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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

#191

Post by jasonjmcghee »

FridgeSeal wrote: post #180
jasonjmcghee wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everything is a spectrum. At what point can you claim that you did "it"? Do you have to use an open source model instead of an API? Do you have to fine tune it? How much do you need to? Do you have to create synthetic data for training? Do you have to gather your own data? Do you need to train from scratch? Do you need to come up with a novel architecture? 10 years ago if you gathered some data and trained a linear m…

> At what point can you claim that you did "it"? When the core of your business ist something that’s shamelessly farmed out to . It would be like calling yourself a restaurant, and then getting uber eats deliveries of whatever customers ordered and handing that to them.

I mean- yeah I think that's a fair analogy.

The customers don't see where the food is coming from and are still coming to eat. If you can make the economics work...

You don't have the moat other restaurants have, but you're still a restaurant.

Re: 73% of AI startups are just prompt engineering

#192

Post by chmod775 »

teiferer wrote: post #147
chmod775 wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yeah, TBH my BS detector is going off because this article never explains how he is able to intercept these calls. You mean, except for explaining what he's doing 4-5 times? He was literally repeating himself restating it. Half the article is about the various indicators he used. THERE'S EXAMPLES OF THEM. There's this bit: > Monitored their network traffic for 60-second sessions > Decompiled and analyzed their Java…

> Monitored their network traffic for 60-second sessions How can he monitor what's going on between a startup's backend and OpenAI's server? > The truth is just an F12 away That's just not how this works. You can see the network traffic between your browser and some service. In 12 cases that was OpenAI or similar. Fine. But that's not 73%. What about the rest? He literally has a diagram claiming that the startups con…

> How can he monitor what's going on between a startup's backend and OpenAI's server?

He is not claiming to be doing that. He says what and how he's capturing multiple times. He says he's capturing what's happening in browser sessions. Reflect on what else you may to re-evaluate or discard if you misunderstood this.

> That's just not how this works. You can see the network traffic between your browser and some service.

Yes, the author is well aware of that as are presumably most readers. However for example if your client makes POST requests to the startup's backend like startup.com/api/make-request-to-chatgpt and the payload is {systemPrompt: "...", userPrompt: "..."}, not much guessing as to what is going on is necessary.

> You are not bothered by the only sign that the author even exist is this one article and the previous one?

Moving goalposts. He may or not be full of shit. Guess we'll see if/when we see the receipts he promised to put on GitHub.

What actually bothers is the lack of general reading comprehension being displayed in this thread.

> Together with the claim to be a startup founder? Anybody can claim that.

What? Anybody can be a startup founder today. Crazy claim. Also... what?

> It doesn't automatically provide credibility.

Almost nobody in this space has credibility. That could turn out to be Sam Altman's alias and I'd probably trust it even less.

In any case evaluating whether or not a text is credible should preferably happen after one has understood what was written.

Re: 73% of AI startups are just prompt engineering

#193

Post by chmod775 »

DetroitThrow wrote: post #149
chmod775 wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yeah, TBH my BS detector is going off because this article never explains how he is able to intercept these calls. You mean, except for explaining what he's doing 4-5 times? He was literally repeating himself restating it. Half the article is about the various indicators he used. THERE'S EXAMPLES OF THEM. There's this bit: > Monitored their network traffic for 60-second sessions > Decompiled and analyzed their Java…

>Response times matching OpenAI’s API latency patterns (150–400ms for most queries) This also matches the latency of a large number of DB queries and non-OpenAI LLM inference requests. >Token usage patterns identical to GPT-4’s pricing tiers What? Yes this totally smells real. He also mentions backoff patterns, which I'm not sure how he'd disambiguate extremely standard backoff in a normal API. Given the ridiculousne…

Why is this comment here? Am I supposed to defend that guy's article now?

Just because I'm frustrated with someone's inability to understand a text does not imply I want to defend or even personally believe what was written.

Re: 73% of AI startups are just prompt engineering

#194

Post by zkmon »

FridgeSeal wrote: post #180
jasonjmcghee wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everything is a spectrum. At what point can you claim that you did "it"? Do you have to use an open source model instead of an API? Do you have to fine tune it? How much do you need to? Do you have to create synthetic data for training? Do you have to gather your own data? Do you need to train from scratch? Do you need to come up with a novel architecture? 10 years ago if you gathered some data and trained a linear m…

> At what point can you claim that you did "it"? When the core of your business ist something that’s shamelessly farmed out to . It would be like calling yourself a restaurant, and then getting uber eats deliveries of whatever customers ordered and handing that to them.

Restaurants are a spectrum too. Some restaurants may not have much of what you call as kitchen. It's not like they make food from raw ingredients. They might just assemble the food. A lot of it could be instant food, pre-made. They might just do wrapping, stuffing and heating it up. Not too different from what uber eats does.

Re: 73% of AI startups are just prompt engineering

#195

Post by nottorp »

zkmon wrote: post #194
FridgeSeal wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> At what point can you claim that you did "it"? When the core of your business ist something that’s shamelessly farmed out to . It would be like calling yourself a restaurant, and then getting uber eats deliveries of whatever customers ordered and handing that to them.

Restaurants are a spectrum too. Some restaurants may not have much of what you call as kitchen. It's not like they make food from raw ingredients. They might just assemble the food. A lot of it could be instant food, pre-made. They might just do wrapping, stuffing and heating it up. Not too different from what uber eats does.

Great analogy. I don't eat at those kinds of "restaurants" though.

If I buy pre made it's at best from supermarkets for heating at home.

Re: 73% of AI startups are just prompt engineering

#196

Post by zkmon »

nottorp wrote: post #195
zkmon wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Restaurants are a spectrum too. Some restaurants may not have much of what you call as kitchen. It's not like they make food from raw ingredients. They might just assemble the food. A lot of it could be instant food, pre-made. They might just do wrapping, stuffing and heating it up. Not too different from what uber eats does.

Great analogy. I don't eat at those kinds of "restaurants" though. If I buy pre made it's at best from supermarkets for heating at home.

If restaurants can't use pre-made food, they would have to have a farm in their backyard with all sorts of animals, veggies and grain crops.

Re: 73% of AI startups are just prompt engineering

#197

Post by ElasticBottle »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #64

I decided to flag this article because it has to be fake. The author never explains how he is able to intercept these API calls to OpenAI, etc. I definitely believe tons of these companies are just wrappers, but they'd be doing the "wrapping" in their backend, with only a couple (dumb) companies doing the calls directly to OpenAI from the front end where they could be traced. This article is BS. My guess is it was pr…

I had the exact same thoughts. Even while I don't disagree with the premise, I'm so confused as to how they are intercepting the calls.

Like I don't think 73% of companies are foolish enough to be calling their LLM provider from the front-end with their API key.

Either they are doing something that they aren't mentioning, or this is just complete bogus.

Re: 73% of AI startups are just prompt engineering

#200

Post by port11 »

pitched wrote: post #152
mycall wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think this sense of “less is more” roughly means refactoring? I think the reason these go south so often is because we’re likely moving complexity around rather than removing it. Removing a layer from the stack means making a different layer more complex to take over for it.

Generally that seems to be true u less we're talking about removing cruft that wasn't needed.

Yearly front-end rewrites are quite the joke, but they also reveal that the team didn't really get the underlying assumptions correctly.

Or maybe they just really wanted to try Redux/Zustand/Jotai/the cool new router and ended up making a mess that will need cleaning next year.

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