Comment by esafak
11 hours ago
> The core tech must be separable from the product
The biggest product of the century thus, LLMs, are the core tech.
I don't doubt these rules have helped the author, but readers should be mindful when heeding them.
11 hours ago
> The core tech must be separable from the product
The biggest product of the century thus, LLMs, are the core tech.
I don't doubt these rules have helped the author, but readers should be mindful when heeding them.
> The biggest product of the century thus, LLMs, are the core tech.
I would not say LLMs are products. It's still early adopters stage and it's going to be skewed on HN -- a large portion of people here evangelize the virtues of digging through an electronics store's parts bin to finish off a pcb they made in their garage then run an obscure version of linux on it for work. It's a lot of tech kludged together, not a product, not in the context of this article anyway. Same for the current state of LLMs. It's a tech waiting for a product to make it useful for the general population. For developers, Github's copilot is probably the closest, it bundles LLM tech to leverage their tech (github) creating a product you don't have to piecemeal together if you don't want too.
The internet was a tech that was first played with like we play with LLMs now. It was the web browser -- a product that leveraged a core tech -- that made it widely usable. Large parts of the population have no idea the internet is not their web browser (or now apps that access that web through a different interface).
I read a quote from the new Apple CEO on AI, that I think highlights the tech vs product separation and why Apple is where it is: 'We never think about shipping technology. We always think about 'how can we leverage technology to ship amazing products'
https://www.tomsguide.com/computing/macbooks/i-interviewed-j...
I don't get that quote. Does that apply to teams working on SDKs, GPU design, internal tools, etc? Are those all reframed as "products"? Seems like there would be a lot of groups at Apple concerned entirely with shipping technology? "Leverage" makes it sound like they just use other people's tech but we know that's not true. Why throw shipping technology under the bus? I don't get it.
I would guess they label things differently or use different language to talk with their internal product teams/employees. But the end goal being to ship an end-user Apple Product orchestrating tech/products in ways that the individual tech/product could not do on its own.
Agreed, but he is talking about limited-scope projects, that he probably does himself. That’s how I work, myself (these days).
In the past, I worked in teams, building much more ambitious projects, and these rules would likely not apply.
The product is automation; the tech is llms