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73% of AI startups are just prompt engineering

pub.towardsai.net

61–70 of 212 posts

Re: 73% of AI startups are just prompt engineering

#61

This makes no sense to me? I don't understand why a company, even if it is using GPT or Claude as their true backend, is going to leave API calls in Javascript that anyone can find. Sure maybe a couple would, but 73% of those tested? Surely your browser is going to talk to their webserver, and yup sure it'll then go off and use Claude etc then return the answer to you, but surely they're not all going to just skin an…

It's very confusing in the text of the article, at times it sounds like the author is using heuristic methods (like timings) but at times it sounds like they somehow have access to network traffic from the provider's backend. I could 100% believe that a ton of these companies are making API calls to providers directly from an SPA, but the flow diagrams in the article seem to specifically rule that out as an explanation.

I might allow them more credit if the article wasn't in such an obviously LLM-written style. I've seen a few cases like this, now, where it seems like someone did some very modest technical investigation or even none at all and then prompted an LLM to write a whole article based on it. It comes out like this... a whole lot of bullet points and numbered lists, breathless language about the implications, but on repeated close readings you can't tell what they actually did.

It's unfortunate that, if this author really did collect this data, their choice to have an LLM write the article and in the process obscure the details has completely undermined their credibility.

Re: 73% of AI startups are just prompt engineering

#62
That is lower than I expected. There are just a handful of companies that create llms. They are all more ir less similar. So all automation is in using them, which is prompt engineering if you see that way.

The bigger question is, this is the same story with apps on mobile phones. Apple and google could easily replicate your app if they wanted to and they did too. That danger is much higher with these ai startups. The llms are already there in terms of functionality, all the creators figured out the value is in vertical integration and all of them are doing it. From that sense all these startups are just showing them what to build. Even perplexity and cursor are in danger.

Re: 73% of AI startups are just prompt engineering

#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 probably AI generated because it doesn't make any sense.

Re: 73% of AI startups are just prompt engineering

#66

The thing that drives me nuts is that most "AI Applications" are just adding crappy chat to a web app. A true AI application should have AI driven workflows that automate boring or repetitive tasks without user intervention, and simplify the UI surface of the application.

I'm firmly of the opinion that, as a general rule, if you're directly embedding the output of a model into a workflow and you're not one of a handful of very big players, you're probably doing it wrong.[1]

If we overlook that non-determinism isn't really compatible with a lot of business processes and assume you can make the model spit out exactly what you need, you can't get around the fact that an LLM is going to be a slower and more expensive way of getting the data you need in most cases.

LLMs are fantastic for building things. Use them to build quickly and pivot where needed and then deploy traditional architecture for actually running the workloads. If your production pipeline includes an LLM somewhere in the flow, you need to really, seriously slow down and consider whether that's actually the move that makes sense.

[1] - There are exceptions. There are always exceptions. It's a general rule not a law of physics.

Re: 73% of AI startups are just prompt engineering

#67
post #17

One of the biggest problems frontier models will face going forward is how many tasks require expertise that cannot be achieved through Internet-scale pre-training. Any reasonably informed person realizes that most AI start-ups looking to solve this are not trying to create their own pre-trained models from scratch (they will almost always lose to the hyperscale models). A pragmatic person realizes that they're not f…

The question that isn't answered completely in the article is how useful are the pipelines for these startups? The article certainly implies that for at least some of these startups there very little value add in the wrapper.

Re: 73% of AI startups are just prompt engineering

#68

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 find it shocking that most comments here just accept the article as fact and discuss the implications.

The message might not even be wrong. But why is everybody's BS detection on ice in the AI topic space? Come one people, you can all do better than this!

Thanks for flagging. Though whenever such a made up thing is flagged, we lose the chance to discuss this (meta) topic. People need to be aware how prevalent this is. By just hiding it every time we notice, we're preventing everybody to read the kind of comment you wrote and recalibrate their BS-meters.

Re: 73% of AI startups are just prompt engineering

#69

Where is this guy sitting that he is able to collect all of this data? And why is he able to release it all in a blog post? (my company wouldn't allow me to collect and release customer data like this.)

There's a link in the preview of TFA that unlocks the rest of the article, looks like this for me:

https://medium.com/@teja.kusireddy23/i-reverse-engineered-20...

The article is basically a description of where to look for clues. Perhaps they've contracted with some of these companies and don't want to break some NDA by naming them, but still know a lot about how they work.

Re: 73% of AI startups are just prompt engineering

#70

Prompt engineering and using an expensive general model in order to prove your market, and then putting in the resources to develop a smaller(cheaper) specialized model seems like a good idea?

Are people down to have a bunch of specialized models? The expectation set by OpenAI and everyone else has set is that you will have one model that can do everything for you. It’s like how we’ve seen basically all gadgets meld into the smart phone. People don’t have Garmin’s and beepers and clock radios anymore (or dedicated phones!). It’s all on the screen that fits in your pocket. Any would-be gadget is now just an…

> The expectation set by OpenAI and everyone else has set is that you will have one model that can do everything for you.

I don’t think that’s the expectation set by “everyone else” in the AI space, even if it arguably is for OpenAI (which has always, at least publicly, had something of a focus on eventual omnicapable superintelligence.) I think Google Antigravity is evidence of this: there’s a main, user selected coding model, but regardless of which coding model is used, there are specialized models used for browser interaction and image generation. While more and more capabilities are at least tolerably supported by the big general purpose models, the range of specialized models seems to be increasing rather than decreasing, and seems likely that, for conplex efforts, combining a general purpose model with a set of focussed, task-specific models will be a useful approach for the forseeable future.

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