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AI agents are starting to eat SaaS

martinalderson.com

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Re: AI agents are starting to eat SaaS

#41

Post by andy_ppp »

I’m currently working on an in house ERP and inventory system for a specific kind of business. With very few people you can now instead of paying loads of money for some off the shelf solution to your software needs get something completely bespoke to your business. I think AI enables the age of boutique software that works fantastically for businesses, agencies will need to dramatically reduce their price to compete with in house teams.

I’m pretty certain AI quadruples my output at least and facilitates fixing, improving and upgrading poor quality inherited software much better than in the past. Why pay for SaaS when you can build something “good enough” in a week or two? You also get exactly what you want rather than some £300k per year CRM that will double or treble in price and never quite be what you wanted.

Re: AI agents are starting to eat SaaS

#42

Post by lwhi »

Aurornis wrote: post #16
Oarch wrote: post #9

Earlier this year I thought that rare proprietary knowledge and IP was a safe haven from AI, since LLMs can only scrub public data. Then it dawned on me how many companies are deeply integrating Copilot into their everyday workflows. It's the perfect Trojan Horse.

Using an LLM on data does not ingest that data into the training corpus. LLMs don’t “learn” from the information they operate on, contrary to what a lot of people assume. None of the mainstream paid services ingest operating data into their training sets. You will find a lot of conspiracy theories claiming that companies are saying one thing but secretly stealing your data, of course.

Information about the way we interact with the data (RLHF) can be used to refine agent behaviour.

While this isn't used specifically for LLM training, it can involve aggregating insights from customer behaviour.

Re: AI agents are starting to eat SaaS

#43

Post by henning »

Ah, yes. If the thing that is false is true, all kinds of interesting things happen! For example, if I became the queen of France, I could make people do silly dances! That is an interesting hypothesis that could play out in my imaginary world!

SaaS maintenance isn't about upgrading packages, it's about accountability and a point of contact when something breaks along with SLAs and contractual obligations. It isn't because building a kanban board app is hard. Someone else deals with provisioning, alerts, compliance, etc. and they are a real human who cannot hallucinate that the issue has been fixed when it hasn't. Depending on the contract and how it is breached, you can potentially take them to court and sue them to recover money lost as a result of their malpractice. None of that applies to a neural network that misreads the alert, does something completely wrong, then concludes the issue is fixed the way the latest models constantly do when I use them.

Re: AI agents are starting to eat SaaS

#46

Post by protocolture »

sotrusting wrote: post #23
Aurornis wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Using an LLM on data does not ingest that data into the training corpus. LLMs don’t “learn” from the information they operate on, contrary to what a lot of people assume. None of the mainstream paid services ingest operating data into their training sets. You will find a lot of conspiracy theories claiming that companies are saying one thing but secretly stealing your data, of course.

[flagged]

>Ah yes, blindly trusting the corpo fascists that stole the entire creative output of humanity to stop now.

Stealing implies the thing is gone, no longer accessible to the owner.

People aren't protected from copying in the same way. There are lots of valid exclusions, and building new non competing tools is a very common exclusion.

The big issue with the OpenAI case, is that they didn't pay for the books. Scanning them and using them for training is very much likely to be protected. Similar case with the old Nintendo bootloader.

The "Corpo Fascists" are buoyed by your support for the IP laws that have thus far supported them. If anything, to be less "Corpo Fascist" we would want more people to have more access to more data. Mankind collectively owns the creative output of Humanity, and should be able to use it to make derivative works.

Re: AI agents are starting to eat SaaS

#47

Post by james_marks »

fzeroracer wrote: post #21
Aurornis wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Using an LLM on data does not ingest that data into the training corpus. LLMs don’t “learn” from the information they operate on, contrary to what a lot of people assume. None of the mainstream paid services ingest operating data into their training sets. You will find a lot of conspiracy theories claiming that companies are saying one thing but secretly stealing your data, of course.

> You will find a lot of conspiracy theories claiming that companies are saying one thing but secretly stealing your data, of course. It's not really a conspiracy when we have multiple examples of high profile companies doing exactly this. And it keeps happening. Granted I'm unaware of cases of this occuring currently with professional AI services but it's basic security 101 that you should never let anything even ha…

> never let anything even have the remote opportunity to ingest data unless you don't care about the data

This is objectively untrue? Giants swaths of enterprise software is based on establishing trust with approved vendors and systems.

Re: AI agents are starting to eat SaaS

#48

Post by blibble »

mc32 wrote: post #34
sotrusting wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, so totally cool to ignore the law but our TOS is a binding contract.

Yes, they can be sued for breach of contract. And it’s not a regular ToS but a signed MSA and other legally binding documents.

the license on my open source code is a contract, and they ignored that

if they can get away with it (say by claiming it's "fair use"), they'll ignore corporate ones too

Re: AI agents are starting to eat SaaS

#49

Post by lwhi »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #7
MangoToupe wrote: post #2

> If I want an internal dashboard, I don't even think that Retool or similar would make it easier. I just build the dashboard Oh, child.... building is easy. Coordinating maintenance of the tool across a non-technical team is hell.

Indeed, wisdom is being able to see the lifecycle like a time knife and making favorable decisions based on past experiences (ie getting the most value from what may need to be built and operated for its lifetime). Writing code is easy, managing a living codebase with ever changing business requirements and stakeholders is hard.

Exactly.

Corporations think in terms of risk.

Second only to providing a useful function, a successful SaaS app will have been built to mitigate risk well.

It's not going to be easy to meet these requirements without prior knowledge and experience.

Re: AI agents are starting to eat SaaS

#50

Post by mulquin »

fzeroracer wrote: post #21
Aurornis wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Using an LLM on data does not ingest that data into the training corpus. LLMs don’t “learn” from the information they operate on, contrary to what a lot of people assume. None of the mainstream paid services ingest operating data into their training sets. You will find a lot of conspiracy theories claiming that companies are saying one thing but secretly stealing your data, of course.

> You will find a lot of conspiracy theories claiming that companies are saying one thing but secretly stealing your data, of course. It's not really a conspiracy when we have multiple examples of high profile companies doing exactly this. And it keeps happening. Granted I'm unaware of cases of this occuring currently with professional AI services but it's basic security 101 that you should never let anything even ha…

To be pedantic, it is still a conspiracy, just no longer a theory.
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