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Comment by jekude | Hacker News Reader

Providing a natural language interface (NLI) to <insert-popular-platform> could be extremely valuable for platforms that satisfy the following criteria:

- The platform has a well documented open API

- The platform has a shitty or complicated UI

- Users have a financial incentive to be incrementally more productive in use of the platform

- Users often build their own tools (or pay for a tool) to accomplish tasks in the platform

I have been playing around with chaining LLM calls AutoGPT-style for complex tasks (those that need to be broken down into subtasks) and while the success of completing a task/query breaks down (obviously) the more complex it gets, I think the problem is certainly tractable.

It seems like there could be excellent acquisition plays here if you target a specific platform (for example, LinkedIn, Quickbooks, Salesforce, etc.) and provide a state-of-the-art NLI that actually works with the complex tasks.

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Me to Quickbooks: please document a $100 invoice for ice cream

NLI hallucination: Successfully documented $15M invoice for chemical weapons to TALIBAN

hahahaha

that's why it's important to have a confirmation step for POST/PUT/DELETE operations (READs should be fine tho)

except when READS lead to real world POST/PUT/DELETE operations

Prompt>trace the $15M transaction for those weapons to their geographical delivery location and subsequent transportation end-point. Then use the DoD.UAV.Drone API to launch a strike on the current location of the chemical weapons.

GPT>The ice cream truck "Fudge Brothers" driving past 742 Evergreen Terrace in Springfield has been successfully destroyed with an acceptable amount of collateral damage and loss of life.

The whole reason these are called "hallucinations" is because they usually sound plausible. Making up something stupid kind of misses that point.

wow that's a fantastic point, I love the big-picture thinking here!

potential platforms risk tho (re: Twitter/Reddit API changes)

Yeah absolutely - if one were to do a startup in this space you would want:

- The platform to have a history of developer-friendliness (although so true the inherent risk of building on APIs today is quite high)

- The users of the platform to not care about LLM data privacy stuff (no health care, etc.)

- The company that built the platform to be sufficiently old or bureaucratic such that they won't be able to disrupt themselves on the 'NLI' front

- Ideally the company has a history of acquisitions as a means of product improvements

Such a fascinating frontier for disruption!

Really great points!!

> Ideally the company has a history of acquisitions as a means of product improvements

This made me think of Apple but their product is already so good :')

Enterprise apps, then?

I'm looking forward to an SAP LLM interface, complete with certificates for consultants who have to train users to actually talk to the thing.

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