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Comment by vemv | Hacker News Reader

There's a long gap from:

  I built a podcast search website

to:

  Staying in any company right now is a negative return.

We humans are too easily impressed by tricks, and are too willing to extrapolate them to fantasy land.

GPT can certainly accomplish an impressive variety of small tasks. Whether it can build large-scale systems that will power tomorrow's world is uncharted territory.

Can you build something meaningful, substantial, robust out of statistical knowledge, without real reasoning behind?

If you believe it's possible, where's everyone's array of profitable, newly-founded ventures? Or at least have you automated your job away yet?

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Despite the novelty and excitement, the profit potential for AI generated applications and content isn't particularly strong. If you can make something using AI, so can everyone else. You work at a company to make money. Using AI doesn't magically allow you to do that. If you have the ability to make a profitable company, AI may help, but it's not a business plan.

As always, you still have to bring your own ideas and hustle to the table. The difference is that GPT flattens the learning curve on a lot of things that would previously prevent you from executing on your ideas and it helps keep the momentum up when you hit the hard part of the grind.

It’s amazing for prototypes and writing utility functions, but for fully scalable and supportable architecture it’s a long ways off.

Likewise, it often generates very complex and confusing code - specifically regex in my experience where I can get the job done in a much more readable way.

Don’t get me wrong, I use it all day as a little coding helper, but while it can say, advise you on how to set up a distributed system, it’s not rolling out VMs and DB clusters.

Being amazing at prototypes is exactly what a one dev operation needs. You can worry about scaling after you know whether people will pay for it or not.

100% agree and that’s what I use it for. My point is more it’s a time saver, but not a replacement for higher order operations. Yet.

Yeah people haven’t used GPT enough if they think it can do all these things. Same with AutoGPT - it’s a total joke that got hyped up to high heavens. Go try to make it actually do anything of value and watch it struggle to parse Google results and get stuck in an infinite loop every time. LangChain has the right idea because you must break down the task to small parts and program the thing to do the correct thing after each step

It’s a really good intern.

What's the fundamental difference between generating Terraform to a spec and "rolling out VMs and DB clusters"?

And it does so for everyone else. The landscape is as flat as ever, the winning party is whoever you pay for running GPT.

> If you can make something using AI, so can everyone else

The idea / creativity is hence the key. Novel ideas don't occur to everyone.

Not really. Ideas have always been cheap. They occur to everyone. Most of them aren't great, let alone good.

But good ideas, even great ones, rarely mean much on their own. It's always been execution.

Technically, you are necessarily speculating....an idea that does not occur to many people during real time cognition.

Well you need both, a great idea and great execution. I agree with your sentiment though that execution (and timing) are the differentiation.

A decent idea and great execution is often enough.

And a deep or wide, or preferably both, market. Without this last ingredient, all you have is a hobby project.

fair, but I was considering that part of "decent" in "decent idea".

With AI making execution bit easier, the idea will become relatively less cheap.

If it's trivial to implement someone else can just take your idea and easily spin up a competitor, devaluing your idea.

This is the ultimate fate of any interesting or useful idea. What matters - if you're doing it for fame or profit - is the delay between you and your competitors executing on the idea.

(The delay may sometimes be negative. I'm reminded of a few cases where someone made a successful Kickstarter, only to discover mid-way through fundraising that factories in China are already busy manufacturing their product for someone else.)

While I agree that is a bit of an extreme statement (many companies are also adopting LLMs from what I've been reading here on HN), this part just below that does seem insightful:

> Unless you work for OpenAI, your GPT leverage is likely wasted on trivial business code, and even more likely that due to the overwhelming amount of poor code, GPT with its 4/8k context window is unable to optimize, further weakening the leverage.

If you are sitting at a company in this situation it is of course arguable that you were already experiencing a negative return pre GPT-4, but certainly that productivity feeling from GPT-4 probably makes it seem even worse.

> If you believe it's possible, where's everyone's array of profitable, newly-founded ventures? Or at least have you automated your job away yet?

Come on now. GPT 4 is not even out for two months. API access is not yet widely available. Legal questions are preventing many conservative players from adoption. How fast do you think progress propagates?

The OP better buy some ketchup cause they’ll be eating those words in a few months.

On top of no generally available API, GPT-4 in ChatGPT is really damn slow right now.

Unless you have a special deal (Microsoft) the only performant option is 3.5-turbo. In my experience for coding and text summarization it’s totally fine with a limited benefit from GPT-4, which is more impressive at higher order reasoning and planning.

Interestingly (or not), Perplexity's GPT-4 chatbot is noticeably faster than ChatGPT-4 for me. I don't find its implementation quite as helpful, though, which is weird I think?

a lot of good software doesn't take off today because selling it is a slog. AI could help there too, but probably not much (especially for getting the first 10 to 100 customers).

e.g. say you used GPT-4 to clone something like Fivetran but with your own unique features. It could even be way better across some dimensions, but you still need to convince users to try it and I don't see AI helping with that (at least not yet!).

I read it as an experiment and hypothesis. The author is on a quest to prove their hypotheses. I appreciate the insight into the work in progress and the potential outcomes. It's more beneficial for me than waiting several months to see it fully proven.

It's worth noting that the podcast search website makes request to Apple's podcast search API, then formats the results.

I would be interested if OP could glean enough from GPT to build the search index as well, a much more complicated project.

>GPT can certainly accomplish an impressive variety of small tasks. Whether it can build large-scale systems that will power tomorrow's world is uncharted territory.

There is an INCREDIBLE amount of opaque BI that can be unlocked with GPT/AI etc.

I have already used it to get some extremely quick market infor about certain things.

AI is going to make a lot of people smarter, much faster and cheaper than current institutions.

classes are going to get more refined, and honestly, certain industries need to be utterly destroyed by AI (legal being my primary target, as they have too much fraud)

And yet another use for it:

GPT4: In the context provided, 'BI' likely stands for 'Business Intelligence'.

Indeed, it is far from clear that, even if an individual can leverage the productivity gains, that individual can generate revenue from what they're doing.

Totally agreed.

Punch cards are such an arduous technology to use, they're effectively useless. Therefore it's pretty clear to me computation is not really going anywhere as a technology and I highly doubt much more progress can be made.

(Sentiment of some, years ago)

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