OpenAI launched ChatGPT Agent on Thursday, its latest effort in the industry-wide pursuit to turn AI into a profitable enterprise—not just one that eats investors’ billions. In its announcement blog, OpenAI says its Agent “can now do work for you using its own computer,” but CEO Sam Altman warns that the rollout presents unpredictable risks.
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OpenAI research lead Lisa Fulford told Wired that she used Agent to order “a lot of cupcakes,” which took the tool about an hour, because she was very specific about the cupcakes.
I think in some ways Generative AI is very emblematic of the current state of software development. Projects are approached from the outset with the driving question being, “how can we make money materialize out of thin air?” Not, “What kind of problems are we trying to solve?” Or, “Why would someone pay for this?”
The last several projects I’ve worked on have been solutions in search of a problem. Hyped up products that made executives see dollar signs but didn’t actually produce any because they failed to provide any tangible value.
Comment resonates with my experience.
Software project at work recently:
We are going to launch a new offering to improve experience for customers.
Ok, how?
We are going to switch it to cloud model and charge annually instead of perpetual.
Ok, that’s for us, what about customer?
We are going to analyze their accounts and present them with suggestions on other of our products and addons they haven’t bought yet.
Where is the customer improvement?
We are going to discontinue supporting third party products and focus exclusively on customers that buy only from us.
Ok, but we have support for third party products we don’t even compete with?
We are going to exclude those too, to focus on the market that is important.
Ok, but at least you’re going to provide equivalent capability as the product you are replacing?
We are going to streamline the experience by offering only the core capabilities and discontinue extraneous features.
Ok, but you think this will expand revenue, so you will afford to explain the service and support team and free up more time for developers to get requirements?
We are in fact going to lay off and offshore all of it, including most of the customer contacts that barely kept the preceding product alive…
Now after a while of this mess they also had like 96% availability with almost all of it unplanned outages, but that’s not too bad because they have only like 6 or 7 customers anyways. There’s emails running around asking why the product has failed, and the answer seems to be we need to kill more of our successful products to try to push customers into this mess.