4 ms·

Pretty much this, 18 months ago my CEO told me we HAD to get into this space, and I told him that basically our money came from our private product and that the

by hobs 2y ago

Pretty much this, 18 months ago my CEO told me we HAD to get into this space, and I told him that basically our money came from our private product and that the only way our big enterprise customers were going to play game with us was either ironclad agreements that went all the way to openai, or more likely a completely single tenant system, which would cost far more than they were willing to pay. Of course they went with both, and as far as I can tell both are a major disaster post layoffs :)

jerf 2y ago
I fully expect in somewhere around 3-6 months the dam will burst and we're going to start hearing more and more about all the teams out there that are pouring tens of millions of dollars into AI and all they have to show for it is a worse version of whatever it is they were doing. To placate the AI fans, that's not because AI isn't interesting, it's because that's how these hype cycles always go. I remember when everything had to be XML'd. XML has its uses, but a lot of money was wasted jamming it everywhere because XML Was Cool. AI has its uses, but it is still an engineering tool; it has a grain, it has things it is good at, it has things it can't just wave a magic wand and improve, the demarcation between those two things is very, very complicated, and people are being actively discouraged from thinking about those lines right now. But there really isn't any skipping the Trough of Disillusionment on your way to the Plateau of Productivity.
- rightbyte 2y ago
  > XML Was Cool That was probably before my time. Was it really "cool"? Like big data, cloud and agile cool? Or more like ... dunno ... some design pattern? So hard to think about XML as having been cool.
  - lgvld 2y ago
    Curious to know to... Seems crazy ;-)
ankit219 2y ago
Can you go into details (as much as you are comfortable) on what happened with the single tenant system? I have seen a few things, but I find it hard to put a finger on what went wrong except the ROI wasnt there. Would love to understand your experience.
- hobs 2y ago
  Mostly capacity issues with openai made super early stuff infeasible for our customer base, and really it was because they would only give an extremely small number of total resources per azure account, which of course each would be vetted. I pushed for local first models but the cost tradeoff just did not make sense for anything but the biggest clients, and they were constantly swapping back and forth whether openai would be acceptable or not for "insert sensitive use case here" Mostly just a big cluster

by hobs 2y ago

jerf 2y ago

I fully expect in somewhere around 3-6 months the dam will burst and we're going to start hearing more and more about all the teams out there that are pouring tens of millions of dollars into AI and all they have to show for it is a worse version of whatever it is they were doing. To placate the AI fans, that's not because AI isn't interesting, it's because that's how these hype cycles always go. I remember when everything had to be XML'd. XML has its uses, but a lot of money was wasted jamming it everywhere because XML Was Cool. AI has its uses, but it is still an engineering tool; it has a grain, it has things it is good at, it has things it can't just wave a magic wand and improve, the demarcation between those two things is very, very complicated, and people are being actively discouraged from thinking about those lines right now. But there really isn't any skipping the Trough of Disillusionment on your way to the Plateau of Productivity.

rightbyte 2y ago
> XML Was Cool That was probably before my time. Was it really "cool"? Like big data, cloud and agile cool? Or more like ... dunno ... some design pattern? So hard to think about XML as having been cool.
- lgvld 2y ago
  Curious to know to... Seems crazy ;-)

ankit219 2y ago

Can you go into details (as much as you are comfortable) on what happened with the single tenant system? I have seen a few things, but I find it hard to put a finger on what went wrong except the ROI wasnt there. Would love to understand your experience.

hobs 2y ago
Mostly capacity issues with openai made super early stuff infeasible for our customer base, and really it was because they would only give an extremely small number of total resources per azure account, which of course each would be vetted. I pushed for local first models but the cost tradeoff just did not make sense for anything but the biggest clients, and they were constantly swapping back and forth whether openai would be acceptable or not for "insert sensitive use case here" Mostly just a big cluster