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This is a nice post, and I think it will resonate with most new AI startups. My advice would be don't build an AI product at all. To my mind an "x product" is

• fillskills 3y ago
  This. Avoid the “If have hammer, everything looks like a nail” strategy. Find a customer pain point and use the right blend of tools
• fillskills 3y ago
  This. Avoid the “If have hammer, everything looks like a nail” strategy. Find a customer pain point and use the right blend of tools. You can also make a new tool where tools dont exist
  • ryandrake 3y ago
    Being a "AI startup" makes about as much sense as being a "Python startup." What does your company do? We do Python! OK, but what problem are you solving? Lots of them, but what's important is we solve it using Python code!
    • yen223 3y ago
      Welcome to the world of consultancies!
      • renjimen 3y ago
        As a consultant this rang far too true
    • musicale 3y ago
      Unfortunately this seems to work as a funding strategy, as long as it's the current fad. At least "AI startups" might turn out to be more beneficial than "crypto startups" were.
    • FullstakBlogger 3y ago
      It's funny you say that, because that's more or less how non-tech people seem to think about programming. It's not naturally intuitive to them that renaming files, rocket trajectory simulation, and data analytics are fundamentally different problems, and that a computer is just a tool that anyone can learn to program if they already understand those problems. I know someone who's relied on the same consultancy company for all things tech related since the early 90's. If they don't know how to do something, like build a website, they just outsource it on upwork or something, and charge a 10:1 markup.
    • blackoil 3y ago
      No, it is more akin to having an Internet startup or Mobile startup. You would need a real problem to solve but there is a pool of 1000s of problems the tech. will be applicable to.
  • immibis 3y ago
    If you have a very advanced hammer then looking for tough nails is how you improve the world. Still doesn't mean everything is a nail.
  • upsidesinclude 3y ago
    Sometimes everything looks like a hammer. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YHpDf-Q90OM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YHpDf-Q90OM
• duped 3y ago
  I think it's a great idea if you're a serial founder and want some money for the idea that's going nowhere. People love to throw money at buzzwords. A couple of years ago it was blockchain. Not sure what the next one is, but I already see all the "technologists" in my LinkedIn network have pivoted from crypto startups to AI startups.
• threeseed 3y ago
  > I think most people I know offline hate interacting with chat bots as products It's hilarious to me when people are bringing back chat bots as a concept. We had chat bots a few years ago and it was something that almost all larger companies had built strategies around. The idea being that they could significantly reduce call centre staff and improve customer experience. And it wasn't just that the quality of the conversations were poor it was that for many users it's about being the human connection of being listened to that is important. Not just getting an answer to their problem.
  • ericskiff 3y ago
    A few months ago, I would’ve agreed with this in theory, but having interacted with an Apple chat bot recently that was fast, seemed empathetic, and immediately solved my problem, I do have to wonder if LLM powered support agents may finally swing this the other direction
    • worldsayshi 3y ago
      Until this point in time I've been extremely sceptical about chat bots. But LLM is changing the playing field. Chat bots often don't make sense but I do think there are a lot of cases they can do things other interfaces would struggle with.
    • ebalit 3y ago
      Are you sure it was a chat bot? I believe Apple customer service chat wasn't run by bots last time I needed it.
  • ancientworldnow 3y ago
    No, it's that chat bots have no actual power to fix most issues. They exist to make it more difficult to escalate up the bureaucracy where there is staff that can actually problem solve, issue refunds, give credits, etc. Chat bots are merely a filter to get rid of easily pacified pushover customers and those who refuse to read instructions or documentation.
    • 3y ago
• osigurdson 3y ago
  >> This is regardless of quality, bots are rarely as good as speaking with a real human being I avoid calling organizations as I know I will be on hold forever, when I finally do get through to someone usually they provide another number to call and the process repeats. I just want the thing done, as fast as possible - I don't care if I talk to a real person or not. The reason chatbots haven't helped the process so far is they just add more time and annoyance to the process as step 0 is often to get the chatbot to spit out a phone number or (finally) connect you to an agent. This is because, naturally, pre OpenAI chatbots were terrible. If post OpenAI chatbots are awesome, I can't see why people would not use them.
  • dopidopHN 3y ago
    I don’t even care for a LLM chatbot. Something with multiple choice would do the trick. But that system has to have some way to actually do something. Close / open / update a account or record or what have you. If the bot is a glorify FAQ then I would rather use CTRL+F. But if the bot, even super dumb, can ID me or see that I’m logged in then change my plan or whatever… I’m happy and that my favorite way. Amazon does it for instance ( report a lost package and trigger a re-send )
    • immibis 3y ago
      Why do you need a chatbot for that? Go to "my plan" and click "upgrade" (or "downgrade"). Customer support is for things the app can't do. Why would you put them in a chatbot instead of in the app?
      • dopidopHN 3y ago
        I expressed myself poorly. Of course if it can be done from the UI I would just click around. Unfortunately not all place have that in place. A good example of what I meant is Amazon chat bot. They can trigger refund / re-ship and the like. And if it’s too much money they bring a human customer service.
      • notahacker 3y ago
• deleted 3y ago
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• EMM_386 3y ago
  > This is regardless of quality, bots are rarely as good as speaking with a real human being. I actually have enjoyed my limited experience with Amazon's customer service bots. And that's only because I have an account with them since forever. And I can see why they are now the target of refund scammers. In many cases, the conversation is as simple as "I recently bought [x] and I would like to return it" resulting in "You can keep it, we will send you another one". That, to me, is a wildly better outcome than anything I could get on a phone. Nothing to do with the fact they told me just to keep what they sent me, but how quickly it can be resolved. "Another satisified customer" This is obviously based off my past purchase history, my rate of returns is, etc. That's fine. It works.
  • hattmall 3y ago
    You don't even need chatbots for that though. You can just open a return and if the default action is replacement without return it's the same thing.
• Amorymeltzer 3y ago
  >To my mind an "x product" is rarely the framing that will lead to value being added for customers. E.g. a web3 product, an observability product, a machine vision product, an AI product. Like all decent startup ideas the obviously crucial thing is to start with a real user need rather than wanting to use an emerging technology and fit it to a problem. Developing a UI for a technology where expectations are inflated is not going to result in a user need being met. Instead, the best startups will naturally start by solving a real problem. That's basically Steve Jobs' advice: "One of the things I've always found is that you've got to start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology. You can't start with the technology and try to figure out where you're going to try to sell it."
  • immibis 3y ago
    If all the niches that don't involve your new technology are already taken, it makes sense.
• austhrow743 3y ago
  For the vast majority of technologies i would agree but i think AI has enough buzz behind it that it’s punched through the technology bubble in to the general business world. So slapping the term all over your product provides value to your customers.
  • fbuslop 3y ago
    How does slapping buzzwords provide value? It might secure funding but I'm having trouble seeing how it provides value.
    • austhrow743 3y ago
      The customer now gets to associate themselves with those buzzwords. On an organisational level that means they can now use them to secure funding. Helping your customers secure funding is generally providing huge value. On an individual level it helps them position themselves internally as an expert on cutting edge technology. Earning raises and promotions. That also is a lot of value.
• Terr_ 3y ago
  > I think most people I know offline hate interacting with chat bots as products. At my company a chatbot is one of the main products, but I think the key is that it is used in bulk/triage situations where there's 0% chance a company would ever hire humans to do it instead. So the real question is whether to to use a complex tax-filing-like form, or a chatbot, and whether either of those routes are done well.
• deepGem 3y ago
  For most of us technologists, figuring out user need is way way harder than doing research or building something. That's the reality. So we tend to take comfort in building technology and figuring out the user need later on. Even discovering a real problem, a problem that warrants the expense on technology, is unfortunately out of the comfort zone for a lot of technologists. We often assume that the problem is real, or worse hope that the problem be real and jump into solving it right away because that's our comfort zone, building stuff. There ain't nothing wrong with this attitude or process. In most cases, where technologists have solved real problems, the real problem has been a serendipitous unraveling during the build-iterate-shut process. So the best shot at figuring out a real problem for technologists is not spending time in problem discovery, but in a better ship-iterate-shut cycle. A cycle, in which in one can look at current usage and postulate the future and take rapid decisions on what to build, or what not to build. Having read the biographies of many tech leaders, I have come to the understanding that the key skill that has set them apart is that exponential growth in their ability to hone the intuition about future demand, in a very short span of time, starting from a barebones MVP.
  • hiAndrewQuinn 3y ago
    Gotta burn the candle at both ends a bit to make it big. Spend some time off in the far vistas of emerging tech - some just looking at how ordinary people live their lives, and thinking about how to improve that.
  • fy20 3y ago
    So basically making lots of different spagetti, and seeing which sticks to the wall?
  • stefanlindbohm 3y ago
    Building is a very expensive way of finding user needs, especially since you might rely on luck to start out even in the right ballpark. I think of innovative products as the combination of a user need insight and an innovative solution. I think there’s a lot of time wasted when teams focus too much on iterating on one without the other. If you’re a technologist who sees the potential in a particular technology, you need to start by thinking about how to navigate towards applying it to a real user need. The flipside happens too, where a team sees a need and gets stuck in circles because they lack the tech expertise to build a solution that delivers & is competitive (but surely less commonly in the HN crowd). Someone good at one of these things but less interested in the other should find a co-founder who’s good at the other perspective.
• FFP999 3y ago
  > Like all decent startup ideas the obviously crucial thing is to start with a real user But if it's funding you want, slap the buzzword du jour in front of what you're trying to do, and you've vastly improved your prospects. In the frequent case when "the stock is the product", that's what you want. Of course, this is basically a question of semantics: you're talking about actual companies that sell products, I'm talking about your typical tech-flavored grift.
• upsidesinclude 3y ago
  >in applications where text isn't meant to be read word-for-word, and the entire response is expected before proceeding to the next step in the workflow, this can pose a significant issue. Your take seems to narrow the application of AI chat down to customer service. Taking a broader view, AI chat or really LLMs have a very wide range of applications. As discussed in the article, script and code producing AI is not meant to be "read" so much as utilized post generation. Either way, the reality is that just like any other advancement, this will slowly start to become integral to many business networks and workflow models, all having no interface with the consumer. The current fascination is wearing thin for the unimaginative who've asked a few generic questions to ChatGPT and then failed to recognize any applications of that product in their own life. All the better, but the more products built now means the more likely something is produced that niche markets are looking to buy.