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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

#11

Post by danenania »

This is a thought-provoking post and I agree with the "avoid using AI as long as possible" point. AI is best used for things that can only be accomplished with AI--if there's any way to build the feature or solve the problem without it, then yeah, do that instead. Since everyone now has more or less equal access to the best models available, the best products will necessarily be defined by everything they do that's not AI--workflows, UIs, UX, performance, and all that other old-fashioned stuff.

I'm not so sure about the "train your own model" advice. This sounds like a good way to set your product up for quick obsolescence. It might differentiate you for a short period of time, but within 6-12 months (if that), either OpenAI or one of its competitors with billions in funding is going to release a new model that blows yours out of the water, and your "differentiated model" is now a steaming pile of tech debt.

Trying to compete on models as a small startup seems like a huge distraction. It's like building your own database rather than just using Postgres or MySQL. Yes, you need a moat and a product that is difficult to copy in some way, but it should be something you can realistically be the best at given your resources.

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

#12

Post by dmezzetti »

There is so much available in the open model world. Take a look at the Hugging Face Hub - there are 1000s of models that can be used as-is or as a starting point.

And those models don't have to be LLMs. It's still a valid approach to use a smaller BERT model as a text classifier.

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

#13

Post by obmelvin »

JSavageOne wrote: post #5

> "One way we explored approaching this was using puppeteer to automate opening websites in a web browser, taking a screenshot of the site, and traversing the HTML to find the img tags. > We then used the location of the images as the output data and the screenshot of the webpage as the input data. And now we have exactly what we need — a source image and coordinates of where all the sub-images are to train this AI m…

If I'm understanding correctly, they are talking about how they are solving very specific problems with their models.

In this case, if you look two images up you will see e-commerce image with many images composted into one image/layer. How will their system automatically decide whether all those should be separate images/layers or one composted image? To do so they trained a model that examines web pages and tags and see's their location. Basically, they are under the assumption that their data has good decisions and you can learn in which cases people use multiple vs one image.

I could be misunderstanding :)

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

#14

Post by golergka »

bob1029 wrote: post #3

> The solution: create your own toolchain No thanks. I have an actual job & customer needs to tend to. I am about 80% of the way through integrating with the OAI assistant API. The real secret is to already have a viable business that AI can subsequently improve . Making AI the business is a joke of a model to me. You'd have an easier time pitching javascript frameworks in our shop. Our current application of AI is a…

> I am about 80% of the way through integrating with the OAI assistant API.

I've been there. Turns out, the last 20% takes x10 the time and effort compared to these first 80%.

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

#15

Post by cryptoz »

> When passing an entire design specification into an LLM and receiving a new representation token by token, generating a response would take several minutes, making it impractical.

Woe is me, it takes minutes to go from user-designed mockup to real, high-quality code? Unacceptable, I tell you!

But seriously, if there are speed improvements that you can make and are on the multiple-orders-of-magnitude then I do get it, those improvements are game-changing. But also, I think we're racing too quickly with expectations here; where minutes is unacceptable now when it used to take a human days? I mean, minutes is still pretty good! IMO.

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

#17

Post by JamesBarney »

danenania wrote: post #11

This is a thought-provoking post and I agree with the "avoid using AI as long as possible" point. AI is best used for things that can only be accomplished with AI--if there's any way to build the feature or solve the problem without it, then yeah, do that instead. Since everyone now has more or less equal access to the best models available, the best products will necessarily be defined by everything they do that's n…

100%, worked with a founder who thought the AI hype was overblown 5 years ago so focused on "workflows, UIs, UX, performance, and all that other old-fashioned stuff" while all his competitors focused on building AI models. Then ChatGPT came out and all his competitors work was instantly obsolete, and he could achieve AI feature parity in weeks.

He was right about what to build but for the wrong reasons and it's been a huge boon to his business.

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

#19

Post by tebbers »

golergka wrote: post #14
bob1029 wrote: post #3

> The solution: create your own toolchain No thanks. I have an actual job & customer needs to tend to. I am about 80% of the way through integrating with the OAI assistant API. The real secret is to already have a viable business that AI can subsequently improve . Making AI the business is a joke of a model to me. You'd have an easier time pitching javascript frameworks in our shop. Our current application of AI is a…

> I am about 80% of the way through integrating with the OAI assistant API. I've been there. Turns out, the last 20% takes x10 the time and effort compared to these first 80%.

Sounds like a normal development project then.

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

#20

Post by rvz »

bob1029 wrote: post #3

> The solution: create your own toolchain No thanks. I have an actual job & customer needs to tend to. I am about 80% of the way through integrating with the OAI assistant API. The real secret is to already have a viable business that AI can subsequently improve . Making AI the business is a joke of a model to me. You'd have an easier time pitching javascript frameworks in our shop. Our current application of AI is a…

> The real secret is to already have a viable business that AI can subsequently improve. Making AI the business is a joke of a model to me.

Precisely. No doubt that the tons of VC fuelled so-called AI startups that are wrapping around the ChatGPT API are already getting themselves disrupted due to the platform risk by OpenAI.

They never learn. Even when the possibility of OpenAI competing against their own partners is 99.99% despite denying it a year ago.

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