LLMs are great at extracting the best of human knowledge from the past, but will they synthesize new information for the future?
LLMs are Not the Answer
LLMs are not the final answer to all our technology woes. The culture harkens back to the time of blockchain being the answer to everything. Proceed with caution.
Artificial Intelligence as a Perfect Solution
Artificial Intelligence will solve our problem. Lot's of entrepreneurs have a grand vision of how AI can solve any difficult problem for their business. This doesn't mean they're wrong, but the fields of AI and ML (machine learning) have many sub categories and areas of active research that allow us to make progress on quite specific computational tasks. Applying the wrong form of learning or problem solving to a task can produce underwhelming results. Tweaking and tuning a model or method is the way to get solid results and outpace your competitors in business use cases. I'd like to go through a few ML methods and what they're used for maybe to inspire some new ideas.
Applying Old ML to Novel Businesses
Artificial intelligence and machine learning are disciplines that cover many methods and systems. There are a ton of powerful tools and libraries that have been built by technologists that are ripe for application to business tasks. There are places where these novel methods can be applied in profitable sectors.
Productize Your Job and Quit
You're a white collar professional with over a decade of experience. You've found some major inefficiencies in your work, and repetitious tasks that you have to do, and not only you, but everyone in your role at other companies. If you're driven, creative and have an insight that's repeatable, you can leverage and sell it with software. This lets you stop trading time for money, and gives greater opportunity for growth. Hard work, no doubt, but worth a risk to escape the 9-5.
Competitive Analysis for Your MVP
Doing a competitive analysis on your MVP and business idea yields many benefits. It helps identify gaps in the market, shows where the attention and money is focused, and may expose features that are extremely technically complex. It's a good thing to do before starting building your MVP to ensure you're hyperfocused on your unique value proposition.
Should I outsource or hire inhouse?
Many early stage companies face a decision of how to build out their first product. Do we go the route of inhouse engineers, or do we outsource to start? Sometimes a combination makes sense. Here are some considerations to take into account.