I'm really confused by "Anecdotally, most people use LLMs for ~4 basic natural language tasks" and "Most LLM applications use some combination of these four".
I'm not sure about the `ELI5` use-case, and feels like this is only true for a very limited type of use-cases people currently use LLMs for.
For conversational FAQ-type use-cases like the ones described by OP perhaps a few basic prompts suffice (although anything requiring the agent to have "agency" in its replies would necessarily require prompt engineering) - but what about all the other ways that people can use LLMs to analyze, transform and generate data?
You say this as if the goal of building a business (and measure of success) was to raise money?
From what I can see, Front has 360+ employees and generates $64M in revenue, which works out to $177K revenue per headcount. Missive generates $2M with a headcount of 4, which comes out to $500k revenue per employee.
Imo, generating almost 3x more revenue per headcount, and not having to deal with the headaches of managing a 360+ employee team (while maintaining complete ownership of your company) is the type of success that more founders should aspire to.
Thanks for the quick answer! Follow-up around this as it's a space I'm actively working in: did you use or build any tools for the labeling process, or was it Excel? :D Also, do you ultimately see/position your solution as an AI-powered exploration tool that allows humans to derive better insights, faster (but where the NLP side of things is simply to assist in this discovery process), or do you see the models (and resulting flags) eventually being able to completely replace the human intuition?
Congrats on the launch guys! Fellow Canadian from Montreal here :) I'm curious, what tools / methodology did you follow to generate the high-quality labels, and how many different labels did you end generating? I'm also very curious whether you view the discovery and generation of new labels (and accompanying high-quality training datasets) as a continuing and core part of your development going forward?
2 years ago some friends and I started writing one song each per week (and met every Thursday to listen to our respective master-pieces). We mostly ended up composing and recording the songs on iphones the Wednesday night before (thank god for GarageBand), and after 3-4 weeks were producing more creative content in this compressed timeframe than we'd had been able to with no deadline before. A few months in we skipped a Thursday or two, and suggested the solution was to write one song per month instead. That was definitely not the solution. We didn't find more time to write, and the lack of schedule killed the momentum. My biggest regret of the last year is not sticking to it - however a friend just moved to our city with the condition that we'd get it started again with the weekly frequency, so I'm optimistic :)
Agreed - we've built extensions for Chrome, Firefox, IE & Safari ; Firefox and IE are on the same level with regards to debugging, that is : not pleasant. It's a shame because browser extensions have great potential : I'm increasingly turning towards them for a variety of use-cases, however currently limiting efforts to Chrome due to availability of tools.
A few months ago, I started a projet with a few friends, whereby we commit to each writing and recording one original song per week, then meet on thursday to listen to everyone's creations and critique. As far as I am concerned, this experience persuaded me that taking more time does certainly not equate producing higher quality material ; up until now, I had taken months and sometimes years (!!) to finish and sometimes never end up recording songs, always unhappy with the final result, and with no deadline, unable to simply let go of my ego and release.
The goal with la Chanson Du Jeudi (www.lachansondujeudi.com) was to adopt a more "Bob Dylan" approach, ie : do one-take recordings if that's all we had time for (none of us are professional musicians in any capacity), and respect the act of creation above that of perfecting. In most cases, we'd end up writing, composing and recording the night before or day of, which led us to go down creative paths that would otherwise maybe have been discarded.
Interestingly, I was talking with a friend last night who is applying pretty the same concept to picture-taking : a group of friends decide on a topic, and submit pictures every week to a Flickr channel and vote on them. Much like the need to produce songs on a regular basis forced me to start recording any little idea that came to me to be sure I had something to close the week, she now consciously takes her camera everywhere she goes for this project's purpose.
"In the worst case your LinkedIn account may be compromised. You will have to weigh this against the convenience of not having to log in to LinkedIn."
This doesn't convince me.
Not really. YCombinator invests < 25,000$ for < 10% stakes in early-stage startups, some of them already showing traction and revenue. To kill Hollywood, you'd need to invest 1000x that, for projects that are be contrast much risker, and that don't benefit from the advantage of teams being able to "iterate" quickly if things don't work out.
There are a subset of applications that imo could rely exclusively on email as the platform.
A few months ago I built such an app, a small side-project called betabrokers(email [email protected] with subject:about to signup and learn more).
The simplicity of the signup process for this type of app (simply sending an email) is a huge benefit.
Email-based apps especially make sense in a mobile context, which is somewhat ironic because the transactional nature of applications built on them would suggest that they are slower, therefore less likely to be used. In our case however, users keep coming back to it, probably because the email client is the single most used app on their phone, and receiving replies to your actions via email becomes addictive.
Go Montreal ! :)
Slight issue though - I created an app, says everything went well, downloaded the sandbox, but nothing appears under "My projects". Does it take time to update ? Also, "Push composer" and "Analytics" in my admin panel link to "#". Are these just placeholder links to let users know that the functionality is coming ? Good job on shipping the product !
The product look great, and piggy-backing on IRC makes a lot sense. However, I wouldn't pay for this, on the basis that the pricing model makes me feel like they assume users are naive (to put it nicely).
Multi-tiered pricing models that work typically offer users incremental value, most often in the form of extra features (that took time to develop), support (that takes time to provide) or hardware/bandwidth resources (that are fixed costs to the company).
In this case however, the incremental value is "number of users". Unless we're talking about hosting video (or other bandwidth-intensive media), the difference in resources needed to host 50 users can't warrant a 10x price difference from that of hosting 5 users.
This is where they lose me (and probably most devs) to the "apt-get" alternative.
IMHO, they should apply a one-price model : 10$ per month, unlimited users. It would better bridge the gap between the DIY option, and the luxury of having someone else do a mostly one-time configuration (and occasional maintenance) for you.
For conversational FAQ-type use-cases like the ones described by OP perhaps a few basic prompts suffice (although anything requiring the agent to have "agency" in its replies would necessarily require prompt engineering) - but what about all the other ways that people can use LLMs to analyze, transform and generate data?