YouSaid · the spoken record

Des Traynor

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111
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2023-11-15
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2023-11-15
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  1. “There's a big difference between a feature and a product. If you wanted to say build a chop bot that those customer support, that's pretty easy to build. It's like half a day's worth of work and you're sitting in your wholly dependent on OpenAI or Anthropic or whoever it is you could go for it. There's a massive difference between that and say something that like a large company would actually deploy to its customers, which ingests knowledge base's request through freshes, reports on itself, reports on customer satisfaction can parse multiple conversations, can understand customer context and feed that in, knows the difference between a premium user and a free user and gives context to where answers, whatever like does a wave upon wave of extra stuff you have to build in like that's before we get to like permissioning, controlling and targeting and making sure that some users don't see bots and some users only see bots and like all of that is like the extra stuff you have to build to turn what's like a thin how would you say like science fair tech demo into an actual fully commercialized product to the vc argument of like a thin wrapper i think if it is a thin”

    2023-11-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How to Survive and Thrive in a World of OpenAI, Are LLMs Being Commoditised, Where Does the Value Lie; Infrastructure or Application Layer, How Apple Could Win in a World of AI, How Amazon Could Threaten OpenAI and Why Google Struggle with Des Trayn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “I was in the valley Precisely. Yeah, on Facebook had their big demo and all that. We basically went from bots that were just literally if-the-text then that logic, you know, very ivy aura style bots. Like if Harry says one, then we take them down path one, right? The next generation of bots were like what I would call like fuzzy AI, which is like, we're going to take Harry's message. And if it looks like he's asking about pricing, we'll give him the pricing answer, right? And that generally had broader coverage because it was an attempt to be conversational, but actually in a lot of times just pissed people off because the fuzzy logic wasn't good enough. And you still had to go and build all of these if this and that rules. You just had the magic AI inferred piece. Where we are today is like generationally different, which is the LLM era, which is we know what Harry's talking about and we can infer it and we can actually work out a specific question and find the precise answer. So I think that's the sort of era that we're living in today.”

    2023-11-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How to Survive and Thrive in a World of OpenAI, Are LLMs Being Commoditised, Where Does the Value Lie; Infrastructure or Application Layer, How Apple Could Win in a World of AI, How Amazon Could Threaten OpenAI and Why Google Struggle with Des Trayn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “One area where we have been fortunate is we were all in on messaging from the very start. That's where chatbots live. The idea of a chatbot is actually the intersection of two megatrends, AI and its messaging. That's what makes a chatbot. So I think we were in a very fortuitous position to have a complete sort of CS platform and have as our core mode of interaction actual messages.”

    2023-11-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How to Survive and Thrive in a World of OpenAI, Are LLMs Being Commoditised, Where Does the Value Lie; Infrastructure or Application Layer, How Apple Could Win in a World of AI, How Amazon Could Threaten OpenAI and Why Google Struggle with Des Trayn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “I think that's true. And when that happens, I'll support them saying it's AI first. But that hasn't happened yet. Right now, we're firmly into like salt and pepper category, in my opinion. But you are correct. the job of like you know managing a project involves like reading email checking tasks looking at github commits to see if something got approved or not checking off tasks and corresponding with a calendar and seeing when things are and using all that information to take action or to request action then yeah if somebody builds like the the project megabot that can do all that i will celebrate them while investing their company i'll call them like an ai first project management solution we're not there yet”

    2023-11-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How to Survive and Thrive in a World of OpenAI, Are LLMs Being Commoditised, Where Does the Value Lie; Infrastructure or Application Layer, How Apple Could Win in a World of AI, How Amazon Could Threaten OpenAI and Why Google Struggle with Des Trayn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “Based on the FOC you found in a knowledge base is a very common thing that has to happen. Consolidating different articles to give a conclusive answer to something, being conversational, these are all things that AI can do. So I think if you were to build a customer support solution today, you'd build it totally different ESCA started in 2007 or 2008 or whatever. I think the world of ticketing and structure and state and like, you know, we'll get back to you in 72 hours and all that, that's all gone. To your question about AI, I just think it's bullshit when actually the job is identical and you're just sprinkling on like salt and pepper, a bit of AI here and there. I think it's true when it's like, shit, we need to reimagine this entire space.”

    2023-11-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How to Survive and Thrive in a World of OpenAI, Are LLMs Being Commoditised, Where Does the Value Lie; Infrastructure or Application Layer, How Apple Could Win in a World of AI, How Amazon Could Threaten OpenAI and Why Google Struggle with Des Trayn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “We're going to end up talking about AI for a while now. So just start off. I think it's largely bullshit if the basic tech stack hasn't actually changed that much. Let's say you're a project management tool and like, hey, what is project management? It's like tasks, deadlines, files, approvals, decisions, communication, whatever. It's not like really obvious to me that AI is going to take away a lot of that because you're planning out projects and like oftentimes these are like things that really have to happen whether it's like you're building a house or you're managing a rebrand for a client or something like that there's a lot of like human decision and judgment made it's not obvious to me where the ai kicks in so if you're like an ai first version of base camp i still think that looks like basecamp and maybe they just find areas to sprinkle in ai to speed up little bits and pieces here and there maybe i think there's if you take say the area of customer support everything about customer support is going to be affected by ai for example summarizing an issue is a very common workflow that has to happen replying to a customer”

    2023-11-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How to Survive and Thrive in a World of OpenAI, Are LLMs Being Commoditised, Where Does the Value Lie; Infrastructure or Application Layer, How Apple Could Win in a World of AI, How Amazon Could Threaten OpenAI and Why Google Struggle with Des Trayn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “The people. He was, you know, hey, I've got a new blend in. Do you want to try it out? Or, like, hey, is your latte nice or whatever? He was getting real-time in-context feedback. But for us, we felt really divorced from our users in our heads. We're like, we're sitting here in Dublin, Ireland. They're all in San Francisco. There was a single street in San Francisco where we had more customers than we did in all of Ireland. Give an example of the gap. But what we realized pretty quickly was it wasn't a unique problem to us because we were in Dublin. Everyone who runs software businesses wanted to have that personal connection. So we started to like iterate on this idea of like maybe users should be able to talk back, maybe should choose who you send a message to that ultimately became what we call like the customer communication platform intercom. Today we call it like an AI first customer service platform because it's kind of been 10 years and we've matured our thinking a lot. But yeah, that's how it started.”

    2023-11-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How to Survive and Thrive in a World of OpenAI, Are LLMs Being Commoditised, Where Does the Value Lie; Infrastructure or Application Layer, How Apple Could Win in a World of AI, How Amazon Could Threaten OpenAI and Why Google Struggle with Des Trayn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “Actually, started life inside a different product. We had a different product called Exceptional. We wanted to talk to our customers. So the logo for exceptionals sat in the bottom right-hand corner of the product. And one day it had a little speech bubble that came out of it and I was like, hey, probably something like, hey, we're sorry that we fell over or the server wasn't working last weekend or something like that. That was a much better workflow to have that bubble pop than the old world. The old world, if you have some of your viewers might be old enough to remember, you'd send out the mail to say like, hey, here's some pre-announced downtime or more likely some apologizing for some downtime we didn't know was coming and then you get a lot of replies in your personal email. It was crap. And then when Intercom was like one day, it was like, why do we just talk inside the product? Another sort of inspiration for us was we were working out of a coffee shop called 3FE in Dublin at the time. And the dude who was building 3FE, this new recurring software recurring subscription business, if you like, like where you're selling coffee every day to the same people, he was talking.”

    2023-11-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How to Survive and Thrive in a World of OpenAI, Are LLMs Being Commoditised, Where Does the Value Lie; Infrastructure or Application Layer, How Apple Could Win in a World of AI, How Amazon Could Threaten OpenAI and Why Google Struggle with Des Trayn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “I think it was Ida, a professional video games tester, but I kind of knew it wasn't a career, or at least it definitely wasn't in the 80s. Sports journalist. I loved soccer and I loved writing. So I really wanted to write about soccer. I just thought if I could do that, that would be like the genuinely the easiest job. I used to actually do it. I used to like, I'd watch a game and I'd write down my match report and I'd get my mum to read it. And she'd be like, that's very good. But yeah, I think I love soccer watching it. And then I literally love writing as well. I'd always read all of the cover to cover every sports newspaper. Everything just trying to get a sense of what's the language, how you're supposed to talk, all that sort of stuff. Thankfully, I didn't end up doing that because I have friends who are sports journalists and it doesn't pay as well as I thought it might.”

    2023-11-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How to Survive and Thrive in a World of OpenAI, Are LLMs Being Commoditised, Where Does the Value Lie; Infrastructure or Application Layer, How Apple Could Win in a World of AI, How Amazon Could Threaten OpenAI and Why Google Struggle with Des Trayn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “Happy to be here. I love London, and it's awesome to actually do this in person and see you in the three dimensional Harry.”

    2023-11-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How to Survive and Thrive in a World of OpenAI, Are LLMs Being Commoditised, Where Does the Value Lie; Infrastructure or Application Layer, How Apple Could Win in a World of AI, How Amazon Could Threaten OpenAI and Why Google Struggle with Des Trayn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “Right now, a lot of value is going straight into the infra, like as in, we're handing it all out the back door to OpenAI. And we actually torture test all of the LLMs. It's not yet the case that they're all equal. I'd be wary of Amazon. So I could see Amazon just flat up like buying Anthropic and being like, let's just make this part of the EC2 cluster. I think Apple will make massive, massive strides forward with AI. I feel like Bard unfortunately felt like we had to release this because ChatGPT was getting a lot of traction. They need to have that Jay-Z allow me to reintroduce myself moment.”

    2023-11-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How to Survive and Thrive in a World of OpenAI, Are LLMs Being Commoditised, Where Does the Value Lie; Infrastructure or Application Layer, How Apple Could Win in a World of AI, How Amazon Could Threaten OpenAI and Why Google Struggle with Des Trayn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source