4 ms·

First of all, good luck and the implementation looks pretty slick. I relate to the other comments that (1) Explosion of AI generated blogs / copy etc is not wh

by lyair1 4y ago

First of all, good luck and the implementation looks pretty slick. I relate to the other comments that (1) Explosion of AI generated blogs / copy etc is not what we need and it's hard to see the value of it long term (2) this looks like a simple usage on top of GPT4, no real IP / innovation - this is risky from a business model perspective. Good luck!

SkyPuncher 4y ago
I'm _extremely_ surprised to see all of the YC companies that are essentially just layers on OpenAI. I think it's safe to assume more models will be introduced and vendor lock-in can be avoided, but I find it hard to believe some of the "simpler" ideas can create compelling, VC-scale businesses.
- anon291 4y ago
  Why are you surprised? OpenAI is Sam Altman's (YC's last leader) pet project. Of course, YC is highly incentivized to produce more customers for OpenAI
  - iamdamian 4y ago
    Incentivized how, specifically?
    - anon291 4y ago
      Well there's this thing called friendship. You see, executives at VC firms and such are typically pretty friendly with each other, and view their fellow executive's success as potentially pulling them up the ladder. AI is the next big thing. Sam Altman and his company is in a nice spot to profit. Moreover, YC research is an investor in OpenAI. Thus, because the executives want Altman to succeed (to presumably advance their own career) and because they're in charge of YC, which is an investor in openai, they have every incentive in funding startups that then use OpenAI as the main platform.
      - iamdamian 4y ago
        This hypothetical incentive structure seems tenuous at best and not the open and shut case it sounded like in your original comment. I’m sorry but I don’t buy it.
        anon291 4y ago
        You don't buy that people want their investments to succeed and their friends to become rich? Those seem like some of the strongest incentives to me.
        nylonstrung 4y ago
        So the YC Partners are actively investing in worse companies that will degrade their returns so that OpenAI/Microsoft can add new customers that do almost no volume compared to ChatGPT or Bing? That's not how YC or VC works.
        anon291 4y ago
        There's more to businesses than simply the underlying tech. If technical superiority were the sole determinant of business success, the tech landscape would look a lot different today. Rather, YC is banking that some of the use cases get people hooked, thus causing vendor lock in, to these new apps, which end up benefiting YC both by benefitting the companies they're funding as well as benefitting open ai. I don't share the sentiment that companies that are 'just' layers over OpenAI are incapable of building moats.
- autoconfig 4y ago
  I think it’s both correct and realistic to assume that most ideas won’t reach venture scale size. After all, the vast majority of startups fail. However I’d like to point out that any software product that is built is per definition a layer on top of something else and it will always start small. The key question is whether that “layer” is useful and if it can keep getting increasingly useful with time.
- jfengel 4y ago
  I suppose it's inevitable that the first uses are going to be the trivial ones. They'll be first to market. I'm sure they imagine that when they figure out something actually worth doing, they'll already have a user base and revenue stream and reputation. If there's somebody out there doing something more innovative, they'll either buy them out or reproduce their idea in-house. Me, I'm skeptical that there's a "there" here. But that's why somebody else is getting rich and I'm not.
- danielgh7 4y ago
  While integrating with OpenAI is just an API call away I don't think it takes away from the user experience. Sure its less of a moat but plenty of products have won by having the best user experience and not many new features (Notion, Digital Ocean, etc.) Not every experience is going to be best suited to fit in a chat box like ChatGPT which opens the door for startups like this one to build something new. I'm excited when I see products like this, and I think we really need to retire the critique of "Its just an API call to OpenAI". While yes that is a core part of it, there is a lot of time and effort that goes into developing these experiences that has value
visarga 4y ago
> this looks like a simple usage on top of GPT4, no real IP / innovation You can generate the first draft in the chatGPT-4 window, then ask it to add a section or expand a list and it works pretty well in the chat interface. So it's not really hard to write articles with bare chatGPT UI.
- stewfortier 4y ago
  To each their own :). I do think it's a big space and plenty of folks will find ChatGPT helpful enough to not warrant a more vertical / specific solution like ours.
- matchagaucho 4y ago
  It is marginally better than ChatGPT, though, for writing. I would happily pay a token or credit-based fee to use this while in heavy writing mode. A MRR or ARR license for this? hmmmm... it would need to be multi-modal with dynamic page layouts and images to justify a subscription (for me). Or auto-update a doc in the background via async AI.
rpgbr 4y ago
It looks like just a feature of Word/Ai Writer/etc indeed.
stewfortier 4y ago
Thanks! I do agree with #1, and I think we need to make that clearer in our messaging. For context, I'll re-share one my replies to a related comment: > The thing that excites me most about generative AI isn't "more," it's better. I often use Type to write satire and now whenever I hit a block, I don't tab over to Twitter – I have Type generate some ideas. Often, I don't use them as-is but they do inspire a new angle I hadn't thought of. One #2, I think there's some truth to that today. But our belief is that over time, these products will start to evolve into something more advanced and useful. A product like Type, for example, won't really look like Google Docs + AI in 3 years, it will start to feel like a more novel category of tool. We'll see, though!
- Kwpolska 4y ago
  How will it look in 3 years then, and why doesn’t it look this way today?
  - stewfortier 4y ago
    Because we're still figuring it out and it takes a while to build new stuff (not a great answer, I know - but it's the honest one)
    - Kwpolska 4y ago
      Sounds like vaporware.
      - Takennickname 4y ago
        And the "roadmap" is for paying customers only.
      - nylonstrung 4y ago
        That's not what vaporware is. A product that just released on a technology that has only been available for a few months isn't vaporware simply because it doesn't already achieve the full roadmap goals
goldfeld 4y ago
Explosion of blogs and cheap copy was already rampant, but it's true that it is magnified. On the other hand, do you consider niche sort of content[0] a net negative, when these tools let fewer writers or writers with fewer hours create content for, perhaps untapped, niches? The newsletter linked below is not something I would have been able to do or justify doing before ChatGPT. Can niche usecases make up for the explosion of samey stuff? 0: https://chinesememe.substack.com/p/learning-a-chinese-song-with-gpt https://chinesememe.substack.com/p/learning-a-chinese-song-w...

by lyair1 4y ago

SkyPuncher 4y ago

I'm _extremely_ surprised to see all of the YC companies that are essentially just layers on OpenAI. I think it's safe to assume more models will be introduced and vendor lock-in can be avoided, but I find it hard to believe some of the "simpler" ideas can create compelling, VC-scale businesses.

anon291 4y ago
Why are you surprised? OpenAI is Sam Altman's (YC's last leader) pet project. Of course, YC is highly incentivized to produce more customers for OpenAI
- iamdamian 4y ago
  Incentivized how, specifically?
  - anon291 4y ago
    Well there's this thing called friendship. You see, executives at VC firms and such are typically pretty friendly with each other, and view their fellow executive's success as potentially pulling them up the ladder. AI is the next big thing. Sam Altman and his company is in a nice spot to profit. Moreover, YC research is an investor in OpenAI. Thus, because the executives want Altman to succeed (to presumably advance their own career) and because they're in charge of YC, which is an investor in openai, they have every incentive in funding startups that then use OpenAI as the main platform.
    - iamdamian 4y ago
      This hypothetical incentive structure seems tenuous at best and not the open and shut case it sounded like in your original comment. I’m sorry but I don’t buy it.
      - anon291 4y ago
        You don't buy that people want their investments to succeed and their friends to become rich? Those seem like some of the strongest incentives to me.
        nylonstrung 4y ago
        So the YC Partners are actively investing in worse companies that will degrade their returns so that OpenAI/Microsoft can add new customers that do almost no volume compared to ChatGPT or Bing? That's not how YC or VC works.
        anon291 4y ago
        There's more to businesses than simply the underlying tech. If technical superiority were the sole determinant of business success, the tech landscape would look a lot different today. Rather, YC is banking that some of the use cases get people hooked, thus causing vendor lock in, to these new apps, which end up benefiting YC both by benefitting the companies they're funding as well as benefitting open ai. I don't share the sentiment that companies that are 'just' layers over OpenAI are incapable of building moats.
autoconfig 4y ago
I think it’s both correct and realistic to assume that most ideas won’t reach venture scale size. After all, the vast majority of startups fail. However I’d like to point out that any software product that is built is per definition a layer on top of something else and it will always start small. The key question is whether that “layer” is useful and if it can keep getting increasingly useful with time.
jfengel 4y ago
I suppose it's inevitable that the first uses are going to be the trivial ones. They'll be first to market. I'm sure they imagine that when they figure out something actually worth doing, they'll already have a user base and revenue stream and reputation. If there's somebody out there doing something more innovative, they'll either buy them out or reproduce their idea in-house. Me, I'm skeptical that there's a "there" here. But that's why somebody else is getting rich and I'm not.
danielgh7 4y ago
While integrating with OpenAI is just an API call away I don't think it takes away from the user experience. Sure its less of a moat but plenty of products have won by having the best user experience and not many new features (Notion, Digital Ocean, etc.) Not every experience is going to be best suited to fit in a chat box like ChatGPT which opens the door for startups like this one to build something new. I'm excited when I see products like this, and I think we really need to retire the critique of "Its just an API call to OpenAI". While yes that is a core part of it, there is a lot of time and effort that goes into developing these experiences that has value

visarga 4y ago

> this looks like a simple usage on top of GPT4, no real IP / innovation You can generate the first draft in the chatGPT-4 window, then ask it to add a section or expand a list and it works pretty well in the chat interface. So it's not really hard to write articles with bare chatGPT UI.

stewfortier 4y ago
To each their own :). I do think it's a big space and plenty of folks will find ChatGPT helpful enough to not warrant a more vertical / specific solution like ours.
matchagaucho 4y ago
It is marginally better than ChatGPT, though, for writing. I would happily pay a token or credit-based fee to use this while in heavy writing mode. A MRR or ARR license for this? hmmmm... it would need to be multi-modal with dynamic page layouts and images to justify a subscription (for me). Or auto-update a doc in the background via async AI.

rpgbr 4y ago

It looks like just a feature of Word/Ai Writer/etc indeed.

stewfortier 4y ago

Thanks! I do agree with #1, and I think we need to make that clearer in our messaging. For context, I'll re-share one my replies to a related comment: > The thing that excites me most about generative AI isn't "more," it's better. I often use Type to write satire and now whenever I hit a block, I don't tab over to Twitter – I have Type generate some ideas. Often, I don't use them as-is but they do inspire a new angle I hadn't thought of. One #2, I think there's some truth to that today. But our belief is that over time, these products will start to evolve into something more advanced and useful. A product like Type, for example, won't really look like Google Docs + AI in 3 years, it will start to feel like a more novel category of tool. We'll see, though!

Kwpolska 4y ago
How will it look in 3 years then, and why doesn’t it look this way today?
- stewfortier 4y ago
  Because we're still figuring it out and it takes a while to build new stuff (not a great answer, I know - but it's the honest one)
  - Kwpolska 4y ago
    Sounds like vaporware.
    - Takennickname 4y ago
      And the "roadmap" is for paying customers only.
    - nylonstrung 4y ago
      That's not what vaporware is. A product that just released on a technology that has only been available for a few months isn't vaporware simply because it doesn't already achieve the full roadmap goals

goldfeld 4y ago

Explosion of blogs and cheap copy was already rampant, but it's true that it is magnified. On the other hand, do you consider niche sort of content[0] a net negative, when these tools let fewer writers or writers with fewer hours create content for, perhaps untapped, niches? The newsletter linked below is not something I would have been able to do or justify doing before ChatGPT. Can niche usecases make up for the explosion of samey stuff? 0: https://chinesememe.substack.com/p/learning-a-chinese-song-with-gpt https://chinesememe.substack.com/p/learning-a-chinese-song-w...