slop article that could probably be good if the author was interested in writing it, but instead they dumped everything into an LLM and now I can't tell what's real and what's not and get no sense of what parts of the findings the author found important or interesting compared to what other parts.

I have to wonder, are people voting this up after reading the article fully, and I'm just wrong and this sort of info dump with LLM dressing is desirable? Or are people skimming it and upvoting? Or is it more of an excuse to talk about the topic in the title? What level of cynicism should I be on here, if any?

Re: 73% of AI startups are just prompt engineering

#99

Post by zkmon »

nottorp wrote: post #92
zkmon wrote: post #84

But ... what else should they be doing? What's the expectation here? For example, in the 90's, a startup that offered a nice UI for a legacy console based system, would have been a great idea. What's wrong with that?

Actual AI. Not being "AI" users. Being LLM users would be fine but they pretend they do AI.

AI is an ecosystem that includes users at all layers and innovation at all those layers - infra, databases, models, agents, portals, UIs and so on. What do you mean by doing AI?

Btw, the so-called AI devs or model developers are "users" of the databases and all the underlying layers of the stack.

Re: 73% of AI startups are just prompt engineering

#100

Post by system2 »

jedberg wrote: post #94

And 99% of software development is just feeding data into a complier. But that sort of misses the point doesn't it? AI has created a new interface with a higher level abstraction that is easier to use. Of course everyone is going to use it (how many people still code assembler?). The point is what people are doing with it is still clever (or at least has potential to be).

I disagree. Software development is not limited to LLM-type responses and incorporates proper logic. You are at the mercy of LLM when you build an "AI" interface for the LLM apis. 73% these "AI" companies will collapse when the original API providing company comes up with a simple option (Gemini for Sheets, for example), they will disappear. It is already happening.

AI software is not long-lasting; its results are not deterministic.

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