[jaxwerk]

As an engineer who has worked briefly with one of the start-ups focused on here on their core product, Robert's critique of the the technology driving the current generation of template-based commercial solutions is absolutely spot-on. The results are useful but the template based approach along with the really lackluster tooling both my employer and competitors in the space had cobbled together made self-service nigh impossible. His assessment that these companies are really professional services companies dealing in bespoke one-off software solutions despite their efforts to market as robust AI products that magically turn some arbitrary JSON schema into prose is very fair I think.

I am eager to see if neural approaches develop to better handle constraints, but part of me thinks the level of control over generated prose that template based approaches provide is essential for customer-facing text and that part of the market will persist even when every other recipe in Google search results is GPT-3 generated rubbish around the actual damn list of ingredients.