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Comment by dbfclark | Hacker News Reader

The key question here isn’t so much whether GPT-4 beats the actual human decks as much as what it had to fabricate to do so. The humans are probably constrained by things like “reality” and “what their business has done in it” while GPT-4 could make up anything it wanted. A fair comparison would be to humans given the same prompt and told to invent whatever facts they wanted.

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The sensible way to do this experiment would be to have GPT-4 create pitch decks for the same businesses that the humans pitched, putting the constraints of those businesses in the prompts. I skimmed the article and it's not clear to me whether they did that.

Amusingly, the article itself seemed more like a pitch than a scientific experiment.

Great point! Since they are not showing the decks, for all we know these GPT4 pitches may have been proposing they found a cure for cancer.

"In addition, my plan guarantees every child a free kitten or puppy, along with the aforementioned immortality."

Sure, but a human could write that too. Surely the onus is on the investor to assess how realistic they think the founders' claims are.

They fell for Juicero and Theranos, can we *really expect that from them?

Yes, but often in a later due diligence stage.

And also the human will be on the hook for actually delivering, so sane founders will take that into account.

is this some new hacker news poes law usually i can tell but this one is too spicy for me

These ChatGPT pitch decks might start offering something even more ludicrous, like profitability!

That's the real risk to the startup ecosystem.

Again, not a million miles from other real world founder decks you could care to mention…

This is what I imagine now: "I am a serial entrepreneur who has created three companies with a valuation of over $100,000,000, and I led one company into an IPO." lol

Right!?!

Ideally the most important thing in a pitch deck are the actual facts and substance, not the presentation and storytelling.

So what are the facts used?

The substance is the base, the presentation and storytelling is the multiplier (and yes the latter can be < 1)

I'd conjecture that the training corpus also tends to be at either end of the spectrum (good and bad, little in the middle). People don't tend to share pitch decks unless:

* They're bragging, showing why it was so good.

* They're reflecting, analyzing why it was so bad.

I wonder, if I could feed true facts into a prompt and consistently get well written decks on the other side. I think I’ll try that.

The humans are probably constrained by things like “reality” and “what their business has done in it” while GPT-4 could make up anything it wanted.

You clearly know different founders than I do.

I found that, by far, the most interesting thing ChatGPT has given us up to this point (and there are a lot of interesting things) are new perspectives on things that we humans do and believe, on a entirely plain, non-philosophical level.

"Well, actually" moments, everywhere, all the time.

Still explainable by GPT4 being able to concoct better lies than humans can.

Wait, lying is an option?

Gross.

what if lying is the real superpower of ceos and all those marketing blogspams were also lies

As far as I can tell this is exactly true

right, CEO as a service it is then.

You're in luck! We're offering a brand new moral-spinedectomy operation, guaranteed to turn mushy humanity into glorious ~~psychopathy~~ - I mean leadership!

Got a CEO who just can't do the right thing (for the shareholders)? We offer up to 20-way split billing so the whole board of directors can chip in for the surgery!

Four-hour recovery before your CEO is ready to do ANYTHING to meet quarterly expectations, no matter how cruel and capricious! Or your money back!

What do you mean board of directors? The goal is to get rid of everyone not using their hands. Everyone answers to the E-CEO from janitor and security to clients, investors and human externalities. Every query answered immediately, to the point, everyone informed exactly to the right extend and at the right moment, all data driven. Instant bonuses if you demonstrate human usefulness beyond the job description.

Every lie can finally be believable and be completely consistent with the rest of the hallucinated universe. Perfectly timed lies that trade reputation for profit at the correct exchange rate.

Complete "awareness" of the exact value of every asset in the company and the audacity to act on it.

Always has been.

you don't need to lie. come up with 50 pitch decks, submit all of them, which ever gets the most feedback probably also has more market fit so go with that.

I'm not 100 percent on what I want to build, I just know it'll involve ai models, automation, and autonomous agents. The way money is flowing to this space. I think a rough idea and a good team is all you need for funding.

That is one of the wrongest-sounding things I have ever read, as you can tell from the track-record of VC-first incubators. (and the effectiveness of the VC industry in aggregate)

"you don't need to lie. come up with 50 pitch decks, submit all of them, which ever gets the most feedback probably also has more market fit so go with that."

All you're getting is feedback on what VCs like the most...

Don't 90% (or a high percentage) of their investments to go bust?

Yup, but at least you know they’ll give you, money.

True.

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