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My small, no name company has lost its mind with AI
- jzombie 3y agoCEO openly says AI will cause the loss of “millions of jobs”. My advice, figure out how to get the CEO fired and tell him he was right.
- seanhunter 3y agoHonestly by the sounds of it the quality of decision-making won't be notably different between the current CEO running things and things just being decided stochastically by ChatGPT. Anyone as old as me remembers the sudden transition in the MBA mindset between "lol you nerds are so cute with your 'web'" where business people thought the internet was just where you got your old college email to "OMG WE NEED A WEBPAGE NOW" and suddenly every business _had_ to have a web page (most of which didn't do anything) so they could say they had an "internet strategy". The same mindset shift is apparent with respect to AI. Every executive currently has their LinkedIn feed dominated by posts from influencers like "20 essential ChatGPT prompts to redefine your marketing strategy!", "50 prompts you need to know to survive in M&A" etc. so they are suddenly scrambling to put the AI magic sauce on everything so they can say to their investors and board they have an "AI strategy". "This too shall pass" as the Persian saying goes. There's no doubt that the sudden increase in capability of some of the leading AI is going to bring about a step change in lots of areas, and I think things like huggingface being a center for open collaboration and sharing of models etc are genuinely radical and transformative in the same way that when the open source movement took off it generated a tremendous amount of collaboration and innovation. However traversing the gap between"I type things into ChatGPT and treat it as my outsourced roomful of monkeys'" and "thoughtful application of AI to some problem domain" requires people who actually have some quite specialised skills and are in quite high demand. I don't see that gap closing for a while tbh.
- tnecniv 3y agoAlso, there’s the recurrent cycle of AI Summer and Winter. Each time, someone figures out a new piece of the AI puzzle, we get new tools that are useful but don’t deliver on the big hype, AI funding drops as we run out of ways to skin the new cat, we’re left with some useful tools that the world acclimates to until the cycle repeats. Maybe the massive growth in computing resources speed up the seasons now, or have prolonged this one, but I don’t think we’re on the exponential part of the curve to AGI yet.
- intelVISA 3y agoOnce every business can one line invoke an LLM to sufficiently create apps, assuming we reach that stage (possible), isn't that going to kill 90% of VC B2B SaaS especially the YC style round robin of funding each other without generating actual value? Think the CEO's SWEs are the least of his concerns.
- jzombie 3y agoTheoretically, if we get to the point where a quality app could actually be generated entirely this way, then someone will inevitably ask it to create an app that recursively asks it to create more apps, thus eliminating the need for anyone to even ask it to create an app at all.
- bathtub365 3y agoAnd whoever runs the API will be laughing all the way to the bank.
- polynomial 3y agoWhere do I sign up!
- Fatboyrunning 3y agoThe absence of real applications incorporating this stuff is damning. Where are the killer apps?
- riku_iki 3y agoto me potential killer app is the search, you already now can find better answers fast in many verticals asking chatgpt than going through the tons of seo spam at google.
- spaceman_2020 3y agoHealth and medical queries are a big one for me. The top results in Google are the same cookie cutter responses from the same 5-10 domains. There is no expertise there - just an article ghost written by a freelance writer with a random doctor’s name attached to it. With the right prompt, chatGPT gives me far better insight and can even point out academic papers to back its claims.
- jmye 3y agoThere are no health issues that anyone should ever be using Chat GPT for - the hallucinations are very real, and often severe. Not that you should be googling your symptoms either - there’s a reason we put medical folks through more than a few minutes of training. LLMs are absolutely worthless for medical information.
- ben_w 3y agoI wouldn't trust them with my life, but out of curiosity I did put some of my own medical notes into 3.5 a few weeks back. It said basically the same thing as the actual doctor.
- spaceman_2020 3y agoI’ve gone to multiple doctors for my problems and most of them have only made it worse. Most doctors I’ve met get dumbfounded when the problem is anything more complex than a straightforward case. And I say this as someone married into a family of doctors.
- justrealist 3y ago> - got the OK to feed entire repos and proprietary information into ChatGPT without a care because “we got the pro version” > Our main product is CRUD app that is designed like something straight out of 2010, complete with outdated frameworks If it's a small startup with a simple CRUD app, why this a problem? 99% startups die from lack of execution, not because someone stole their proprietary secrets or source code.
- intelVISA 3y agoSimple CRUD apps don't really need a startup to be fair, they could be done as a side project these days.
- justrealist 3y agoMaybe, depends how much biz/dev and domain expertise is needed. Either way, I don't understand the complaints. OpenAI isn't going to steal your crappy webapp.
- spaceman_2020 3y agoA 30 year old “startup” I consulted with once was a very badly designed SaaS app that had somehow been in business for three decades. At first, I couldn’t figure out how this awful app could be in business when there were competitors on the market with better UX/UI and marketing. But then I learned that the bad UI had very specific features that professionals in their target industry desperately needed, and that the bad UX was so deeply embedded in their workflows that changing any of it would collapse entire multimillion dollar businesses.
- lelanthran 3y agoI'm exploring creating a CRUD/SaaS/or similar type of business.[1] I've settled on using a plain and simple and unadorned UI as possible, regardless of what the product is, as long as it is easy to use. My reasoning is that if people need it to be pretty before they'll pay for it then it's not really a pain-point that the product is solving. OTOH, if people are willing to hand out cash for the functionality then I'm onto something. [1]Want to do B2B, but will depend on what I can come up with.
- anotherhue 3y agoI like to think that all the quantillion crypto mining computations were somehow a cover for the training of an ELLM that is now seeding LLMs to hide its existence. And that still makes more sense than this bs.
- seanhunter 3y agoIf only. Then those CPU cycles would at least have been doing something of value. If you look at crypto mining computations they don't (on the chains I have looked at) actually compute anything meaningful at all. It's literally just generating random numbers and then (almost always) throwing them away. Like you have Alice who says "Try to guess my number?", and then Bobs around the world go Bob1: "Is it 13?" Alice: "no" Bob2: "Is it 4672?" Alice: "no" ... Bob175432: "Is it 294762483492643826432862834??" Alice: "Yes. You can do the next block." Literally that pointless.
- gordian-not 3y agoThis can be used to create the world's largest rainbow table though. If we're already into unlikely conspiracy uses of crypto, this could have been an NSA Sigint@Home endeavour
- Solvency 3y agoCan someone explain why there isn't a blockchain that is powered by users hardware training LLM models all day? Like the worlds best open source trillion parameter model.
- seanhunter 3y agoNoone has built it and that's because it would be hard to satisfy the needs of a consensus mechanism and also do useful real work. To understand why that is, you need to understand why they are doing all this generating random numbers nonsense in the first place. They are doing this to establish distributed consensus. You have some chain of blocks b_1... b_2 ... b_3. To make the next block you want to put a bunch of transactions together, calculate their hash and mint it, but there's a problem: In a distributed system, who gets to decide what goes into the block? We all need to agree what b_4 is otherwise the system loses consensus. We can't have me publishing something and calling it b_4 and you publishing something and calling it b_4. The way the "proof of work" mechanism does this is by everyone guessing random numbers until someone chooses the right number at which point that person has the right to mint b_4.[1]. If you wanted that computation (instead of being just choosing random numbers) to do something useful, you'd have to figure out a way to decide what the correct number is without knowing it beforehand. Otherwise you might train your ML model just fine but your computation couldn't be used to establish who gets to mint the next block so wouldn't work in a proof of work consensus algorithm. People have done this with distributed computations where doing the computation is hard but checking the computation is easy. For example finding large Mersenne primes, is extremely expensive but once you have a big number, checking whether or not it is a Mersenne prime is very cheap. But training an ML model isn't that kind of computation. [1] Proof of stake just picks who gets to do it randomly from a pool of people who have staked, which is why it is so much more efficient.
- onetokeoverthe 3y ago[dead]
- narag 3y agoSmall company, bad product, bad bosses. So no excuse to stay in such a place.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- threeseed 3y ago> CEO openly says AI will cause the loss of “millions of jobs”. My partner let go two people and replaced them with ChatGPT. No joke. It can accelerate many business tasks e.g. copywriting, customer service, proof-reading, product design exploration, marketing campaigns etc. And its ability to do all of this in multiple languages and in different tones can be a really big deal for some businesses.
- bb611 3y agoCan you share what jobs those people performed?
- threeseed 3y agoMy partner runs a B2B ecommerce company with revenue ~$5m with lots of different products coming from a range of suppliers all over Asia. And the jobs were the sort of generalist types you see in most small businesses and startups. Examples of tasks mostly involving writing e.g. emails to suppliers and customers, marketing copy for products/campaigns, website content. But also coming with potential new products and how they can be branded/marketed. And the reason they were hired specifically is because most of the team doesn't have English or Mandarin as their first language and so they needed native speakers. And since ChatGPT's problem is inaccuracy not writing well it's really suited to them.
- throw9away6 3y agoWho would reply to a message generated by a chat bot. That would set off all my fraud alarms
- mrguyorama 3y agoAnd yet CEOs routinely click on the most basic of phishing emails. Maybe they don't teach media literacy in business school.
- hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
- spaceman_2020 3y agoI don’t know what to make of stuff like this. On the one hand, AI in its present form is a great learning tool, and little else. So you’d call the CEO a fool. On the other hand, you have the leading AI firm publicly devoting 1/5th of its resources on controlling AI and declaring that we will likely have Superintelligence within this decade. If the latter is right, this CEO might be a genius who was early on a trend, instead of a kook.
- brucethemoose2 3y agoIf the CEO was smart, they would be trying to build or extend a cool generative AI tool customers would like... Not rack up the biggest OpenAI bill they can. Shoehorning tech where its not working sounds like the blockchain boom to me. Even if crypto did take off, that would not have helped them survive.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- fileeditview 3y agoI guess you can be a kook and make a stupid move but with enough luck you will be regarded as a genius and your move will be seen as a bold one.
- mrguyorama 3y ago>If the latter is right, this CEO might be a genius who was early on a trend, instead of a kook. Lottery and slot machine winners aren't smart, they're lucky.
- Planktonne 3y ago> On the other hand, you have the leading AI firm publicly devoting 1/5th of its resources on controlling AI and declaring that we will likely have Superintelligence within this decade. This is just marketing.
- taylorfinley 3y agoThis post reads like a neoluddite AI-skeptic trashing someone for trying new things. Every CEO should be trying to automate human tasks with AI right now--not to fire all the humans, but to increase their efficiency. Good on your CEO for trying. Sounds like they've largely failed to execute, which is a valid thing to criticize, but at least they're trying. The CEO of my company has also been trying, and we've done some really cool things. I've been hearing a lot of AI criticism lately from folks who clearly haven't gotten deep with GPT-4, like geohot/George Hotz's recent interview on the Lex Friedman podcast. There are a ton of valid things to criticize about AI and LLMs, but I've built things with GPT-4 that are incredibly impactful for our business--a tool to turn a Zendesk ticket thread into internal and external support guides, for example. Yes, there are limitations. But sticking your head in the ground saying "it's all a parlor trick" won't age well.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- thefz 3y ago> - HR docs are now being generated by ChatGPT with no checks for legality This enough will almost guarantee that this CEO will be out of work soon.
- tnecniv 3y agoIt’s definitely not parlor tricks but I am skeptical that it’s going to be making skilled professionals obsolete any time soon. For many jobs, even a 10% error rate is too high. I think it certainly makes sense as a way to amplify what your employees are capable of doing on any given day by reducing busy work they hated doing in the first place, but improving the performance of these models to get that 10% error rate down to a 1% error rate (and having an understanding of what kinds of tasks it can achieve those results on) will be a lot harder. Maybe I’m wrong, but AI has a huge history of things we thought were easy turning out to be very difficult. Self-driving cars weren’t expected to be nearly as challenging as they turned out to be. In the original AI summit, all the big thinkers of that era thought that physical tasks like manipulation would be easy and logical reasoning would be hard. It turned out that it was the other way around.
- prpl 3y agoI was more skeptical with ChatGPT but started paying for it. For better or worse, my company/team uses documents for communication, and it helps me automate the boring stuff - word smithing and clarifying ambiguity. The flip side of this is those will be summarized with AI for those who don’t care about the fluff. The world is doomed to expansion and compression in this way. Also, just like the switch to digital cameras from film, my role in writing a document transitions to editor from careful composer.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- gcanyon 3y ago> They really think AI is this magic thing that will fix over a decade of no documentation, spaghetti code, and unclear requirements. One of my favorite bosses loved to say, "You can't software your way out of a process problem." Several times I've had other bosses try to prove that wrong. None so far have succeeded.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- jacknews 3y ago- CEO openly says AI will cause the loss of “millions of jobs” Clearly a visionary leader. - CTO says he wants live examples of ChatGPT “making us code faster” Honestly where are you, a kindergarten? So-called 'leaders' with this attitude deserve a slap (in rhetorical terms) IMHO.