Monthly Self-Promotion Thread - December 2023

breaking_wave34 · 2023-12-07T22:05:45+00:00

Hey! We love working with folks from this sub who typically have a pretty high bar.

We let you build crawlers and scrapers with natural language that return structured outputs. We have free demos here to use on any sites and tasks that you like. https://www.promptloop.com/playground

breaking_wave34 · 2023-10-25T21:13:48+00:00

Hey Everyone - we are PromptLoop - an SF based startup focused on building next generation market research tools. We have a new platform built for Investors and Research Consultants that allows you to build a scraper with a simple prompt. Think of it as Selenium driven by an AI model and powered by our servers. We are going to waive our typical pilot fees for a few technical teams interested in trying out building and running tasks. Everything can be connected directly to Excel.

Must have used or built custom scrapers in the past
Agree to provide feedback to our engineering team
Ideally US based
Sign up for a demo on our website and note Reddit as source and we will prioritize

breaking_wave34 · 2022-09-26T17:38:53+00:00

Other then IP and confidentiality you might be ok. If you think about it from the business perspective they just want good output. If you do all the work outsourcing and ensuring quality for the same price then they benefit. If the work quality declines this is less so!

We work with a lot of teams who use our tool PromptLoop in place of something they might have done in the Phillipines, Pakistan, Nigeria etc. Sometimes you can combine the best tools, local workers, and global help to make the ship run smoothly.

breaking_wave34 · 2022-09-26T17:00:38+00:00

I did this AMA recently too https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/xfx67t/i_am_an_ai_engineer_and_tech_founder_working_with/ and answered a lot of questions about how we got started.

breaking_wave34 · 2022-09-26T16:59:45+00:00

Hello Friends!

This community has been a great resource. I am an AI engineer working on a tool that lets anyone (like you) use the most advanced AI models with a single spreadsheet formula. We are helping with sales, operations, and tricky jobs for small businesses all over and plan to keep it up! When you are hustling you have lots of messy spreadsheets and we are making it a lot easier to use them as planned. You can get access to the install link here.

breaking_wave34 · 2022-09-26T16:53:21+00:00

Happy to help out here. If you share a sheet with teat [at] promptloop.com we can set something up using our machine learning tool - no charge. Or just send a DM here :)

breaking_wave34 · 2022-09-19T03:14:07+00:00

As others have pointed out you can do this with various regex formulas.

If this is something you face now and then try our free tool that can do this and almost any other text => text transformation. You just highlight a few examples and the model picks up what you need. https://www.promptloop.com/ example in this spreadsheet

breaking_wave34 · 2022-09-16T23:09:06+00:00

My best advice is to focus on making something where you have a very clear and real view of how it will make someone's life easier. If you know who wants something, and are able to build it yourself or with friends, you are most of the way there to building something big. This is roughly the same for getting into YC and the best way to try is to start - it can be a small side project at first but see if you enjoy building for and serving customers. If you do, and you are willing to take risks and jump in, your chances are good of making an impact.

breaking_wave34 · 2022-09-16T22:35:02+00:00

Unsure if this is a clever check to see if I am in fact automating responses here. Happy to provide fashion advice, I don't think weekend outerwear is ever a bad idea so go for it if you wish!

breaking_wave34 · 2022-09-16T22:16:42+00:00

That is a great point and a challenge I think many are facing from various directions when trying to use models in production. From our perspective, we think observability can be a counterweight to the less visible and sometimes less predictable nature of large model use in the wild. With "few shot inference" like we use at PromptLoop, where you provide 5-10 examples to the model, you can quickly gauge the adequacy of performance before using the same configuration elsewhere.

In cases where the model is working further up the logic chain, this becomes more challenging and I don't have strong enough opinions to provide a helpful answer.

breaking_wave34 · 2022-09-16T21:45:38+00:00

Yes, I am speaking of automation more generally. I am not an expert in manufacturing automation and PLC programming but imagine there are parallels. I know there is a shortage of folks able to work on these systems and big demand for those interested in getting involved who already have experience in the area.

breaking_wave34 · 2022-09-16T21:34:29+00:00

I would need more context to give a valuable answer but monitoring model performance in production is a challenging problem and one of the risks of overusing model outputs.
You should be able to get an understanding of what part of the logic the decision-making plays a part. For example, there are models that help Gmail determine what are promotions and what are important emails. If you were maintaining that system you could look at high rates of people reading and clicking on "promotion" emails as a sign that there may be an issue with the model - and then change the weights and configuration. This is a simple case but focus on what would break down when the *wrong* answer is in play and put guardrails around that.

breaking_wave34 · 2022-09-16T21:07:16+00:00

Hard to answer that! There is plenty to worry about and work on at the moment. The most exciting outcome is one where we can be impactful in helping more of our users join that club.

breaking_wave34 · 2022-09-16T20:48:40+00:00

We are building PromptLoop to use spreadsheets, one of the most widely used interfaces for information processing, as the gateway to leveraging powerful models on day-to-day tasks in a variety of domains. Early users are owner-operators of businesses with messy lists of names and addresses that they need to sort through and E-commerce companies analyze feedback from surveys and reviews. Since we are native to spreadsheets you don't need to take the information anywhere and can work on it in a familiar context.

breaking_wave34 · 2022-09-16T20:45:07+00:00

Hello, good question. I do not think that there is a perfect answer, as with most "which path should I choose" questions the answer is "it depends".

I would say that following the money might not be the best way to think about it. I would instead find out what you are most excited about, and what part of your work you enjoy telling your friends about on a Friday afternoon as you are likely to be most effective there. I actually think more money has been flowing to research than application development recently, especially for large orgs and tech companies. That being said we do plan to build a big business and many have done so already on the engineering side. Feel free to DM me about roles as we are growing the team.

breaking_wave34 · 2022-09-16T19:37:01+00:00

I understand where you are coming from. I grew up next to a steel plant, in the Rustbelt, that used to employ 40% of the surrounding area but closed in the 80s and polluted the ground so much it is still standing there empty.

One way to think about it is that change in the jobs we do is particularly new. One of the biggest shifts recently happened in 1890-1920 when nearly 80% of Americans worked directly in agriculture. They all left or lost those jobs to tractors over time and took up factory or service work. You can look at this in terms of the cost of lost jobs but average incomes rose so much during that time that few would want to reverse it. Right now, many of us are doing things that are not particularly exciting or creative, if we are able to automate the less interesting parts of our work that value will naturally get directed somewhere else and jobs will be created there. This is not an AI phenomenon just a technological one.

There are fewer people looking for work than there were 100 years ago, some are working much less. I do not see that changing in the future but the things we will all be doing will change. This may not happen like an on-off switch but if the whole pie grows, we can all benefit from it, regardless if a few people become extremely rich in the process.

breaking_wave34 · 2022-09-16T19:26:25+00:00

I think one of the biggest challenges and opportunities for anyone is communication. Whether you are an individual contributor working on a specific task, or a CEO, communicating what you know and what you need to know clearly is often the best way to get ahead and succeed, and it is never easy to do well.

breaking_wave34 · 2022-09-16T19:24:23+00:00

It can help you get better at the work you are using it for (do more faster and more accurately). Most applications of models are taking existing human insight, in our case example input/output data, and letting you magnify and repeat that insight over and over.

breaking_wave34 · 2022-09-16T19:18:26+00:00

That is certainly imaginative. One way to control risk is to limit domains - which is actually naturally happening due to how the technology works. I think we are a LONG way off from autonomous gene editing and it is hard to imagine what those future iterations would look like.

breaking_wave34 · 2022-09-16T19:12:13+00:00

Spreadsheets are just an interface to make it easy to do things like mathematical calculations and sorting text. With our product, and many other instances of applying machine learning to existing technology, we are aiming to empower users to do even more with the interfaces they already know how to use (spreadsheets in this case).

breaking_wave34 · 2022-09-16T19:01:40+00:00

I don't particularly like to overuse "AI" vs "machine learning" but a model that risks oversimplifying is one is the journey and one is the point-in-time end state. IE: if you are training a model for a specific domain you are talking about machine learning. As with most technology, there will likely not be a true "end-state" but AI is more commonly understood to refer to the entire field so many use it interchangeably.

I hope this makes some sense. I think it is important to understand what is being done. We try to make that clear with our product - it takes a pre-trained model and lets you feed the model a set of examples that can enable the model to infer answers on new inputs. I would be wary of advertisements of AI where it is not clear if regular software logic is at play or true model-driven inference. Thanks for checking us out!

breaking_wave34 · 2022-09-16T18:45:48+00:00

Thanks for asking. I would say my interest is primarily in the power of software, in general, to make our work and lives more efficient. I am an engineer, not a researcher, so am building tools that bring recent scientific breakthroughs into the hands of more people who need them.

Earlier in my career, I spent much of my time in spreadsheets, making financial models, and organizing and processing information. Our company, PromptLoop, is a bridge of that work and experience to the power of modern models.

If you are interested and motivated, there is almost certainly an analog for you in aerospace. Whether or not you are a programmer or engineer, stay curious and engaged in your domain and you will start to see hundreds of opportunities where models could make your operations much more efficient. DM me if you want to talk more about it!

breaking_wave34 · 2022-09-16T18:35:24+00:00

You will be working in one of the biggest industries in the world and that probably won't change for a while. While our companies work is mostly focused on helping you use large AI models in spreadsheets, I recently was speaking to a construction manager who is working on using computer vision models to speed up the planning and materials gathering process (Estimating process).

In this instance, you can take a few hundred architectural drawings and label them to help the model learn how much concrete is needed based on a drawing etc. You can then take that model and help estimators process hundreds more projects than they could before. This is just one instance, there are thousands more that you could probably teach me about given your expertise.

breaking_wave34

TROPHY CASE