Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

AI companies are pivoting from creating gods to building products

aisnakeoil.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 210 posts

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

#71

Post by hnlmorg »

hellovai wrote: post #48
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…

i 100% percent agree. people get so caught up on trying to do everything 90% right with AI, but they forget there's a reason most websites offer at least 2 9's of uptime.

I’m not really sure what stance is here because you say you agree with the GP but then throw some figures that clearly disagree with the authors point (99% uptime is vastly greater than 90% accuracy).

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

#72

Post by Terr_ »

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.

And hopefully a real recommendation engine won't be weirdly biased towards different answers depending on the exact phrasing, tone, and idiom of the request.

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

#73

Post by Terr_ »

freejazz wrote: post #64
simonw wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Randomness is difficult. I wouldn't expect any LLM to be able to reliably produce random anything, except in the cases where they have access to tools (ChatGPT Code Interpreter could use Python's random.random() for example).

Okay, but repeating words?

Makes sense to me: It's not understanding and complying with your request, it's doing statistics to guess what kind of follow-up would be most common.

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

#74

Post by guywithahat »

8organicbits wrote: post #62
FpUser wrote: post #41

ChatGPT is very useful for me to the point that I pay subscription fee. To me it IS the product.

I haven't found a use for it. What do you use it for?

I use it to auto generate responses to ridiculous rhetorical questions on hacker news

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

#75

Post by tux1968 »

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…

It was likely the same back when the steam engine was invented. Everyone who could start a steam engine company, started a steam engine company. Because learning how to be a steam engine company was difficult, new, and unique. It would be a while before finding all the products that could be sold to people incorporating that new tech.

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

#76

Post by BobbyJo »

wruza wrote: post #70
BobbyJo wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have to write your code presuming that sometimes 'a + b' will be wrong? I don't. Software pretty much always "works" when you consider the definition of work to be "does what the programmer told it too". AI? Not so much.

It’s all about limits and edge cases. a+b may “fail” at INT_MAX and at 0.1+0.2. You don’t `==` your doubles, you don’t (a+b)/2 your mid, and you don’t ask ai to just book you vacation. You ask it to “collect average sentiment from `these_5k_reviews()` ignoring apparently fake ones, which are defined as ”. You don’t care about determinism because it’s a statistical instrument.

> and you don’t ask ai to just book you vacation. You ask it to “collect average sentiment from `these_5k_reviews()` ignoring apparently fake ones, which are defined as ”.

That's exactly my point. You have to interact directly with the A.I. and be aware of what its doing.

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

#77

Post by ants_everywhere »

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…

There's still a lot of real work to be done knowing what can be built and operated profitably, because the underlying tech is so new.

So just zooming out, we need people trying to figure out what can be built with this Lego set. We also need people like you're saying to work the other side so everyone can meet in the middle.

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

#78

Post by FpUser »

8organicbits wrote: post #62
FpUser wrote: post #41

ChatGPT is very useful for me to the point that I pay subscription fee. To me it IS the product.

I haven't found a use for it. What do you use it for?

For many things in general for IT related tasks in particular.

a) Write me shell script which does this and that. b) what Linux command with what arguments do I call to do such and such thing. c) Write me a function / class in language A/B/C that does this and that d) write me a SQL query that does this and that e) use it as a reference book for any programming language or whatever other subject.

etc. etc.

The answers sometimes come out wrong and / or does contain non trivial bugs. Being experienced programmer I usually have no problems spotting those just by looking at generated code or running test case created by ChatGPT. Alternatively there are no bugs but the approach is inefficient. In this case point explaining why it is inefficient and what to use instead ChatGPT will fix the approach. Basically it saves me a shit ton of time.

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

#79

Post by Lerc »

Instead of pivoting, can this behaviour be explained by trying lots of different things and then iterating on the ones that show promise?

It's all well and good to say "Make something people want" but for anything that people want usually one of three things is true

1. Someone else is already making it.

2. Nobody knows how to make it.

3. Nobody knows that people want it.

People experimenting with 2 and 3 will have a lot of failures, but the great successes will come from those groups as well.

Sure, every trend in business has a lot of companies going "we should do this because everyone else is" It was a dumb idea for previous trends and it is a dumb idea now. Consider how many companies did that for the internet. There were a lot of poorly thought out forays into having an internet presence. Of those companies still around, they pretty much will have an internet presence now that serves their purposes. They transition from "because everyone else is" as their motivation to "We want specific ability x,y,&z"

Perhaps the best way to get from "everyone else is doing it" to knowing what to build is to play in the pool.

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

#80

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]
Post reply on HN