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Building LLMs is probably not going be a brilliant business
Building LLMs is probably not going be a brilliant business
In the 1960s, airlines were The Future. That is why old films have so many swish shots of airports in them. Airlines though, turned out to be an unavoidably rubbish business. I've flown on loads of airlines that have gone bust: Monarch, WOW Air, Thomas Cook, Flybmi, Zoom. And those are all busts from before coronavirus - times change but being an airline is always a bad idea.
That's odd, because other businesses, even ones which seem really stupid, are much more profitable. Selling fizzy drinks is, surprisingly, an amazing business. Perhaps the best. Coca-Cola's return on equity has rarely fallen below 30% in any given year. That seems very unfair because being an airline is hard work but making coke is pretty easy. It's even more galling because Coca-Cola don't actually make the coke themselves - that is outsourced to "bottling companies". They literally just sell it.
If you were to believe LinkedIn you would think a great business is made with efficiency, hard work, innovation or some other intrinsic reason to do with how hardworking, or clever, the people in the business are. That simply is not the case. What makes a good business is industry structure
Classically, there are five basic parts ("forces") to a company's position: The power of their suppliers to increase their prices The power of their buyers to reduce your prices The strength of direct competitors The threat of any new entrants The threat of substitutes It's industry structure that makes a business profitable or not. Not efficiency, not hard work and not innovation. If none of the forces are very much against you, your business will do ok. If they are all against you, you'll be in the position of the airlines. And if they're all in your favour: brill, you're Coca-Cola.
#tools/CRMs#business/strategy
·calpaterson.com·
Building LLMs is probably not going be a brilliant business
$700bn delusion - Does using data to target specific audiences make advertising more effective?
$700bn delusion - Does using data to target specific audiences make advertising more effective?
Being broadly effective, but somewhat inefficient, is better than being narrowly efficient, but less effective.
Targeting can increase the scale of effects, but this study suggests that the cheaper approach of not targeting so specifically, might actually deliver a greater financial outcome
As Wiberg’s findings point out, the problem with targeting towards conversion optimisation is you are effectively advertising to many people who were already going to buy you.
If I only sell to IT decision-makers, for example, I need some targeting, as I just can’t afford to talk to random consumers. I must pay for some targeting in my media buy, in order to reach a relatively niche audience.  Targeting is no longer a nice to do, but a must have. The interesting question then becomes not should I target, but how can I target effectively?
What they found was any form of second or third-party data led segmenting and targeting of advertising does not outperform a random sample when it comes to accuracy of reaching the actual target.
Contextual ads massively outperform even first party data
We can improve the quality of our targeting much better by just buying ads that appear in the right context, than we can by using my massive first party database to drive the buy, and it’s way cheaper to do that. Putting ads in contextually relevant places beats any form of targeting to individual characteristics. Even using your own data.
The secret to effective, immediate action-based advertising, is perhaps not so much about finding the right people with the right personas and serving them a tailored customised message. It’s to be in the right places. The places where they are already engaging with your category, and then use advertising to make buying easier from that place
Even hard, sales-driving advertising isn’t the tough guy we want it to be. Advertising mostly works when it makes things easier, much more often than when it tries to persuade or invoke a reluctant action.
Thinking about advertising as an ease-making mechanism is much more likely to set us on the right path
If your ad is in the right place, you automatically get the right people, and you also get them at the right time; when they are actually more interested in what you have to sell. You also spend much less to be there than crunching all that data
#advertising#data#privacy#business#business/models#industry#tools/CRMs
·archive.is·
$700bn delusion - Does using data to target specific audiences make advertising more effective?
The rise of Generative AI-driven design patterns
The rise of Generative AI-driven design patterns
One of the most impactful uses of LLM technology lies in content rewriting, which naturally capitalizes on these systems’ robust capabilities for generating and refining text. This application is a logical fit, helping users enhance their content while engaging with a service.
Similar to summarization but incorporating an element of judgment, features like Microsoft Team CoPilot’s call transcript summaries distill extensive discussions into essential bullet points, spotlighting pivotal moments or insights.
The ability to ‘understand’ nuanced language through summarization extends naturally into advanced search functionalities. ServiceNow does this by enabling customer service agents to search tickets for recommended solutions and to dispel jargon used by different agents.
Rather than merely focusing on content creation or manipulation, emerging applications of these systems provide new perspectives and predict outcomes based on accumulated human experiences. The actual value of these applications lies not merely in enhancing efficiency but in augmenting effectiveness, enabling users to make more informed decisions.
#trends#design#product design#workflows#enterprise#ai#design/interaction design#patterns#tools/CRMs
·uxdesign.cc·
The rise of Generative AI-driven design patterns
Value Beyond Instrumentalization - Letters to a Young Technologist
Value Beyond Instrumentalization - Letters to a Young Technologist
Resist being context-collapsed to a one-dimensional being.
Technologists intervene in our present realities and forge the future, and in doing so, choose how best to model the world and impress their will upon it. The public must insist that technologists are responsible for thinking about the human implications of their work.
#tools/CRMs
·letterstoayoungtechnologist.com·
Value Beyond Instrumentalization - Letters to a Young Technologist
New Productivity — Benedict Evans
New Productivity — Benedict Evans

On bundling and rebundling services

The main takeaway from this is that we are now seeing a new wave of productivity companies that are unbundling and rebundling spreadsheets, email, and file shares into a new, more structured workflow. This is being done through vertical two-sided marketplaces that connect service providers with their customers, as well as through collaboration-first web applications. Additionally, we are seeing LinkedIn unbundled in the same way as Excel, creating a new wave of company creation. All of this is being driven by the fact that everyone is now online and expects to be able to do everything with a smartphone.

there are dozens of companies that remix some combination of lists, tables, charts, tasks, notes, light-weight databases, forms, and some kind of collaboration, chat or information-sharing. All of these things are unbundling and rebundling spreadsheets, email and file shares.
LinkedIn tried to take the flat, dumb address book and turn it into both structured flow and a network of sorts. But by doing that for everyone, it has the same problem as a spreadsheet, file share or email - it’s a flat, lowest-common-denominator canvas that doesn’t capture the flows that many particular professions or tasks need.
There’s clearly a point in the life of any company where you should move from the list you made in a spreadsheet to the richer tools you can make in coolproductivityapp.io. But when that tool is managing a thousand people, you might want to move it into a dedicated service. After all, even Craigslist started as an actual email list and ended up moving to a database. But then, at a certain point, if that task is specific to your company and central to what you do, you might well end up unbundling Salesforce or SAP or whatever that vertical is and go back to the beginning.
every application category is getting rebuilt as a SaaS web application, allowing continuous development, deployment, version tracking and collaboration. As Frame.io (video!) and OnShape (3D CAD!) show, there’s almost no native PC application that can’t be rebuilt on the web. In parallel, everything now has to be native to collaboration, and so the model of a binary file saved to a file share will generally go away over time
an entire generation now grew up after the web, and grew up with smartphones, and assumes without question that every part of their life can be done with a smartphone. In 1999 hiring ‘roughnecks’ in a mobile app would have sounded absurd - now it sounds absurd if you’re not. And that means that a lot of tasks will get shifted into software that were never really in software at all before.
#Tech#Design#Academic#Trends#work/productivity#tools/CRMs
·ben-evans.com·
New Productivity — Benedict Evans