Ask HN: Any GenAI project that moves the business needle?

12 points by rayxi271828 1 year ago | 14 comments
Have you seen any GenAI project that (1) is in use in production today, AND (2) actually moves the business needle in a material way? (increased revenue, or perhaps actual jump in productivity, i.e.: not only perceived, and so on).

In my conversation with friends, business partners, vendors, ex-colleagues, I have never heard a single successful application of GenAI beyond the gimmicky ones.

If you've seen at least one, can you share how it's used? I'm truly curious. I still can't convince myself that this is more than a bubble.

  • lbhdc 1 year ago
    I have worked on a few projects that use language models over the years. Most of them don't use the models people would call large these days, but have had cases where we used those.

    In all of the cases that I have used them it has been for categorization. Basically in areas where we can't write enough if statements to do it well enough so the only option is human review. For the most part language models do great here.

    • nicbou 1 year ago
      Replacing the first tier of customer support for sure. Every time I see support bots mentioned, some ex-support employees bring up that 90% of those customer support questions are really dumb. The more people you can funnel to your knowledge base, the better.

      On a more depressing note, translations. Translators are really hurting from LLM translations. They must focus on certified translations that must be done by a sworn translator.

      Many websites got wrecked by Google's reaction to the rise of AI-generated content. The internet got funnelled to a very small number of sites controlled by 16 companies. A lot of independent websites got practically killed.

      • muzani 1 year ago
        Yup, CS satisfaction just shot up with gen AI. I don't think any headcount is reduced from CS either. AI just does the triaging. CS handles larger areas, more interesting questions, do account manager level stuff.

        For example, one problem I had recently was my printer didn't work after buying it. We went through 12 fucking hours of "unplug and reconnect your printer". At times the guy asked me to inform when it's working and I told him you told me to unplug it without reconnecting it. Of course it doesn't work! Eventually he sent me a driver. I ran it, it worked.

        Most of that lag was just from customer support being in an entirely different timezone, with focus split up over tons of different people on WhatsApp, and by the time I read their message I'm just afk. AI is just great at that sort of thing. I just want the driver file. Find me the damn driver file. Your website doesn't work or at least the search isn't turning up the right one.

        I wish companies like AWS would do this so I wouldn't have to pay ChatGPT $20 to point out where buttons are. I wish Firebase's one worked.

        Downside: Every now and then AI is just overloaded and your first level of support breaks.

      • LogHouse 1 year ago
        My use case (not very sexy) is process documentation. I take a basic outline, run it through GPT, manually edit some things here and there, boom, done. 10x productivity in that regard.
        • snielson 1 year ago
          According to my testing, Claude 3 Opus makes drafting patent applications about 50% faster.
          • sfmz 1 year ago
            I read an article about an anime place that fired 80% of their illustrators, because the remaining 20% were 10x more efficient.
            • ensemblehq 1 year ago
              As a consultant, it's been extremely useful for rapid prototyping for POC projects.
              • rayxi271828 1 year ago
                I can imagine so. Would you have a comparison between Claude 3 Opus vs. GPT4o? Which one would you pick?
                • ensemblehq 1 year ago
                  So far it depends on the use case. GPT4o has been super useful with code generation tasks for POC but we've used Claude 3 to try and make educated predictions.
              • iamleppert 1 year ago
                We were able to fire 200 of our workers and replaced them with an AI chatbot.
                • rayxi271828 1 year ago
                  What kind of field / chat interactions does your chatbot do, if you can share? Apart from Klarna I haven't heard any other success in this regard...
                • altdataseller 1 year ago
                  Klarna allegedly has saved millions from using AI to replace most of their support folks.

                  Might just be a PR stunt tho

                  • moomoo11 1 year ago
                    It’s one way to spin a layoff lol
                  • hnaccountme 1 year ago
                    Agreed, It's just a bubble. I have a feeling now a days these bubbles are intentionally created to scam investors out of their money.