Comment by altdataseller
10 months ago
“What that also means is that you don’t need to be an AI genius to succeed in building applications. With thoughtful software engineering and a focus on customer data, you’ll build a moat over time.”
This sounds encouraging at first glance, but even more demoralizing when you think about it. It doesn’t matter how clever or smart you are over your competitors. If you don’t have the data, you don’t stand a chance. And of course the incumbents have the data not you, the entrepreneur
I don't see it that way. If you build a genuinely novel application then the critical data doesn't exist yet (IMO almost by definition). Sometimes it's easier for a startup to do this rather than for an incumbent who's trying to shoehorn the application into a preexisting framework (technical, operational, whatever).
If the data doesn't exist, you can't train an (neural network) AI as they exist today.
Whatever thing people build, will be based on data that exists, not data that will be created afterwards. And guess what, you don't have that data.
You could bootstrap a niche model using what's available and go from there. I don't think it's all that different from any other kind of bootstrapping startups tend to require.
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