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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

#31

Post by BobbyJo »

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…

I've made this statement a bunch in other mediums: The reason AI software is always "AI software" and not just a useful product is because AI is fallible.

The reason we can build such deep and complex software system is because each layer can assume the one below it will "just work". If it only worked 99% of the time, we'd all still be interfacing with assembly, because we'd have to be aware of the mistakes that were made and deal with them, otherwise the errors would compound until software was useless.

Until AI achieves the level of determinism we have with other software, it'll have to stay at the surface.

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

#33

Post by slidehero »

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…

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, and then hand off to your standard systems to complete the transaction.

there are also a lot of systems that tolerate "faults" just fine such as image/video/audio gen

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

#34

Post by ryandrake »

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 with Python. Our customers want their apps to have Python in them. We just have to 'productize Python' and find the right killer app for Python and we'll be successful!" Going at it from the wrong direction. Replace Python in that quote with AI, and you probably have something a real company has said in 2024.

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

#35

Post by loa_in_ »

BobbyJo wrote: post #31
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…

I've made this statement a bunch in other mediums: The reason AI software is always "AI software" and not just a useful product is because AI is fallible. The reason we can build such deep and complex software system is because each layer can assume the one below it will "just work". If it only worked 99% of the time, we'd all still be interfacing with assembly, because we'd have to be aware of the mistakes that were…

But software works only 99% of the time. For some definition of work: 99% of days it's run, 99% of clicks, 99% of CPU time in given component, 99% of versions released and linked into some business' production binary, 99% of github tags, 99% of commits, 99% of software that that one guy says is battle-tested

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

#36

Post by findmore77 »

23B1 wrote: post #29

Well the whole 'creating gods' thing is just silly fantasy nonsense to cover up for what's really going on, which is novelty and gimmicks. It's okay, I mean even the internet started out as Charlie_Bit_Me.avi and free porn.

Factually incorrect about the genesis of the internet or even the “mass” internet. But, okay.

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

#37

Post by tomrod »

simonw wrote: post #23
mupuff1234 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you know they have a lot of paid subscribers if their numbers aren't public? I'd guess that outside of a core "fanbase" / early adopter type they don't have that many subscribers.

Rumors. The Information had a story about this (but it's behind a paywall): https://www.theinformation.com/articles/openais-annualized-r... - their story was based on "people with knowledge of the situation" aka insider leaks. I don't know the source for https://www.notoriousplg.ai/p/notorious-openais-revenue-brea... but it could just be that same Information article.

They leak like a sieve to their trusted testers.

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

#38

Post by sroussey »

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…

This has been the case for decades. Look at the internet and .com’s. Mobile. Etc.

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

#39

Post by candiddevmike »

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 blogged about our glorious journey Becoming an AI Company (TM)

https://candid.dev/blog/becoming-an-ai-company/

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

#40

Post by Groxx »

loa_in_ wrote: post #35
BobbyJo wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've made this statement a bunch in other mediums: The reason AI software is always "AI software" and not just a useful product is because AI is fallible. The reason we can build such deep and complex software system is because each layer can assume the one below it will "just work". If it only worked 99% of the time, we'd all still be interfacing with assembly, because we'd have to be aware of the mistakes that were…

But software works only 99% of the time. For some definition of work: 99% of days it's run, 99% of clicks, 99% of CPU time in given component, 99% of versions released and linked into some business' production binary, 99% of github tags, 99% of commits, 99% of software that that one guy says is battle-tested

Software works so much more than 99% of the time that it's a rather deliberate strawman to claim otherwise.

Newly-"AI"-branded things that I have touched work substantially less than 90% of the time. There are like 3 orders of magnitude difference, even people who aren't paying any attention at all are noticing it.

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