But ... what else should they be doing? What's the expectation here?
For example, in the 90's, a startup that offered a nice UI for a legacy console based system, would have been a great idea. What's wrong with that?
For example, in the 90's, a startup that offered a nice UI for a legacy console based system, would have been a great idea. What's wrong with that?
I assume it works because the ecosystem is, as you say, so new. Non-technical observers have trouble distinguishing between LLM companies and CRUD companies
The thing that annoys me is when clearly non-AI companies try to brand themselves as AI: like how Long Island Iced Tea tried to brand themselves as a blockchain company or WeWork tried to brand themselves as a tech company.
If we’re complaining about AI startups not building their own in house LLMs, that really just seems like people who are not in the arena criticizing those who are.
A lot of these startups have little to no moat, but they're raking in money like no one's business. That's exactly what happened in the dotcom bubble.
Being LLM users would be fine but they pretend they do AI.
Btw, the so-called AI devs or model developers are "users" of the databases and all the underlying layers of the stack.
At what point can you claim that you did "it"?
Do you have to use an open source model instead of an API? Do you have to fine tune it? How much do you need to? Do you have to create synthetic data for training? Do you have to gather your own data? Do you need to train from scratch? Do you need to come up with a novel architecture?
10 years ago if you gathered some data and trained a linear model to determine the likelihood your client would default on their loan and used that to decide how much, if any, to loan them- you're absolutely doing "actual AI"
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Any other software you could ask all the same questions but with using a high level language, frameworks, dependencies, hiring consultants / firm, using an LLM, no-code, etc.
At what point does outsourcing some portion of the end product become no longer doing the thing?
When the core of your business ist something that’s shamelessly farmed out to <LLM provider of choice>.
It would be like calling yourself a restaurant, and then getting uber eats deliveries of whatever customers ordered and handing that to them.
The customers don't see where the food is coming from and are still coming to eat. If you can make the economics work...
You don't have the moat other restaurants have, but you're still a restaurant.
If I buy pre made it's at best from supermarkets for heating at home.
Yes clearly the only 2 options are “sells someone else pre-made meals” or “farms everything on premises”.
Clearly no other alternatives exist. /s