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o11ywhispereron Andrew Ng says bottleneck in AI startups isn't coding – it's product management

As a Product Manager (not Program or Project), this has been my lived experience of the devolution of the profession.

We want PMs to understand the market, the tech, the customer, and the economic value of building a product.

We then ask them to tell us when it will be built, down to the discrete feature and function, be a technical expert for the field and engineering in the product space, ask them to convey the roadmap and timeline to customers and prospects, build reports about everything from utilization to capacity, save deals by changing timelines for “just this one feature”, participate in product marketing, and understand how their product space co-exists in the complex product offerings from a company.

“You are the Chief Product Officer for your product!” is the promise and rallying cry. That’s not an accurate description of what most PMs do and even fewer are capable of doing.

o11ywhispereron Actual LLM agents are coming

Tell me more about this idea of topology.

From the observability realm (check username!), the relationship of data is a challenging problem. Standards like OpenTelemetry try to solve this by focusing on the relationship between technology elements with attributes and resource.attributes, along with context propagation using span and trace ids.

OTel is effectively a relational database schema. The larger questions like “If the Detroit Tigers make it to the playoffs, how much will a head of lettuce be in Berlin?” require context that machines (and humans!) lack. And, since the question is entirely made up, there might not be any relevant context.

Context powered by topology feels like the next step. Extrapolating that topology to search queries still feels like science fiction today.

o11ywhispereron How to break the 'AI hype cycle'

AI has become the new IBM — nobody has ever been fired for recommending AI.

AI is shorthand for “we have no clue how to solve this problem, but AI can do it for us.”

I wish that that wasn’t the case. Generative AI is a very cool tech, not magic. And machine learning, the “other” AI, powers much of what we consider normal in our tech interactions.