The AI stood for Actual Intelligence

A decade ago my company was selling some "ML classification" service for service request calls, which in fact was 200 people in India being paid low wages even for India to do that 10 hours a day.

They were replaced by a simple neural network and I see they advertise now advanced AI agents, which I'm pretty sure are again 200 people in India

This starting to reassemble the dot com bubbie.

The Practical AI podcast interviewed the Fireflies CEO very recently (that’s who this article is about)

He was super transparent about being a cheap transcriptionist in the beginning, because he was trying to prove market demand in 2017, long before ChatGPT turned the world over. Basically doing it for his friends.

As someone in the tech and startup fields, I can say one of the best ways to make a great product is to do the thing you want to automate and learn how it works. This is an excellent example of that approach.

The co-founders held their tech startup together for 3-4 years, doing the best they could with keyword matching and voice transcription from the olden days, before it exploded in 2021(?) up to about 10m in revenue. Then they got early access to gpt 3.5 in 2022 because one of their investors was also an investor in OpenAI.

They were almost ahead of their time, and they were well positioned to take advantage of the huge power that GPT models brought to their business.

Excellent example of being in the right place at the right time, with a great vision and good network.

Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain

We're taking the jobs back AI!......

Gotta love how corporations are just resource burning machines.

1. Have all employees commuting to the office.
2. Organize meetings.
3. Add transcription agents, because nobody's paying attention.

The result is the same or worse than just sending an email to people in their homes, but burns through 800x more resources.

honestly...Yeah man I'd pay for this.

Hahaha this is brilliant.

I think he was just trying to recreate Searle's Chinese Room.

This concierge approach is nothing new; it existed even before LLMs are a thing.

One of my courses in undergrad computer science is Human-Computer Interaction, in which we learn about user experience (UX) concepts.

One of the things we learnt is to validate our ideas quickly and cheaply before putting a lot of time, effort and money into building the thing.

To do so, what we can do is build prototypes. The early versions may be be low-fidelity (lofi) and are scrappy. The later, high-fidelity (hifi) ones would mimic the functionality of the actual products, and may even appear to work to end users when in reality it could be just be manual effort behind the scenes.

The example given during lecture is the development of a ticketing system. To test the idea out, one could simply get a dude to sit in the "machine" and give out slips of paper.

Anyway, I am explaining all these because this seems like a surprise to those without the same educational background. Long story short, what this startup did is completely normal in the realm of software.

We may have better tools like Figma to simulate browser / mobile frontend experiences, but nothing is stopping us from going back to the basics and doing it this way.

That way maybe some of it will be accurate.

Fake it 'til you make it!

Dude's winning at life. Providing the best possible service.

By a human? Seriously? Ok... I'm game. Where's the buy link?

I mean honestly I'm still happier with that service than I would be with an actual AI. I mean sure he lied but he's also not using AI so.

We've done it. The worst job on earth. Being an "AI" meeting transcriber for corporate random meetings all day long sounds like true hell on earth.

It was a startup. Gotta start somewhere, lol