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AI companies are pivoting from creating gods to building products

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Re: AI companies are pivoting from creating gods to building products

#151

Post by aprilthird2021 »

rustypotato wrote: post #26

> But when developers put AI in consumer products, people expect it to behave like software, which means that it needs to work deterministically. If your AI travel agent books vacations to the correct destination only 90% of the time, it won’t be successful. This is the fundamental problem that prevents generative AI from becoming a "foundational building block" for most products. Even with rigorous safety measures i…

> If your AI travel agent books vacations to the correct destination only 90% of the time, it won’t be successful.

Well, I don't agree. I think there are ways to make this successful, but you have to be honest about the limitations you're working it with and play to your strengths.

How about an AI travel agent that gets your itineraries at a discount with the caveat that you be ready for anything. Like old, cheap standby tickets where you just went wherever there was an empty seat that day.

Or how about an AI Spotify for way less money than current Spotify. It's not competing on quality, it can't. Occasionally you'll hear weird artifacts, but hey it's way cheaper.

That could work, imo

Re: AI companies are pivoting from creating gods to building products

#152

Post by johnnyanmac »

ryandrake wrote: post #34

Companies keep going at it the wrong way. Instead of saying "We have AI, let's find products we can make out of AI!" they should be saying, "What products do people want, let's use whatever tools we have (including maybe AI) to make them." The idea that a company is an AI company should be as ridiculous as a company being a Python company. "We are Python-first, have Python experts, and all of our products are made wi…

if you're some Python contractor company, the angle makes sense. but of course, very few AI companies are out there trying to help others solve problems.

Re: AI companies are pivoting from creating gods to building products

#153

Post by null0pointer »

chasd00 wrote: post #55
slidehero wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

structured outputs help, paired with regular old systems design I think you can get pretty far. it really depends what you're building though. >If your AI travel agent books vacations to the correct destination only 90% of the time that would be using the wrong tool for the job. an AI travel agent would be very useful for making suggestions, either for destinations or giving a list of suggested flights, hotels etc, a…

> that would be using the wrong tool for the job. an AI travel agent would be very useful for making suggestions But that’s a recommendation engine and we have that already all over the place.

Yeah how am I supposed to raise millions of dollars without a working product by selling yesterday’s tech??

Re: AI companies are pivoting from creating gods to building products

#154

Post by johnnyanmac »

necroforest wrote: post #49
ryandrake wrote: post #34

Companies keep going at it the wrong way. Instead of saying "We have AI, let's find products we can make out of AI!" they should be saying, "What products do people want, let's use whatever tools we have (including maybe AI) to make them." The idea that a company is an AI company should be as ridiculous as a company being a Python company. "We are Python-first, have Python experts, and all of our products are made wi…

I don't entirely disagree with you, but "what products do people want" is overly conservative. Pre-ChatGPT, very few people wanted a (more or less) general purpose chatbot.

>very few people wanted a (more or less) general purpose chatbot.

I mean, I still don't. But from a cynical business point of view, cutting customer servce costs (something virtually every company of scale has) of 99% of customer calls is a very obvious application of a genera purpose chatbot.

expand that to "better search engine" and "better autocomplete" and you already have very efficient, practical, and valuable tools to sell. but of course companies took the angle of "this can replace all labor" instead of offering these as assistive productivity tools.

Re: AI companies are pivoting from creating gods to building products

#155

Post by johnnyanmac »

dyauspitr wrote: post #88
dragontamer wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of my local car dealerships is using an chat system of some kind (probably an LLM?). It's awful and a complete waste of time. I'm not sure if LLMs are getting good use yet / general chatbots are good or ready for business use.

Who cares. I literally use ChatGPT 30 times a day. It answers incredibly complex queries along with citations I can verify. Isn’t “this not good enough yet” line getting old? There nothing else that can estimate the number of cinder blocks I need to use for a project and account for the volume of concrete required for it (while taking into consideration the actual available volume available in a cinder block and sett…

>Who cares.

clearly anyone trying to buy a car, which is already an ordeal with a human as is.

>I literally use ChatGPT 30 times a day

good for you? I use Google. mos of my queries aren't complex.

>Isn’t “this not good enough yet” line getting old?

as long as companies pretend 2024 AI can replace skilled labor, no. It's getting old how many more snake oil salesmen keep pretending that I can just use ChatGPT to refactor this very hot loop of performance sensitive code. And no ChatGPT, I do not have the time budget (real time) to hook into some distributed load for that function.

I'm sure in a decade it will wow me. But I prefer to for it to stay in its lane and I stay in mine for that decade.

>There nothing else that can estimate the number of cinder blocks I need to use for a project

is Calculus really this insurmontable feat to be defending big tech over? I'm not a great mathmatican, but give them excel/sheets and they can do the same in minutes.

>I can think of literally thousands of things I have asked that would have taken hours of googling that I can get an answer for in minutes.

I'm glad it works out for you. I'm more scrutinous in my searches and I see that about half the time its sources are a bit off at best, and dangerously wrong at worst. 50/50 isn't worth any potential time saved for what I research.

>I think the problem is you haven’t shifted your mindset to using AI correctly yet.

perhaps. But for my line of work that's probably for the best.

Re: AI companies are pivoting from creating gods to building products

#156

Post by johnnyanmac »

dyauspitr wrote: post #120
goatlover wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It works for me, therefore it should work for everyone?

It’s pretty much the vein of the comment of the GP I’m responding to.

>I'm not sure if LLMs are getting good use yet / general chatbots are good or ready for business use.

They left room for the idea that the technology could evolve to be useful. You're simply dismissing anyone who cannot use he technology as is as "using it wrong".

As someone who did a tad of UX, that's pretty much the worst thing you can say to a tester. it doesn't help them understand your POV, it builds animosity towards you and the tester, and you're ruining the idea of the test because you are not going to be there to say "you're doing it wrong" when the UX releases. There's 0 upsides to making such a response.

Re: AI companies are pivoting from creating gods to building products

#157

Post by johnnyanmac »

Filligree wrote: post #98
axitanull wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure if this is a sarcasm or "you are holding it wrong" moment.

There’s skill involved in using these. Of course there is. That doesn’t make them useless.

depends on the tool and purpose. There was skill in navigating a file system, and now the next generation (obbscured from folder systems by mobile) seem to be losing that ability.

You can look at it in two ways, neither are particularly wrong unless your job is in fact to navigate file systems.

Re: AI companies are pivoting from creating gods to building products

#159

Post by johnnyanmac »

mondrian wrote: post #59
ryandrake wrote: post #34

Companies keep going at it the wrong way. Instead of saying "We have AI, let's find products we can make out of AI!" they should be saying, "What products do people want, let's use whatever tools we have (including maybe AI) to make them." The idea that a company is an AI company should be as ridiculous as a company being a Python company. "We are Python-first, have Python experts, and all of our products are made wi…

I 95% agree, but "what people want" is probably not a strong indicator on the thresholds of paradigm shifts, since people don't know what's possible.

I'd look at the collorary. "what people DON'T want" is a stronger (but still imperfect) indicator of how far you can push the overton curtain.

If you can't convince people that this is benefiting them, and instead focus on talking to investors about how much you can kill off the working class (aka, your "customers" and nowadays "product audience"), you will make it harder to properly sell your product nor audience. Companies have forgotten who the real customers are, no wonder their products aren't resonating.

Re: AI companies are pivoting from creating gods to building products

#160

Post by SkyPuncher »

ryandrake wrote: post #34

Companies keep going at it the wrong way. Instead of saying "We have AI, let's find products we can make out of AI!" they should be saying, "What products do people want, let's use whatever tools we have (including maybe AI) to make them." The idea that a company is an AI company should be as ridiculous as a company being a Python company. "We are Python-first, have Python experts, and all of our products are made wi…

I only partially agree with this. Having spent a lot of time in the “find a problem then the solution” way of working, I’ve found the solutions are often too tame and lack innovation.

When you’re truly bring novel new value to things, sometime you need to say “we can do this cool thing, but don’t know what that means”. Simply knowing that capability opens you up to better sets of solutions.

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