People are excited and doing things, that’s wonderful. What are you doing besides complaining?

Everything starts small.

Also, the most important thing about a service is attracting customers, not the tech stack under it. Facebook was made with PHP, Twitter famously failed constantly while struggling with user growth.

I’d much rather have tons of users with a tech stack that is a wrapper for a bunch of other stuff, than have super impressive in-house tech and no users.

> People are excited and doing things, that’s wonderful. What are you doing besides complaining?

I don't think people are excited about making API calls. They see a land grab and are clamoring for their piece. As for what I'm doing, I work on my own products that, I hope, push the envelope, at least slightly. And I have seen AI companies that are doing good work using OpenAI's tools, but this isn't one of them.

> As for what I'm doing, I work on my own products that, I hope, push the envelope, at least slightly

That’s awesome. Please post about it on HN, share what you are doing and get people’s feedback.

But please don’t just throw shade at others because they don’t conform to your view of what’s praiseworthy.

We can all support each other and give feedback/advice.

Out of curiosity, could you share those envelope pushing products of yours?

I would, but then I'd sacrifice the anonymity of this HN account that I like to shitpost from.

I am excited. I need this tool professionally and I don't give a damn how it works underneath if it can work for me and give results.

* * *

It's a good metaphor a good part of for the startup scene: good looking gift wrapping around tools built by smarter people.

in their defense, there's a lot of value there. As i commented elsewhere here, I'm frustrated that this particular thing isn't running the transcription locally, but this is a _massive_ improvement on what the "tools built by smarter people" built.

Sometimes "good looking gift wrapping" is a huge value unto itself. Also, it isn't fair to good UX and UI developers to imply that that isn't also really hard work to get right. It's just different work using a different form of thinking. Not lesser in any way. And... without the people who could make the "good looking gift wrapping" most apps would suck a lot harder than they already do.

It is a complete grift which everyone and their llamas are somehow immediately AI companies, when they are all hitting the OpenAI API. So when it goes down their entire business is down as well.

This hype is going to eventually subside with lots of losers and a tiny minority of winners when the price increases come in.

The only winners of this race to the bottom is Stability.ai who are already open sourcing everything and OpenAI cannot afford to open source their flagship AI product(s) for free.

Does it have to satisfy your standard of being novel, or be super approachable and adoptable by customers?

This project is meant to be especially for educational reasons, which is why it's entirely open source

Agreed.

The current AI hype cycle has driven companies to slap AI somewhere in their offering so they can call themselves an AI company - even if it's an API key and an intern spending half a day with an API wrapper.

Gatekeeping is always risky but in my mind if you're not at least touching an ML framework you're not an "AI company" - which is already IMO a pretty low bar. That said it starts to get really hazy when you look at things like SageMaker and other offerings where you're doing abstracted model development or substantial amounts of fine-tuning/training on a custom dataset, etc.