3 ms·
I think more and more people are slowly realizing that LLMs aren't products in themselves. At the end of the day, you need to do something like Midjourney or Co
by dvt 3y ago
I think more and more people are slowly realizing that LLMs aren't products in themselves. At the end of the day, you need to do something like Midjourney or Copilot where there's some value generation. Your business can't just be "throw more GPUs at more data" because the guy down the block can do the same thing. OpenAI never had any moat, and it's a bit telling that as early as last year, everyone on HN acted as if they did.
LLMs are like touch screens: technically interesting and with great upside potential. But until the iPhone, multi-touch, the app ecosystem comes along, they'll remain an interesting technological advancement (nothing more, nothing less).
What I'm also noticing is that very little effort (and money) is actually spent on value generation, and most is spent on pure bloat. LangChain raising $25m for what is essentially a library for string manipulation is crazy. (N.B. I'm not solely calling out LangChain here, there are dozens of startups that have raised hundreds of millions on what is essentially AI tooling/bloat.) We need apps--real, actual apps--that leverage LLMs where it matters: natural-language interaction. Not pipelines upon pipelines upon pipelines or larger and larger models that are fun to chat with but actually do basically nothing.
- jedberg 3y ago80% of people just want the ability to write a sentence and have it run the correct SQL on their data warehouse. That's the biggest use of LLMs I see in the enterprise right now. I think you are right -- eventually we will see an ecosystem pop up that uses LLMs in unique ways that are only possible with LLMs. But in the meantime people are using LLMs to shortcut what used to be long processes done by humans, and frankly, there is a lot of value in that.
- dvt 3y ago> 80% of people just want the ability to write a sentence and have it run the correct SQL on their data warehouse. Even this is IMO too ambitious (due to edge cases, and multi-shot prompting being basically required, which kind of defeats the purpose). Right now, I'm working on a product that can just do simple OS stuff (and even that is quite challenging); e.g. "replace all instances of `David` with `Bob` in all text files in this folder".
- namanyayg 3y agoI agree with your points about LLMs being like touch screens but what kind of natural language interaction apps are you talking about? Might be that some startup has attempted something similar already.
- digging 3y agoI'm a different person but the key for me is a wrapper than can handle uncertainty and ask questions for clarification. Currently I don't find LLMs tremendously useful because I have to be extremely specific with what I want, which IMO is closer to writing code than the magical promise of turning ideas into products. An app that I can just talk into and say, "I want to do X" and it can start building X while asking me questions for functional requirements, edge cases, UI/UX, that's a killer app. It's also an app which could actually decimate many SWE jobs, so, I should be careful what I wish for.
- minimaxir 3y agoThe LangChain fundraise was a year ago, the same time the ChatGPT API was released and there was much more optimism about generative AI. Things have cooled a bit more nowadays as the cost economics became more real. I wouldn’t expect another LangChain level fund raise.
- Abecid 3y agoReminds me of the crypto bubble. All the defi shitcoins giving yields to each other while no shitcoin actually generated real value or had real demand. Now everyone building LLM libraries and systems but very few LLM products yield real value
- rchaud 3y agoThere's a big difference cost-wise: anybody can deploy an Ethereum fork, mine the resultant shitcoin very cheaply and start a Discord for marketing purposes. That's the whole product right there. The same is not true of AI projects which require a lot more upfront investment.
- rchaud 3y agoThe need for concrete products is acute. I'm in the martech space and it's ridiculous how many big-name software vendors have done nothing besides slap an "AI-powered" label on their traditional products (CRM + email marketing and API-connector type apps). Tried talking to the reps about the AI features. All were very cagey, suggesting that they didn't really know and were parroting buzzwordy benefits because the higher-ups told them to. So far, the "AI revolution" seems to have just led to higher price tiers.
- parineum 3y ago> The need for concrete products is acute. This feels very crypto-like in this regard for me. Businesses seem to be struggling with what we're all struggling with, LLMs are untrustworthy.
- rchaud 3y agoBusiness' needs are clear. Handle payroll, handle data analysis, conduct sentiment analysis of our brand across social media, identify problems. Do this effectively and at a far lower price than what a human would agree to work for. AI isn't moving the needle much here, which is why GenAI "solutions" are underwhelming things like support chatbots, writing assistance and auto-generated stock art for Facebook ads. There's nothing wrong with doing that a service but it falls well short of the fantastical visions that Microsoft, OAI and SV at large have portrayed.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]