AI companies are pivoting from creating gods to building products

Companies keep going at it the wrong way. Instead of saying "We have AI, let's find products we can make out of AI!" they should be saying, "What products do people want, let's use whatever tools we have (including maybe AI) to make them."

The idea that a company is an AI company should be as ridiculous as a company being a Python company. "We are Python-first, have Python experts, and all of our products are made with Python. Our customers want their apps to have Python in them. We just have to 'productize Python' and find the right killer app for Python and we'll be successful!" Going at it from the wrong direction. Replace Python in that quote with AI, and you probably have something a real company has said in 2024.

> But when developers put AI in consumer products, people expect it to behave like software, which means that it needs to work deterministically. If your AI travel agent books vacations to the correct destination only 90% of the time, it won’t be successful.

This is the fundamental problem that prevents generative AI from becoming a "foundational building block" for most products. Even with rigorous safety measures in place, there are few guarantees about its output. AI is about as solid as sand when it comes to determinism, which is great if you're trying to sell sand, but not so great if you're trying to build a huge structure on top of it.

Instead of pivoting, can this behaviour be explained by trying lots of different things and then iterating on the ones that show promise?

It's all well and good to say "Make something people want" but for anything that people want usually one of three things is true

1. Someone else is already making it.

2. Nobody knows how to make it.

3. Nobody knows that people want it.

People experimenting with 2 and 3 will have a lot of failures, but the great successes will come from those groups as well.

Sure, every trend in business has a lot of companies going "we should do this because everyone else is" It was a dumb idea for previous trends and it is a dumb idea now. Consider how many companies did that for the internet. There were a lot of poorly thought out forays into having an internet presence. Of those companies still around, they pretty much will have an internet presence now that serves their purposes. They transition from "because everyone else is" as their motivation to "We want specific ability x,y,&z"

Perhaps the best way to get from "everyone else is doing it" to knowing what to build is to play in the pool.

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I’m building an integration platform. There’s a thousand ways to deeply embed AI throughout it, both to build integration workflows faster, and to help us build smarter API wrappers faster.

But AI has always been a secondary augmentation to the product itself. It’s a tool, it shouldn’t be the other way around.

ChatGPT is very useful for me to the point that I pay subscription fee. To me it IS the product.

Just a heads-up. I'm interested in your online workshop link, but it's private.

https://sites.google.com/princeton.edu/agents-workshop

Google has been productizing AI for a while now. 2021 Pixels have the Tensor SoC which was explicitly marketed as an AI chip. Chatbots weren't part of the equation back then, but offline image translation, magic eraser, etc certainly were.

When I see “AI” in the product description of something I’m almost immediately turned off. It’s plastered everywhere for most tech companies now and doesn’t mean anything practically, despite trying to sound like a differentiator.

While I don't like the blog title, many things said in there rang true for my company (MoveAI.com). We are building an AI-powered moving concierge that can orchestrate your relocation experience end-to-end.

We initially were developing a system that we had hoped could handle everything and eject any workflow issues to a human so the operations team could kick the machine. We were hoping to avoid an interface all together on the customer side.

After a few versions and attempts at building this system, we moved towards a traditional app where we focused on building a product people wanted and automate parts of it over time. But even the parts we automated needed an interface for customers to spot check our work. So we found a great designer.

...Before we knew it, we were building a traditional company, with some AI. The company is doing well and people love what we're building, but it's different than we imagined.

We still believe in the long term vision and promise of the technology, but the article is right, this isn't going to be an overnight process unless some new architecture emerges.

In the mean time, we're focused on helping people get from A to B easily using whatever means necessary, because moving f**ing sucks. If you're moving soon or know anybody who is, we'd be happy to help them. -P

Because you need to make money to get there

people who claim AI is just snake oil are farthest from the reality.

I'll believe it when I see it.

I guess they've worked out making money is an important part of any business?

depends on your definition of "good." if good means creating the next generation of recommendation algorithms that result massive technology addiction and a mental health crisis, then yeah

Well the whole 'creating gods' thing is just silly fantasy nonsense to cover up for what's really going on, which is novelty and gimmicks.

It's okay, I mean even the internet started out as Charlie_Bit_Me.avi and free porn.