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"This becomes magnified if the founder doesn’t have the skill to produce and operate the automation their business depends on" While that's true, I think it al

"This becomes magnified if the founder doesn’t have the skill to produce and operate the automation their business depends on" While that's true, I think it also pushes the profile of the ideal founder much more to the technical side than where it is now. Creating and maintaining automations is inherently difficult-to-impossible to fully automate, and will likely always require some level of engineering skill. Conversely, many of the most important skills a "business founder" brings to the table are also the most ripe for automation. Marketing, sales, administrative tasks, investor pitches, support, accounting: all have the potential to be automated to a large degree by AI.

danenania 4y ago
I'm curious why the downvotes? I'm a technical founder running a devtools/security startup. After experimenting with ChatGPT for a few hours, it's clear to me that given the right prompts and model tuning, it's already capable of doing the following tasks at an above average skill level: - Writing cold emails and responding to questions asked in replies - Writing a script for sales calls - Writing a pitch deck - Writing marketing page copy - Writing ad copy - Responding to customer support requests - Writing promotional social media posts I have more confidence in its ability to do these tasks given its current level of sophistication than to meaningfully contribute to engineering tasks (though it can certainly help there too). I wouldn't trust it with accounting or administrative tasks yet, but it doesn't seem far off.
- jijji 4y ago
  Adding to that ChatGPT can also generate working function code for many different programming languages given the right description in your prompt
  - danenania 4y ago
    That's true, but while it is definitely helpful and can accelerate development, I don't generally see writing working functions to do simple, discreet tasks as a bottleneck to engineering in the context of a nontrivial system. But writing quality cold emails tailored to each prospect is definitely a bottleneck to sales--they are time consuming/tedious to write, and you usually need to write tons of them to get results. Same story with marketing copy, ads, social media posts, etc. having the time and energy to produce this content on an ongoing basis is a major bottleneck to marketing.
    - Oxidation 4y ago
      On the receiving end, being able to rip though thousands of words of AI drivel and pick out the actual content (if any) is going to become a major skill in itself. Not that skim reading and summarisation isn't a skill now, but the noise floor is about to rise by many decibels. Probably there will be AI tools to de-AI messages, like reverse semantic companders[1], coming soon. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Companding https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Companding
- Oxidation 4y ago
  It really appears to have a default style or bland, corporate nothing-speak to it. It can write perfect emails crammed with every platitude and all in completely sterility, unless prompted otherwise. It can already write better HR-friendly pap than I ever could, and it can churn it out by the thousands of words. I'm very impressed by the power of "mere statistics" to construct dead-eyed language like the aliens in Blindsight. But, more than that, I'm grateful that I'm not employed to write such text in the first place. While there's an incoming boon for slackers who can just fire off a prompt email with a little bit of proofreading, there's a long run pinch on people who are employed just to talk nothings all day. Those who remain will have to watch over hundreds of thousands of words spraying out per day.

danenania 4y ago

I'm curious why the downvotes? I'm a technical founder running a devtools/security startup. After experimenting with ChatGPT for a few hours, it's clear to me that given the right prompts and model tuning, it's already capable of doing the following tasks at an above average skill level: - Writing cold emails and responding to questions asked in replies - Writing a script for sales calls - Writing a pitch deck - Writing marketing page copy - Writing ad copy - Responding to customer support requests - Writing promotional social media posts I have more confidence in its ability to do these tasks given its current level of sophistication than to meaningfully contribute to engineering tasks (though it can certainly help there too). I wouldn't trust it with accounting or administrative tasks yet, but it doesn't seem far off.

jijji 4y ago
Adding to that ChatGPT can also generate working function code for many different programming languages given the right description in your prompt
- danenania 4y ago
  That's true, but while it is definitely helpful and can accelerate development, I don't generally see writing working functions to do simple, discreet tasks as a bottleneck to engineering in the context of a nontrivial system. But writing quality cold emails tailored to each prospect is definitely a bottleneck to sales--they are time consuming/tedious to write, and you usually need to write tons of them to get results. Same story with marketing copy, ads, social media posts, etc. having the time and energy to produce this content on an ongoing basis is a major bottleneck to marketing.
  - Oxidation 4y ago
    On the receiving end, being able to rip though thousands of words of AI drivel and pick out the actual content (if any) is going to become a major skill in itself. Not that skim reading and summarisation isn't a skill now, but the noise floor is about to rise by many decibels. Probably there will be AI tools to de-AI messages, like reverse semantic companders[1], coming soon. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Companding https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Companding
Oxidation 4y ago
It really appears to have a default style or bland, corporate nothing-speak to it. It can write perfect emails crammed with every platitude and all in completely sterility, unless prompted otherwise. It can already write better HR-friendly pap than I ever could, and it can churn it out by the thousands of words. I'm very impressed by the power of "mere statistics" to construct dead-eyed language like the aliens in Blindsight. But, more than that, I'm grateful that I'm not employed to write such text in the first place. While there's an incoming boon for slackers who can just fire off a prompt email with a little bit of proofreading, there's a long run pinch on people who are employed just to talk nothings all day. Those who remain will have to watch over hundreds of thousands of words spraying out per day.