You hit the nail on the head on the commoditization of AI, and the importance of non-technical specs to how companies are successful. Apple users pay a lot more for less computing power because they want the ease of an Apple product. Likewise, if there were a "better" search engine, would people stop using Google? Probably not. OpenAI has the first-mover advantage, with "I chat-gpt'd something" becoming a verb like "I googled something." That being said, these days, when you Google something, you get an AI summarizing the answer for you. That's their way of getting people to use their AI tools and keeping Google Search relevant. The key problem these days (it seems) is just taking all these LLMs, and implementing them without the chat interface and directly into a workflow, which is what Cursor/windsurf do (and why people pay for them). Understanding the use cases and how to integrate the LLM into it, so-called "agentic AI."
years ago my youngest was struggling in kindergarten. I paid a fortune to all kinds of doctors and while the diagnosis in retrospect was obvious (ADHD) the recommendation cracked me up - the child needed 2 squares of carpet at story time not 1 - to give space for their body to wiggle and not disturb others. I always thought of that extra reading carpet real estate as the most expensive in all of the Bay Area. The bigger text box suggestion is #GOLD and should go down as an innovation breakthrough - give this concept a name, update your wikipedia and trademark it right away.
Useful is not the same thing as usable. You hit the nail on the head baby!
That’s why the LLM leaderboard halo effect doesn’t make it past those who already bookmarked huggingface. People want to use tools that feel good to use daily and that doesn’t map cleanly to overtraining a model to pass hyper specific benchmarks. Same story with why snowflake blew up. It’s not going to win the benchmark game. That was not the game worth winning. It had the best UX and story for old and new school data people.
You hit the nail on the head on the commoditization of AI, and the importance of non-technical specs to how companies are successful. Apple users pay a lot more for less computing power because they want the ease of an Apple product. Likewise, if there were a "better" search engine, would people stop using Google? Probably not. OpenAI has the first-mover advantage, with "I chat-gpt'd something" becoming a verb like "I googled something." That being said, these days, when you Google something, you get an AI summarizing the answer for you. That's their way of getting people to use their AI tools and keeping Google Search relevant. The key problem these days (it seems) is just taking all these LLMs, and implementing them without the chat interface and directly into a workflow, which is what Cursor/windsurf do (and why people pay for them). Understanding the use cases and how to integrate the LLM into it, so-called "agentic AI."
years ago my youngest was struggling in kindergarten. I paid a fortune to all kinds of doctors and while the diagnosis in retrospect was obvious (ADHD) the recommendation cracked me up - the child needed 2 squares of carpet at story time not 1 - to give space for their body to wiggle and not disturb others. I always thought of that extra reading carpet real estate as the most expensive in all of the Bay Area. The bigger text box suggestion is #GOLD and should go down as an innovation breakthrough - give this concept a name, update your wikipedia and trademark it right away.
Useful is not the same thing as usable. You hit the nail on the head baby!
That’s why the LLM leaderboard halo effect doesn’t make it past those who already bookmarked huggingface. People want to use tools that feel good to use daily and that doesn’t map cleanly to overtraining a model to pass hyper specific benchmarks. Same story with why snowflake blew up. It’s not going to win the benchmark game. That was not the game worth winning. It had the best UX and story for old and new school data people.
The title has me dead! Great article as always. Interesting to think of ChatGPT as a wrapper around the actual IP