As in every hype cycle: When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. A little while ago the hammer was blockchain, now it's AI.
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Don't build AI products the way everyone else is doing it
101–110 of 261 posts
Re: Don't build AI products the way everyone else is doing it
#102The issue here isn’t AI, it’s not shovels and goldrushes, and it’s not about building how others are doing it.
It’s fundamental value.
It’s who is creating value that cannot be destroyed. Who owns the house is determined by who builds the foundation first, and that means those that control the ecosystems.
All others will play, survive, rent, and buy inside of those ecosystems.
If you’re not building fundamental value, you are an intermediary, which may be huge companies, but ultimately companies built on others. If you don’t own the API and the customer, you’re a renter. And renters can get evicted.
Those opportunities may still be worth chasing, but we shouldn’t get confused or over complicate what’s going on or we risk investing and building straw houses when brick was available.
Nothing wrong with that. Respect to success. But let’s keep fundamental value in mind, as it’s the most important thing for first generation technology companies.
Re: Don't build AI products the way everyone else is doing it
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
To be fair, LLMs as a tech are actually useful, even just to take human input. Blockchain an K8s though... Eh. Geekery for geekery's sake.
I've worked for a number of enterprise companies. All have moved to Kubernetes. And it's not just geekery by developers who aren't as smart as you. It's because it allows you to treat all of your infrastructure in one way. Whether you are on GCP, AWS or On-Premise, whether you use Java, Spark, Web Serving or ML Training, whether you are deploying direct to Production or go through multiple staging environments etc. I…
Seriously. People make Kubernetes out to be this wildly complicated technology, but if your environment is more complex than just "Here's a glorified VM running on a couple EC2 instances behind a load balancer," it has a lot of benefits and is really not that difficult to set up in this day and age.
Re: Don't build AI products the way everyone else is doing it
#104> One awesome, massive free resource for generating data is simply the Internet.
Isn't that building AI products _exactly_ the way everyone else is doing it? There are things in the world the internet doesn't know much about, like how to interpret sensor data. There are lots of transducers in the world, and the internet knows jack about most of them.
Re: Don't build AI products the way everyone else is doing it
#105The issue here isn’t AI, it’s not shovels and goldrushes, and it’s not about building how others are doing it. It’s fundamental value. It’s who is creating value that cannot be destroyed. Who owns the house is determined by who builds the foundation first, and that means those that control the ecosystems. All others will play, survive, rent, and buy inside of those ecosystems. If you’re not building fundamental value…
I agree with you, but only to a point. In a healthy market renters can make landlords compete for their business. Plenty of healthy companies are built on other's infrastructure.
But your point remains: Where will the linchpin be? Will AI be a commodity like the cloud, or a fundamental asset like search? And how quickly will we find out?
Re: Don't build AI products the way everyone else is doing it
#106I totally agree with this article, it's actually not that complicated to build your own toolchain, you can use one of the many open models, and if you're building it for profit make sure you read the ToS.
Build a moat y'all - or be prepared to potentially shut down!
Re: Don't build AI products the way everyone else is doing it
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think we'll find that, when the dust settles, AI's usefulness wasn't as impactful as we thought. AI is only as good as its data and no meaningful dataset is 100% representative and 100% accurate IMHO. Don't get me wrong-- it's neat and all, and it can be somewhat useful in the right context, but the hype is huge. Much bigger than Kubernetes ever saw and probably bigger than blockchain.
There's a huge win to be had though with "this is my natural language data, give me natural language insights at a 100 foot view, at a 50,000 foot view, etc". This is one of the big pulls OpenAI is hoping for w/ GPTs/Assistants.
Too bad this costs a few million (only if you're using insanely subsidized hardware).
Re: Don't build AI products the way everyone else is doing it
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's why you should spend your time building a great product rather than an also-ran model. While you're working on your model, your competitors are working on their products. In a few months when your model is made obsolete by the latest OpenAI release, your competitors will have a better product and a better model than you.
This is a persistent, but in fact a poorly justified opinion. First of all, according to linked article, they were able to make something much better and cheaper than Chatgpt (for their task obv.) in quite a short period of time. What stops them from making the same feat again? What makes you think, that the same boring bland OpenAI wrappers are going to take off at all, let alone survive till next OpenAI iteration?…
You seem to be conflating a "boring" product with using OpenAI models, but the two have nothing to do with each other. 99% of users don't care what models you're using underneath. They only care how well the product works.
"What stops them from making the same feat again?"
Hopefully nothing, for their sake, because they're going to have to do it again and again to keep up.
Look, I'm not saying this specific product was wrong to build their own models for certain tasks. If it works for their product and they're getting users, then bully for them. I just don't think it's great general advice. I also think it provides a lot less long-term differentiation and competitive edge than the author of the post seems to think.
Re: Don't build AI products the way everyone else is doing it
#109I've survived "What is your organization's Kubernetes strategy." And then came along "You need to integrate Blockchain in your business processes." And now is the time for "make your products smart with AI" season.
To be fair, LLMs as a tech are actually useful, even just to take human input. Blockchain an K8s though... Eh. Geekery for geekery's sake.
This is what each of those trends said.
Re: Don't build AI products the way everyone else is doing it
#110As in every hype cycle: When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. A little while ago the hammer was blockchain, now it's AI.
Blockchain isn't anywhere near as useful as a hammer. If you were gullible enough to fall for the promises of the blockchain, then of course you're going to be disappointed that AI isn't a get-rich-quick pyramid scheme that will make you millions of dollars without any investment of time or energy or original thought, because if that's all you're looking for, you're going to be continuously disappointed (and deserve to be). There's a lot more to AI than to the blockchain, and comparing the two as equal shows you don't understand what either of them are.