Welcome to a special edition of Black Box. I recently completed a series on my observations of generative AI. For ease of reference, I have collected the parts and highlighted their key ideas.
Future Generative
Generative AI Founders Aren’t Thinking Big Enough
Generative AI founders need to think bigger. What “product” means is anyone’s guess, but I am bullish on verticalized platforms that use generative AI in an opinionated way to serve a function in which personalization matters. A generative AI product must be verticalized to comprehensively meet all the needs of a function. It needs to use generative AI in a way that not only adds value, but fits natively into how its intended users think and work. Ideally, the founders are former would-be users with specific ideas about UX, systems and flows, defaults vs. options, etc. And personalization must matter to the function because that is the only moat I currently see, at least for the vast majority of startups that rely on someone else’s model.
Generative AI Could Free Us to Be More Human, but Do We Want That?
The fact of the matter is building and managing relationships, romantic or otherwise, is hard. Humans may be much better at it than machines, but that doesn’t mean it’s absolutely easy for us. The same goes for anything that requires theory of mind: Generative AI automating the functional doesn’t make the emotional any less human. If anything, AI automating the execution part means the theory of mind part will be the only work that people do.
In mathematics, an expression is said to be well-defined if it has a unique value or interpretation for a given input. For example, functions are well-defined since each input maps to exactly one output. Generative AI, on the other hand, is not well-defined because running the same prompt multiple times will result in different outputs. A generator can still produce desired outputs if the prompt itself is well-defined, but this often requires a level of sophistication that its intended users do not have. Conversely, sophisticated users have no need for it. I call this the “Goldilocks problem” because there are sometimes no users who are just right.
Referenced articles
I’d love to hear what you thought of Future Generative on Twitter @jwang_18 or LinkedIn. Next week, I’m excited to introduce a side project I’ve been working on…