_akhe

  Location:     San Francisco 
  Remote:       Sure
  Relocate:     Depends
  Technologies: Node/React, working with LLMs would be a plus
  Résumé/CV:    https://bennyschmidt.com
  Email:        hello@bennyschmidt.com
  -----
  YC alum of:   Brave, Checkr 
  GitHub:       https://github.com/bennyschmidt
  Neat project: https://github.com/bennyschmidt/next-token-prediction

Simply said I expect there to be an npm to use in case I don't want to use the hosted UI. Very common, almost everyone does it. I would even expect that of free-to-use SaaS.

Example: https://www.npmjs.com/package/easyinvoice

Not to mention it's pretty low effort to build to a dist and npm publish - it would be very worth it to get more people using the product. That's why it's so common.

My random internet person's opinion: Instead of a 14-day trial, I think freemium is better where you can use it for up to X # of clients and if you want to go beyond some usage then you have to pay (e.g. Vercel, GitHub, etc. model).

For $9/mo, I would also expect React/Angular/Vue libraries to implement this into a larger project or other back office workflow - just my 2 cents!

Thanks for sharing, I love stuff like this.

> you clearly know nothing about

I have more direct experience than you do - and startups already exist that do this very thing with LLMs, but go ahead, have fun on the wrong side of history making false claims and straw manning arguments

Yeah huh.

> Why do you think medical is similar to legal

As stated, because both involve sensitive and personal information about people - unlike say, Stable Diffusion which is using AI for creative image creation etc.

> why do lawyers and doctors get it wrong all the time

Because they're human. "Medical error" has been in the top 5 causes of death in the United States for several years. Our legal system is also far from perfect and could use the help - consider systemic biases and wrongly convicted people who spent their lives behind bars unfairly due to human error or bias, omissions of information, etc.

> Do you have any experience with the legal industry at all

> Rude

Your repeated use of "at all" also comes across as slightly rude FYI :)

As stated, yes I built background check software for a major background check company (they're yc, now worth billions) - in particular I developed their background check ETA and built their React app which is used millions of times per year by Uber, DoorDash, and others, for background checks. I'm familiar with the space and had to become a background investigator to work there. What you say just isn't true.

> they do not abstract facts from a legal case into a database for querying

Again wrong - yes they do. How would courts operate if they didn't, think about it for 2 seconds.

I built Checkr's background check ETA in Ruby/React, and had to get background check certified to work there. Part of onboarding was going down to the courthouse to show us how it was done before APIs. While it's true some records are still offline in some courthouses, almost all of it is online, some is even sold to 3rd parties in some states like mugshot websites, background check sites, etc. While others are on-prem servers the state/county runs. But they definitely use databases and computers lol.

I think you're missing the point - you act like I'm suggesting AI replace the entire legal system when I'm talking about a tool people would use instead of older tech like a SQL database and UI.

For courthouses that run their SQL on-prem for security reasons, could do the same with models - they don't even need access to the internet. So if you wanted to be inaccessible to the public you could (though some states/counties require they make it public).

Nothing will satisify the neo-luddite take, just watch from the sidelines I guess!

Some mechanic positions will be replaced by AI - probably similar to medical where those operating machinery and those making important judgments are fine for now, but asking about parts/comparisons, giving/getting info about my car, etc. will be an LLM - maybe even self-serve with a friendly UI. I can see a lot of front-of-house - everything from fast food to oil changes, being just AI.

Automotive engineers at automakers will also use LLMs though, but more like software developers, probably text-to-CAD type generation to automate work or come up with ideas, so in this analogy the modern-day drafter is replaced by AI.

Looking at nuance.js you seem to like writing libraries. The JavaScript side of AI needs lots of help with little utilities and stuff like this!

I think a project + Show HN would:

- build confidence

- get eyes and feedback on your work

- increase your legitmacy to others ultimately resulting in people contacting you

Make it a point to show Hacker News something awesome every Friday until you get a job, would give you a metronome and carrot-on-a-stick at least - "hope" I think they call it

To get a PR in you have to be pretty actively using the project and be lucky enough to spot an issue worth fixing. Either that or you're going through Issues trying to find something important enough that someone isn't working on.

Let's say you find the thing, you fork the repo (because you aren't on the team) make the change, open the PR, then it's back to Discord trying to get someone to look at the PR. Sometimes a miracle happens and they approve the PR, but you still aren't allowed to merge it, gotta usually bother them one last time to merge it.

Worth it if it's a project you use all the time and you truly understand the codebase, I do this all the time with stuff I use, but nearly impossible if you're an outsider just trying to get a PR merged on something you don't use especially in a well-known repo.

A lot of the more experienced developers (mid-millennial age) entered their careers riding the wave of the invention of smartphones and social media not to mention modern web, games, advertising, etc. There was so much work and funding to do the work.

The world changed after the Obama years, funding was largely yanked out of tech, except for self-funded types and hype cycles like crypto and AI. Most of tech sort of merged with "status quo" work - it's not special anymore. Most companies don't budget that much for engineers, or any staff.

There's a chance it will bounce back - I can't imagine Netflix is going to just let us have something like:

  output a Tarantino film set in a cyberpunk future starring Bruce Willis and Uma Thurman in their prime with a cameo from Ariana Grande who plays the crime lord's daughter 

For now, it's self-funded egomaniac founders and boring work for low pay. There's no advice I can give you on interviewing other than it's a numbers game. Every company gets like 1000+ applicants right now, it's ridiculous. You have to know somebody.

RAG/LLMs are a clear improvement to the baseline though. People will unfairly judge LLMs even when they provide more accuracy and better results, even if they save lives, simply because they can't meet the impossible demands of neo-luddites. People want it to be like "an evil force" and I blame OpenAI and the news for this narrative.

This take reminds me of some of the (weaker) arguments against blockchain when it was popular. For some - just because there was not a 100% chance a blockchain can prevent every conceivable exploit and hack it was therefore useless hype - they ignore the decentralization utility, throw out the peer-to-peer ledger concept, throw out the consensus protocols, etc. How could something like git have been invented in such a political, anti-tech environment? Git would have been shut down by the masses, otherwise smart people would label it as a scary evil force. Thankfully peer-to-peer was very cool back then and so git is useful tech that we get to use.

I'm seeing the same thing with LLMs, all people are focused on is: Prove to me AI isn't evil - people can see a valuable use case in a demo but it doesn't matter, I think like blockchain some are beyond convincing. They just aren't into technology anymore.

Doesn't it answer it?

> Lawyers and doctors get it wrong all the time

This is a tool that helps them get it right

There's a possibility for errors in regular SQL querying too, like a user-facing search input. I'm not saying language interfaces are foolproof, but it's not generally wrong when you ask specific things like a person's age, blood pressure, criminal history, etc. if querying against a vector DB of that exact info.

Again the human judgment is not replaced in either scenario, I'm talking about a tool the lawyer, the doctor, etc. would use.

Lawyer and doctor are often listed as comparable examples because both involve sensitive info you can't afford to get wrong, unlike creative use cases for AI like image or song generation.

Those who need to work (a lot of us) are those who don't have someone paying their bills and don't have an easy/fun/passive way of getting money, like a lifestyle business, fun job, fame, or inheritance.

So is work necessary? Probably not. But hobbies, creativity, production, and innovation will probably always exist because it's what people do naturally. I think there's a system in which everyone is having a better time overall, where we wouldn't call it work. But we're not there yet - we're still in a post-feudal system and will continue to see leftovers of that for some time which affects a lot of people and makes their lives unnecessarily difficult.

People of the future will ask: "{ "question": "What is this .gitkeep file?" }"

And the sages will answer: "{ "answer": "It is a tomb or religious site." }"

Yeah I agree with that, that's why I specified knowledge workers. I don't think it's bad if cashiers get replaced by self-checkout or if receptionists get replaced by automated agents on either end.

Emergency/police dispatchers - obviously increased sensitivity that makes it a special case, but I still think AI can eventually do the job better than a human.

Driving cars - not yet, at least not outside specific places, but probably eventually, and definitely for known routes.

Teaching yoga - maybe never, as easy as it would be to do, some people might always want an in-person experience with a human teacher and class.

But importantly - most knowledge workers can't be displaced by AI when the work entails solving problems with undocumented solutions that the AI could not have trained on yet, or any work that involves judgment and subjectivity, or that requires a credential (doctor to write the prescription, engineer to sign off on the drawing) or security clearance, authorizations, etc. There's a lot of knowledge work it can't touch.

I used to think AI would replace doctors before nurses, and lawyers before court clerks - now I think it's the other way around. The doctor, the lawyer - like the software engineer - will simply be more powerful than ever and have lower overhead. The lower-down jobs will get eaten, never the knowledge work.

Yet you and a few other people insist I'm saying "AI will replace human judgment" - why? I'm saying the doctor isn't replaced, the lawyer, the software engineer, etc. aren't replaced. It's more like the technician just got a better technical manual, not like they are replaced by it.

Secondly, it's obvious they have not used RAG, or they wouldn't say things like "inaccurate responses" etc. RAG is as accurate as any database (because it is a database). It puts all the information from your uploaded files into a database and reads from that. The commenter fundamentally misunderstands the technology and likely hasn't even used it - yet feels the need to comment on it like an expert. It's not like using ChatGPT, and in any case it's not in lieu of a lawyer anyway, that was just a straw man argument that goes counter to my actual post.

I did respond to the points about accuracy and legal precedents. Unlike the other false statements that were made, these are legitimate concerns a lot of people share about whether or not LLM tooling should be used by legal professionals.

Is ChatGPT sufficient to replace a lawyer? No.

Is ChatGPT sufficient as a legal advice tool that a lawyer might use on a case-by-case basis or generally? No.

Could the same LLM technology be used except on a body of specific case documents to surface information through a convenient language interface to a legal expert? Yes. It's as safe as SQL.

The point about pricing and inventory is that, unlike an LLM, RAG involves retrieval of specific facts from a document (or collection of documents) - the language is more for handling your query and matching it to that information. None of the points he made about inaccuracies and insufficient answers, etc. or replacing lawyers apply.

San Francisco in 2019.

> if LLMs had value they would be used elsewhere first therefore they are not currently useful

I don't see how this logically follows. LLMs are already used and will continue to displace tooling (and even jobs) in various positions whether its cashiers, medical staff, legal staff, auto shops, police (field work and dispatch), etc. The fact they don't immediately displace knowledge workers is:

1) A win for knowledge workers, you just got a free and open source tool that makes you more valuable

2) Not indicative of lacking value, looks more like LLMs finding product-market-fit

> the concept of a hospital is now meaningless

Like saying you won't go to an auto shop that does research, or hire a developer who uses a coding assistant. Why? They'd just be better, more informed.

When we accept that AI is not replacing knowledge workers, the conversation changes to a more digestible and debatable one: Are LLMs useful tools for experts? And I think the answer will be a resounding: Duh

Very easily done. Is that it?

> lack of common sense, false conclusions

The AI tool doesn't replace the judge/DA/etc. it's just a very useful tool for them to use. Checkout the "RAG-based learning" section of this app I built (https://github.com/bennyschmidt/ragdoll-studio) there's a video that shows how you can effectively load new knowledge into it (I use LlamaIndex for RAG). For example, past cases that set legal precedents, and other information you want to be considered. It creates a database of the files you load in, so it's not making those assumptions like an LLM without RAG would. I think a human would be more error-prone than an LLM with vector DB of specific data + querying engine.

> I don't see the utility

Then you are not paying attention or haven't used LLMs that much. Maybe you're unfamiliar with the kind of work it's good at.

> actual work involved in practicing law

This is what it's best at, and what people are already using RAG for: Reading patient medical docs, technical documentation, etc. this is precisely what humans are bad at and will offload to technology.

> actual research is required

You have not tried RAG.

> LLMs struggle to produce useful outputs

You have not tried RAG.

> LLMs are unlikely to identify issues

You have not tried RAG.

> the LLM by definition is creative analysis

You have not tried RAG.

You can load an entire product catalog into LlamaIndex and the LLM will have perfect knowledge of pricing, inventory, etc. This specific domain knowledge of inventory allows you to have the accurate, transactional conversations that a regular LLM isn't designed for.

But like the "AI lawyer", the "AI doctor", the "AI coder", it doesn't replace the analyst, it just improves the quality and output of their work.

It might replace analyst interns, or some entry-level positions that were mostly low-level tasks and data entry, but a data analyst at a company who knows how to put data into a LlamaIndex for querying is a very useful analyst - think of what can be built on top of that domain-specific LLM for the company, for the analyst. It makes non-technical analysts who don't use AI seem incredibly passe and useless in comparison.

Same with auto mechanics, lawyers, doctors, HVAC techs, construction workers - AI tooling will even make its way into police work (even in the field, running on their little computer in-car) as well as dispatching.

Doesn't replace anyone, but has the ability to drastically improve our quality of work. Turns the expert into a super-expert.

PS: Cloudflare vs Vercel. Cloudflare is a military/government contractor that offers outdated and slow cloud products that others have already offered for years. Vercel is a serverless platform who somewhat innovated in that space, designed ideally for Next.js and/or React apps for convenient CI/CD from a github repo. Not the same.

Instead of writing your senator who is owned by OpenAI - just throw away your `OPENAI_API_KEY` and use one of the many open models like mistral or llama3.

  ollama run mistral

And there are cloud providers like https://replicate.com/ and https://lightning.ai/ that will let you use your LLM via an API key just like you did with OpenAI if you need that.

You don't need OpenAI - nobody does.

Curiosity + LLM = instant knowledge