Three kinds of AI products work

Perhaps I'm biased since we're in a document heavy industry, but I think the original post misses a lot of the non-tech company use cases. An insane percentage of human time is spent copy pasting things from documents.

Realistically there are only four types of businesses writ large: tourism, food service, railroads, and sales. People building AI-based products should focus on those verticals.

The only GUI products that work are GUIs that you can interface with, or that perform tasks for you

Maybe the real value of AI, particularly LLMs, is in the interface it provides for other things, and not in the AI itself

What if AI isn't the _thing_? What if it's the thing that gets us _to_ the thing?

> Next thing you'll tell me is that the only businesses that work are ones where you can ask somebody to do something for you in exchange for money.

What other type of business is there?

Basically already solved = you've never used it for any of those purposes and have no idea if or how well would they work?

The other part to this is that LLMs as a technology definitely has some value as a foundation to build features/products on other than chat bots. But unclear to be whether that value can sustain current valuations.

Is a better de-noisier algorithm in Adobe Lightroom worth $500 billion?

I use mongo at work and LLM helped me find index issues.

Feeding it the explain, query and current indexes it can quickly tell what it was doing and why it was slow.

I saved a bunch time as I didn’t have to read large amounts of json from explain to see what is going on.

Agentic tools is already delivering an increase in productivity equivalent to many FTEs. I say this as someone in the position of having to hire coders and needing far fewer than we otherwise would have.

Skeptics always like to toss in 'if ever' as some form of enlightenment they they are aware of some fundamental limitation of the universe only they are privy to.

Recent articles seem only to mean LLMs when they reference AI. There are tons of commercial usecases for other models. Image Classification models, Image Generation models (traditionally difusion models, although some do use llm for image now), TTS models, Speach Transcription, translation models, AI driving models(autopilot), AI risk assessment for fraud, 3D structural engineering enhancement models.

With many of the good usecases of AI the end user doesn't know that ai exists and so it doesn't feel like there is AI present.

By Ai generated feeds do you mean a feed that is just full of AI posts or an AI generating a feed to one can scroll?

Why 5 years, I'm pretty sure we're there today.

He meant Sonnet 3.7 which was released on the same day as Claude Code, Feb 24th 2025: https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-3-7-sonnet

With hindsight, given that Claude Code turned into a billion dollar precut category, it was a bit of a miss bundling those two announcements together like that!

I've also found LLMs helpful for breaking down user requests into a technical spec or even just clarifying requests.

I make a lot of business reporting where I work and dashboards for various things. When I get user requests for data, it's rarely clear or well thought out. They struggle with articulating their actual requirements and usually leads to a lot of back and forth emails or meetings and just delays things further.

I now paste their initial request emails into an LLM and tell it "This is what I think they are trying to accomplish, interpret their request into defined business metrics" or something similar and it does a pretty good job and saves a ton of the back and forth. I can usually then feed it a sample json response or our database schema and have it also make something quick with streamlit.

It's saved me (and the users) a ton of time and headaches of me trying to coerce more and more information from them, the LLMs have been decent enough at interpreting what they're actually asking for.

I'd love to see a day where I can hook them up with RO access to a data warehouse or something and make a self-service tool that users can prompt and it spits out a streamlit site or something similar for them.

> summarization

can you point me to a useful example of this? i see websites including ai-generated summaries all the time, but i've yet to see one that is actually useful and it seems like the product being sold here is simply "ai", not the summary itself - that is, companies and product managers are under pressure to implement some sort of AI, and sticking summaries in places is a way for them to fill that requirement and be able to say "yes, we have AI in our product"

> basic content generation

Dunno, man, I can spot ai-generated content a mile away, it tends to be incredibly useless so once I spot it, I’ll run in the opposite direction.

Old Apple Newton had a feature, I don't remember how they called it, but on any screen you could write "please", and then describe what to do, e. g. using one of their examples: "please fax this to Bob". And it worked. Internally it was a rather simple keyword match plus access to data, such as the system address book. New applications could register their own names for actions and relevant dictionaries.

Yes, this! esp the last one. Finding coffee shop / restaurant options ALONG THE WAY seems like it should've been solved years ago. Scenario: while driving, "want to eat in about an hour, must have vegetarian options, don't add more than 10m extra drive time" and get a shortlist to pick from.

Formatting did not help. Three kinds, but then subheadings in the same size font, and then here come two more kinds, plus a side journey into various topics.