I was advising this MBA student's nascent startup (with the idea I might technical cofound once they're graduating), and they asked about whether LLMs would help.
So I listed some ways that LLMs practically would and wouldn't fit into the workflow of the service they doing. And related it to a bunch of other stuff, including how to make the most of the precious customer real-world access they'd have, and generating a success in the narrow time window they have, and the special obligations of that application domain niche.
Later, I mentally replayed the conversation in my head (as I do), and realized they were actually probably asking about using an LLM to generate the startup's prototype/MVP for the software they imagined.
And also, "generating the prototype" is maybe the only value that an MBA student had been told a "technical" person could provide at this point. :)
That interpretation of the LLM question didn't even occur to me when I was responding. I could've easily whipped up the generic Web CRUD any developer could do and the bespoke scrape-y/protocol-y integrations that fewer developers could do, both to a correctness level necessarily higher than the norm (which was required by this particular application domain). In the moment, it didn't occur to me that anyone would think an LLM would help at all, rather than just be an unnecessary big pile of risk for the startup, and potential disaster in the application domain.
So I listed some ways that LLMs practically would and wouldn't fit into the workflow of the service they doing. And related it to a bunch of other stuff, including how to make the most of the precious customer real-world access they'd have, and generating a success in the narrow time window they have, and the special obligations of that application domain niche.
Later, I mentally replayed the conversation in my head (as I do), and realized they were actually probably asking about using an LLM to generate the startup's prototype/MVP for the software they imagined.
And also, "generating the prototype" is maybe the only value that an MBA student had been told a "technical" person could provide at this point. :)
That interpretation of the LLM question didn't even occur to me when I was responding. I could've easily whipped up the generic Web CRUD any developer could do and the bespoke scrape-y/protocol-y integrations that fewer developers could do, both to a correctness level necessarily higher than the norm (which was required by this particular application domain). In the moment, it didn't occur to me that anyone would think an LLM would help at all, rather than just be an unnecessary big pile of risk for the startup, and potential disaster in the application domain.