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Three kinds of AI products work

seangoedecke.com

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Re: Three kinds of AI products work

#81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agentic tools is already delivering an increase in productivity equivalent to many FTEs. I say this as someone in the position of having to hire coders and needing far fewer than we otherwise would have.

Well, yeah, as they say on Wikipedia: {{Citation Needed}} Can AI-as-it-currently-is save FTEs? Sure: but, again, there's a template for that: {{How Many}} -- 1% of your org chart? 10%? In my case it's around 0.5% right now. Or, to reframe it a bit: can AI pay Sam A's salary? Sure! His stock options? Doubtful. His future plans? Heck nah!

400-800%. That is to say, I am hiring 4x-8x fewer developers for the same total output (measured in burn down progress, not AI-biased metrics like kLOC).

Re: Three kinds of AI products work

#83
Regarding games: > A third reason could be that generated content is just not a good fit for gaming.

This is my current opinion as a game developer. IMO this isn't going to be fun for most once the novelty wears off. Games are goal oriented at the end of the day and the great games are masterfully curated multi-disciplinary experiences. I'd argue throwing a game wrapper around an LLM is a new LLM experience, not a new game experience.

Re: Three kinds of AI products work

#84

Very obviously missing the mundane agentic work. I think the following things are basically already solved, and are just waiting for the right harness: - Call this government service center, wait on hold for 45 minutes, then when they finally answer, tell them to reactivate my insurance marketplace account that got wrongly deleted. - Find a good dentist within 2mi from my house, call them to make sure they take my in…

> Figure out how I'm going to get from Baltimore to Boston next Thursday, here's $100 and if you need more, ask me.

I tried something like this last month. I was going on a holiday and asked LLM to prepare a sightseeing guide on a fixed budget. The LLMs plan looked feasible unless you looked closer.

The first issue was the opening/closing times of certain attractions. It kept saying stuff like - "At 6pm you can go and visit place X". While in reality X closed at 5pm.

Second issue was underestimating the walking speed/distance. The plans were often fully packed with lots of walking. Now without a Google maps guidance it often underestimated the time. Instead of say 10 mins between A and B it routinely underestimated the time to be 5-6 mins.

I keep prompting it go back and check the opening hours. And once it took that into account the walking routes became complicated- often double backing to same location. Lots of prompts and re-prompts to get it right.

So, I don't know if this is already solved - at least at scale and within costs - especially given the token costs.

Re: Three kinds of AI products work

#86
post #6

This seems to be biased heavily towards products that look like an LLM. And yes, only a small number of those work. But that's because if your product is a thing I chat with, it immediately is in competition with ChatGPT/Claude/Grok/etc, leading to everything the article expressed. But those are hardly the only use cases for LLMs, let alone AI (whatever people nowadays mean by AI) To name some of the obvious counter-…

Yeah, the "normal" people I know, use AI in Grammarly or Adobe Express, or a astonished and delighted by NotebookLM, mostly because of the audio overviews--but also because grounding chat with sources gets you better, focused chat.

And, outside of chat, it's less clear that that big labs win all the time. People who care about making films, rather than video memes, often look to Kling or Runway, not just Sora. People who want to make images often have a passion for Midjourney that I've never seen for ImageFX.(Nanobanna for editing often sparks joy, so a big lab can play successfully in such a space, but that is diffferent from saying it is destined to win.)

Re: Three kinds of AI products work

#88
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> summarization can you point me to a useful example of this? i see websites including ai-generated summaries all the time, but i've yet to see one that is actually useful and it seems like the product being sold here is simply "ai", not the summary itself - that is, companies and product managers are under pressure to implement some sort of AI, and sticking summaries in places is a way for them to fill that requirem…

I sometimes get contracts, NDAs, or terms and conditions which normally I would automatically accept because they are low stakes and I don't have time to read them. At best I would skim them. Now I pass them through an LLM and ask them to point out interesting, unconventional, or surprising things, and to summarize the document in a few bullet points. They're quite good at this, and I am can use what I discover later…

[deleted]

Re: Three kinds of AI products work

#89
I think there's a space for something that wraps an llm (especially multimodal) to do something that's halfway to agentic. Yes you could do it yourself but it's not worth it to you to figure out prompts etc, especially when someone has already optimized it. Plus, it could go from 100 clicks and 10 minutes in front of chatgpt to zero clicks, automated ingest, and get an email when the results is baked.

A good example I saw recently was stripping ads from podcasts.

Re: Three kinds of AI products work

#90
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I sometimes get contracts, NDAs, or terms and conditions which normally I would automatically accept because they are low stakes and I don't have time to read them. At best I would skim them. Now I pass them through an LLM and ask them to point out interesting, unconventional, or surprising things, and to summarize the document in a few bullet points. They're quite good at this, and I am can use what I discover later…

for your first one, if you're just feeding docs into a chatbot prompt and asking for a summary, i think that matches what the article would call a "chatbot product" rather than a summarization product. fireflies.ai is interesting though, that's more what i was looking for. i've used the meeting summary tool in google meet before and it was hilariously bad, it's good to hear that there are some companies out there hav…

I guess you’re right re chatbot for summaries. I was thinking about the use case and not the whole integrated product experience.

For example, for code gen I use agents like Claude Code, one-shot interfaces like Codex tasks, and chatbots like the generic ChatGPT. It depends on the task at hand, how much time I have, whether I am on the phone or on a laptop, and my mood. It’s all code gen though.

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