Some prompts I found interesting when brainstorming LLM startups
I spent a little time thinking about making an AI startup. I generally think it would be great if more people were trying to build useful companies that directly add value, rather than racing to build AGI. Here are some of the prompts I found interesting to think about, perhaps they will be useful to other people/AI agents interested in building a startup:
What are the situations where people will benefit from easy and cheap access to expert knowledge? You’re leveraging that human expert labor is hard to scale to many situations (especially when experts are rare, needs are specific, it’s awkward, it’s too expensive — including both raw cost and the cost of finding/trusting/onboarding an expert). What are all the things you occasionally pay somebody to do, but which requires them coming in person? What is a problem people know they have but they don’t seek out existing solutions (because of perceived cost, awkwardness, unsure how). e.g., dating profile feedback, outfit designer.
Solve a problem that exists due to technological development, e.g., preventing the social isolation from social media, reducing various catastrophic risks during and after intelligence explosion.
Some other problem attack surface opened up by LLMs:
Cheaply carry out simple straightforward tasks.
Analyze data at scale.
Do tasks that there was no previous market for (e.g., provided $5 of value but took an hour, and you can’t hire people for $5/hour because they don’t want to work for that little and the overhead is high). Reasons for lack of market: not enough money to be made, can’t trust somebody (not worth the time needed to grow trust, or substantial privacy concerns), communication cost too high (specify task), other overhead too high (travel, finding person), training cost too high compared to salary (imagine it took 8 years to become a barber).
Provide cheap second opinions, potentially many of them (e.g., reviewing a low-importance piece of writing).
Some other desiderata I had (for prompting LLMs):
I want to have a clear and direct story for making people’s lives better or solving problems they have. So I have a slight preference for B2C over B2B, unless there’s a clear story for how we’re significantly helping the business in an industry that benefits people.
We don’t want to be obsoleted by the predictable products coming out of AI development companies; for instance a product that just takes ChatGPT and adds a convenient voice feature is not a good idea because that niche is likely to be met by existing developers fairly soon.
We don’t want to work on something that other well resourced efforts are working on. Our edge is having good ideas and creative implementations, not being able to outcompete others according to resource investment. We should play to our strengths and not try to get in a losing battle with strong existing products.
I mainly don’t want to be directly competing with existing products or services, instead I want to be creating a large amount of counterfactual value by solving a problem that nobody else has solved.
The MVP should be achievable by a team of 5 working for <6 months, ideally even a very basic MVP should be achievable in just a week or two of full-time work.
I want to be realistic, we won’t be able to solve everything or do everything. I want to aim for a fairly niche product, rather than solving a huge-scale problem like fixing medical care. That is, instead of a general medical chatbot, a better idea would be a first-aid tutor that can help people learn first-aid basics and refresh their knowledge later.
I want to be providing a service people are excited to receive. For instance, a sustainable living advisor isn’t a great idea because if it actually got people to make more sustainable decisions, that would be annoying — people don’t actually want to hear that they shouldn’t fly home to their family for the holidays, even though this is one of the more important sustainability decisions they could make.
I probably want to provide a service that is not currently provided by a simple google search. For instance, a cooking assistant is pretty much just glorified google search. I want to be providing more value than that. Services which can be provided by a simple google search are likely to be filled in by existing developers.
I do not want to be pushing the frontier of AI capabilities in dangerous domains such as: synthetic biology, cybersecurity, autonomous weapons, ML engineering and AI development, manipulation and persuasion. Generally pushing the frontier of scientific capabilities may also be in this group due to its effects on the other domains, but it is unclear.
I think there’s a large area in journalism where there’s a lot of data and an LLM-driven model could write a good story.
Any law that’s considered by congress before it’s passed or regulation could be the basis for an article. The model could read through all the comments that were made in the public comment process by various lobbyists and other interested parties and synthesis them into a pro&con.
I think it’s possible that such article could be less be lot less partisan than current mainstream media and explain the important features of laws that a journalists that spends a few hours for the issue just doesn’t get.
Besides public comments for laws and regulations, I would expect that there are some similar topic where there’s a lot of public information that currently no one condenses into one post that can be easily read.
I think it could make sense to combine artificial intelligence with expert domain knowledge. The expert describes the process step by step, providing detailed instructions for the AI at each step. The AI does the process with the customer. The expert reviews the logs, notices what went wrong, and updates the instructions accordingly.
AI is the power that allows the solution to scale, and expert knowledge is the part that will make you different from your competitors. The AI multiplies the expert’s reach. Many of your competitors will probably try just using the AI, and will achieve worse results. Even the ones who start doing the same thing one year later will be at a disadvantage, if you used that time to improve your AI instructions.
For example, imagine a tutoring website with an AI. How could it be better than opening a chat and asking a generic AI to explain a topic? For starters, on the front page, you would see a list of topics. For example, you choose math, and you see a list of math topics that are taught at school, arranged by years. (By “a list of topics” I mean something like a grid of colorful icons. By the way, those icons can also be AI generated, but approved by a human.) For each topic, an expert would specify the set of things that need to mentioned, common misconceptions that need to be checked, etc. The AI would do the dialog with the student. (For example, if the topic is quadratic equations, the expert would specify that you need to solve an equation with two solutions, an equation with one solution, and an equation with no solutions. Or that the AI should ask whether you know about complex numbers, verify whether you actually do, and depending on that maybe mention that “no solutions” actually means two complex solutions.)
Or, imagine a tool that helps wannabe authors create stories. How could it be better than a generic “hey AI, make me a story about this and that”? For example, you could have a workflow where the AI asks about the size of story (a short story? a novel? a series of novels?), a setting; then lets you specify the main characters, etc., and only afterwards it would start generating the actual text of the story. This would probably result in better stories. Also, there could be a visual component to this, so that the AI could also create illustrations for the story. Again, instead of “make me a picture of a hero fighting a dragon”, you would specify how your characters look like, as a combination of text description and choosing from AI generated visual suggestions. And then when you ask the AI to generate a picture of “Arthur fighting a dragon”, the AI already knows what Arthur looks like, so all pictures in the story will contain the same character.
Some prompts I found interesting when brainstorming LLM startups
I spent a little time thinking about making an AI startup. I generally think it would be great if more people were trying to build useful companies that directly add value, rather than racing to build AGI. Here are some of the prompts I found interesting to think about, perhaps they will be useful to other people/AI agents interested in building a startup:
What are the situations where people will benefit from easy and cheap access to expert knowledge? You’re leveraging that human expert labor is hard to scale to many situations (especially when experts are rare, needs are specific, it’s awkward, it’s too expensive — including both raw cost and the cost of finding/trusting/onboarding an expert). What are all the things you occasionally pay somebody to do, but which requires them coming in person? What is a problem people know they have but they don’t seek out existing solutions (because of perceived cost, awkwardness, unsure how). e.g., dating profile feedback, outfit designer.
Solve a problem that exists due to technological development, e.g., preventing the social isolation from social media, reducing various catastrophic risks during and after intelligence explosion.
Some other problem attack surface opened up by LLMs:
Cheaply carry out simple straightforward tasks.
Analyze data at scale.
Do tasks that there was no previous market for (e.g., provided $5 of value but took an hour, and you can’t hire people for $5/hour because they don’t want to work for that little and the overhead is high). Reasons for lack of market: not enough money to be made, can’t trust somebody (not worth the time needed to grow trust, or substantial privacy concerns), communication cost too high (specify task), other overhead too high (travel, finding person), training cost too high compared to salary (imagine it took 8 years to become a barber).
Provide cheap second opinions, potentially many of them (e.g., reviewing a low-importance piece of writing).
Some other desiderata I had (for prompting LLMs):
I want to have a clear and direct story for making people’s lives better or solving problems they have. So I have a slight preference for B2C over B2B, unless there’s a clear story for how we’re significantly helping the business in an industry that benefits people.
We don’t want to be obsoleted by the predictable products coming out of AI development companies; for instance a product that just takes ChatGPT and adds a convenient voice feature is not a good idea because that niche is likely to be met by existing developers fairly soon.
We don’t want to work on something that other well resourced efforts are working on. Our edge is having good ideas and creative implementations, not being able to outcompete others according to resource investment. We should play to our strengths and not try to get in a losing battle with strong existing products.
I mainly don’t want to be directly competing with existing products or services, instead I want to be creating a large amount of counterfactual value by solving a problem that nobody else has solved.
The MVP should be achievable by a team of 5 working for <6 months, ideally even a very basic MVP should be achievable in just a week or two of full-time work.
I want to be realistic, we won’t be able to solve everything or do everything. I want to aim for a fairly niche product, rather than solving a huge-scale problem like fixing medical care. That is, instead of a general medical chatbot, a better idea would be a first-aid tutor that can help people learn first-aid basics and refresh their knowledge later.
I want to be providing a service people are excited to receive. For instance, a sustainable living advisor isn’t a great idea because if it actually got people to make more sustainable decisions, that would be annoying — people don’t actually want to hear that they shouldn’t fly home to their family for the holidays, even though this is one of the more important sustainability decisions they could make.
I probably want to provide a service that is not currently provided by a simple google search. For instance, a cooking assistant is pretty much just glorified google search. I want to be providing more value than that. Services which can be provided by a simple google search are likely to be filled in by existing developers.
I do not want to be pushing the frontier of AI capabilities in dangerous domains such as: synthetic biology, cybersecurity, autonomous weapons, ML engineering and AI development, manipulation and persuasion. Generally pushing the frontier of scientific capabilities may also be in this group due to its effects on the other domains, but it is unclear.
I think there’s a large area in journalism where there’s a lot of data and an LLM-driven model could write a good story.
Any law that’s considered by congress before it’s passed or regulation could be the basis for an article. The model could read through all the comments that were made in the public comment process by various lobbyists and other interested parties and synthesis them into a pro&con.
I think it’s possible that such article could be less be lot less partisan than current mainstream media and explain the important features of laws that a journalists that spends a few hours for the issue just doesn’t get.
Besides public comments for laws and regulations, I would expect that there are some similar topic where there’s a lot of public information that currently no one condenses into one post that can be easily read.
I think it could make sense to combine artificial intelligence with expert domain knowledge. The expert describes the process step by step, providing detailed instructions for the AI at each step. The AI does the process with the customer. The expert reviews the logs, notices what went wrong, and updates the instructions accordingly.
AI is the power that allows the solution to scale, and expert knowledge is the part that will make you different from your competitors. The AI multiplies the expert’s reach. Many of your competitors will probably try just using the AI, and will achieve worse results. Even the ones who start doing the same thing one year later will be at a disadvantage, if you used that time to improve your AI instructions.
For example, imagine a tutoring website with an AI. How could it be better than opening a chat and asking a generic AI to explain a topic? For starters, on the front page, you would see a list of topics. For example, you choose math, and you see a list of math topics that are taught at school, arranged by years. (By “a list of topics” I mean something like a grid of colorful icons. By the way, those icons can also be AI generated, but approved by a human.) For each topic, an expert would specify the set of things that need to mentioned, common misconceptions that need to be checked, etc. The AI would do the dialog with the student. (For example, if the topic is quadratic equations, the expert would specify that you need to solve an equation with two solutions, an equation with one solution, and an equation with no solutions. Or that the AI should ask whether you know about complex numbers, verify whether you actually do, and depending on that maybe mention that “no solutions” actually means two complex solutions.)
Or, imagine a tool that helps wannabe authors create stories. How could it be better than a generic “hey AI, make me a story about this and that”? For example, you could have a workflow where the AI asks about the size of story (a short story? a novel? a series of novels?), a setting; then lets you specify the main characters, etc., and only afterwards it would start generating the actual text of the story. This would probably result in better stories. Also, there could be a visual component to this, so that the AI could also create illustrations for the story. Again, instead of “make me a picture of a hero fighting a dragon”, you would specify how your characters look like, as a combination of text description and choosing from AI generated visual suggestions. And then when you ask the AI to generate a picture of “Arthur fighting a dragon”, the AI already knows what Arthur looks like, so all pictures in the story will contain the same character.