Ask HN: Why call it an AI company if all it does is call open AI API? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Why call it an AI company if all it does is call open AI API?

78 pointsmoomoo1157 comments

Not being a hater since I also leverage open ai api heavily in my projects but to call it AI project would be silly.

It’s just like building on top of AWS or GCP.

Open AI is an AI company. Extending LLMs projects like memory for chat gpt etc are AI projects.

Some two minute UI that makes a call to open ai to show you “As a large language model …” is not impressive and NOT an AI company.

Isn’t it a lie basically to claim so? Or am I missing something.

In my case I’m building a dev tool that uses open ai product in the workflow. My product is NOT an AI company. It’s a dev tool for app developers.

ESL btw.

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End users don't care who in your dependency stack is enabling NLP, but that your tool can do things the non-NLP tools cannot

Likewise, that is key signaling for all stakeholders on what is to come. If using AI is part of the core identity & value prop, great. If not, great too, hopefully there is some other wow. Whether users, staff, investors, same deal.

Ex: We do some custom graph neural network & custom auto feature engineering to help ppl look at & analyze their event data more easily & intelligently. OTOH, our LLM work currently uses OpenAI/Azure, and we are deferring self-hosting and fine-tuning for when more useful, as we rather focus more now on bits like vector databases and UIs. In both cases, our users care more that they can get better results and a journey committed to doing more, vs precisely who is doing what & when.

This.

No different than how “email marketing” companies exist that are nothing more than a wrapper around AWS SES, etc.

The word you're looking for is called marketing. If you don't like that part of a business as a developer, that's fine, but you'll soon find out why it is an essential skill when starting a company or building a product. To answer your question: No, it's not a lie even by more rigid developer community standards if AI is the core part of the product (so let it be API calls). Those companies are using AI Technology as perceived by the public.

Why call it a web company if you simply use web technology (http/2, html, css, reactjs, javascript) rather than develop web technology?

You're not a database company if you use a database. You're not a cloud company because you use the cloud.

That depends.

If you offer databases as a service but don't develop the database software itself, you're still a database company.

If you re-sell cloud resources, you're still a cloud company.

If you offer an interface for interacting with an AI, you're an AI company.

Is it a broad stroke? Absolutely. I do agree with your sentiment. It would be more accurate to describe these things as what they really are than to inaccurately categorize them.

Web technologies are defined in RFCs and specifications though, OpenAI is an implementation. And I would definitely not call a company a "web company" if it only used Frontpage all day long without knowing what HTML is.

I once built a web app for a client that did not use any AI or machine learning at all. All it did was to make some well thought out SQL queries. They called it "advanced AI" on the marketing page and made lots of money. And I bet it made the end customers feel better to use such an advanced tool.

Almost every question like this can be answered with the word "engagement"

It's the hot topic of the moment, people are searching it. Businesses market to what people are searching.

Is it lying? Sure, I could be convinced. Is it illegal? Nah. Will people do it no matter what we think about it? Forever.

I'd focus on your own marketing rather than worrying about whether other people are lying. You don't need to call yourself an AI company, just say you "utilise AI to xyz" or something if you want in on the AI marketing. Same keywords, no lies, sorted.

haha this is funny. imagine i say i work as a mathematician but actually i run the cash register?

That would be the same as OP's example. I think it'd be fair to say you utilise mathematics in your role.

Dunno what situation would involve you wanting to say that though, maybe the job history bit of a very light resume? Haha

This is purely a positioning thing. Customers will understand "AI company" to mean "a business that uses AI to solve my problem," and nothing more. The insider perspective matters extremely little (, unfortunately.)

It's like McDonalds positions themselves as a food company while their majority revenue comes from real estate[1]. It doesn't matter to the consumer that their business internals involve the renting of property to their franchisees. What people see are the broken ice cream machines and the burgers.

A two-minute UI that makes a call to OpenAI is just as sellable of a product as someone offering social media templates written by a Llama instance running on their own servers. And during the gold rush, that's all that matters. H sure hope we'll see more nuanced descriptions later down the road: AI-powered, AI-integrating, and AI-adjacent :)

[1]: https://www.wallstreetsurvivor.com/mcdonalds-beyond-the-burg...

It makes perfect sense - if you reorient your thinking.

AI companies come in two flavors.

(1) Build a novel AI for a pre-existing purpose

(2) Use a pre-existing AI for novel purpose.

It's "I didn't realize _AI_ could do that!" vs. "I didn't realize AI could do _that_!"

Engineers found company type 1. Product people found company type 2. Both are valuable, but for different reasons.

Engineers also build type 2. Type 2 can be quite complex as well. Although there are a lot of thin wrappers too.

Why call it "OpenAI" when it is probably the biggest blackbox thing out there.

The name is how they poached most of Google's ML team. Of course, in hindsight all they did was move to Microsoft.

"My product is NOT an AI company. It’s a dev tool for app developers."

and people will definitely NOT be interested. The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent.

So should I lie and say it’s an AI company? Just trying to understand this trend.

Probably. Check search trends. Consult chatgpt for marketing advice

Depends on whether you value your principles more than money.

What do your users want? Will they understand your offering faster if you explicitly mention AI in your messaging?

No, you're not. You're flame baiting.

Sorry but you’re taking such an elitist tone about this whole thing, and it’s completely unjustified. The only reason yo see this as different is because you’re feeling sour and contrarian about the AI hype. Take that away, and it’s an incredibly common, accepted, and not even problematic marketing standard.

The customer does not care about your internal build vs buy decisions. It is utterly inconsequential to the value that your product brings. Making that distinction part of the marketing message would muddy things purely to please…who? I don’t even think that this is something that the typical puritan nerd cares about.

Man is it a good thing not to be in tech.

People? Investors you mean? Why does the customer care.

Why call it an IT company when all it does is to use existing IT? I think it's fine.

Sales guy last week: “We don’t use OCR. That’s 20-year old tech. We use Amazon Textract”

Annoyance of sales/marketing tactics aside, the problem is when you are the plug-in. They can screw you at any moment, raise the price, change the interface every month, kick you out of the App Store, or whatever. You have little to no leverage.

You have real value when people want to plug into you.

> It’s just like building on top of AWS or GCP.

Yes, but companies still use "hosted on the cloud" as a feature in enterprise SaaS.

Starting a response with “you realize” is so condescending. I wish people would just make their point neutrally.

You’re right. Edited to be less of a jerk.

I am working on an AI-related project that isn't "making AI" but rather leveraging the APIs. I did a little soul-searching about whether to use a .ai domain (which of course is actually an Anguilla domain) or a .com, and my inner nerd beat my inner marketer but maybe only temporarily.

When I launch, I will absolutely describe it as an "AI thing" -- because it's using "AI" tech to do stuff you couldn't do otherwise.

Is your product a dev tool that happens to do something with OpenAI sometimes? Or is it a specialized interface to OpenAI? In the latter case, I would say it's misleading to not describe it as an "AI" product, because people (should) want to know whether they're going to be interacting with our new Insect Overlords.

Your case may be different, but that's my thinking as someone doing AI-adjacent work who is by no means an AI researcher.

It's similar to how many "media" and "video" companies just call FFmpeg

To get investor bucks

One can claim one's product possessing/powered by AI. It doesn't mean that one is building the AI algorithm oneself. Just like one can claim to provide infinite scalability, uptime and redundancy, leveraging some public cloud infrastructure.

Once OpenAI and similar AI infra become firmly established like public clouds, products built on top of them will find it more attractive and compulsive to mention that their service is powered by so and so AI, and not some in-house random AI.

It's all marketing tactics IMO.

Because AI is the current tech flavor of the month and everyone wants a slice of the pie even if they don't know anything about it themselves, just like crypto a few years ago.

To me, an AI company would be a company that offers products with AI capabilities (regardless on if they are just calling an API).

We have plenty of web hosting companies that don't own a server, energy companies that don't own power generation or power infrastructure, mobile phone carriers that don't own cell-towers etc. so I don't see this being any different to any of these scenarios.

This is nothing. During the dotcom boom there were companies owning only poultry farms in places like India that changed their names to sound like an IT company or a dotcom to so that the stock goes up. Atleast these "AI" companies are doing pass through AI, hopefully with some good user friendly and useful features on top of OpenAI's APIs, or targeting different verticals.

LLMs open up a new means of accomplishing complex tasks. How ere, there’s still a lot of work that happens to ensure input and output behaviors align with user needs and expectations.

Technically, most of your users could build your tool themselves. They don’t because they want someone else to solve the problem for them.

Same thing with LLMs. Pay someone who specializes in a specific task to build it well.

If I use AWS/GCP to build a SaaS product that runs in the cloud, I think it's fair to market as something running in the cloud. Especially if the customer isn't going to be able to buy it and run it on-prem. It wouldn't make sense to call myself a cloud provider though, that's what AWS/GCP are. AI companies aren't so clear with their naming.

If you trust a vendor's description of their product you're in for a world of hurt.

Why would you even care about hair splitting definitions rather than whether you need what the company offers?

The people that are making these silly distinctions aren’t the ones making meaningful buying decisions. And if they are, they’re very bad at their jobs.

It's not only attaching your product to hype trains, any claims about a product's capabilities directly from the vendor should be taken with a grain of salt.

> “It’s just like building on top of AWS or GCP.”

If you applied your logic to the use of cloud services then companies like Vercel shouldn’t call themselves a hosting provider because they use AWS. “It’s just a UI that calls the AWS API”

It's marketing hype. Calling yourself an "AI" company when you just query ChatGPT and a simple prefix prompt gets you more attention and makes the uninitiated think its your chatbot.

Thanks for the responses I appreciate the marketing and other reasons. I think I’m going to include AI in my tagline and other marketing materials.

We just say our projects are "enhanced/powered/enabled by AI" and no one bats an eye. It's for "regular people" though and using that term gives it shimmers of magic in their eyes "wow it's AI...!" and truth is that while most people have heard of ChatGPT now, they haven't used it. And the majority of people trying Chat, they're using it as a novelty toy.

Yeah it's marketing, but it really makes you stand out (in front of non-devs). However, I do think it's beneficial to say you're "AI-powered" since that'll get you the more right kind of users who like that stuff. It'll probably turn away those who are afraid of touching OpenAI's servers, but that'll save you tons of headaches too, with those customers.

Why call it cloud when you're just using AWS? Build your own redundant data center.

If you build using AWS you are a cloud company. You are not a cloud provider.

It’s fine.

Those standing on the shoulders of giants are effectively very tall.

If the giant shrugs you are in trouble.

Heroku is a hosting company built on top of a hosting company.

Breaking: Marketing can turn snake oil into gold

Marketing mostly (uses AI)

AI is just a marketing term. Doesn't actually have a proper definitiom.

On the contrary, the reason it's a marketing term is because it means something to end users. It's just not what OP thinks it means.

That said, successful marketing terms can lose a lot of their meaning and become very broad categories if a lot of companies/products adjacent to it are able to squeeze value out of the association.

Marketing terms are manufactured to make use of assumptions. They're rarely well defined and their meaning is invariably tortured.

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