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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   4903 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for December 10, 2023

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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In a somewhat recent speech Andrew Ng describes the "long tail of 5M$ projects". The idea being that software projects of the recent past were either very cheap or very expensive, and the long tail of projects in the middle were ignored because they were not worth time/money whatever. However new generative AI tech opens up that long tail because things that would have been very expensive or impossible are now cheap and possible, and there is opportunity for those who want to address that long tail.

How do I tap into those projects?

I've been fortunate enough to work with building LLM based projects that run in prod and I think I can start taking freelance and contract work now. My USP isn't being able to stich together openais API with exponential backoff and a vector db, any joe can do that. I genuinely think I can see some very creative uses of llms and embeddings that others just aren't, I can't find any papers or blogs on using llms for what I am using them for. But how do I sell my service? I obviously have NDAs and can't leak my employers trade secrets. Also I've only recently started working and don't have much industry connections.

Making yet another b2b SaaS around openais api is not appealing to me. I want to do contract work where I go to a shop and automate parts of it. Basically I want to move from project to project.

Are you in the Eleuther AI discord server? If not, I suggest you join, because I strongly expect you'll find a lot more in the way of practical/helpful suggestions there than you will here (though there are some people who can certainly assist).

Thanks, I'll check it out.

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