[komali2]

As per usual everyone else keeps coming up with the ideas that when I hear, I think, "damn, seems obvious, wish I had thought of that." Sometimes it's because it's a good idea, sometimes because it's an idea that will probably get funding, which makes it a good idea :P

Examples:

1. Ingesting a shitload of unread emails after you come back from vacation, then telling you briefly what important things you missed

2. The same idea but for slack

3. Ingesting request-for-cost response emails from various suppliers and outputting the data in a machine-readable way so it can be easily ingested by another API

4. Generating "individual" lesson plans based on student needs (I've heard 5 different pitches around this, majority for language learning)

5. student tutor chatbot

There's some other ideas that were too stupid (or more probably, too innovative for dumb old me to comprehend) to remember.

At the very least it has people thinking and being imaginative, which I think is pretty cool. I like getting into political debates with the thing.

[ChatGTP]

To be honest, at least for 1 and 2, they seem like issues that shouldn't be happening, you're working at a place that spends too much time on slack and too much time on email (I guess? I don't have this problem), so rather than maybe have that addressed, which is what we did where I work, we'll just continue bad habits because of the bot?

3. Ingesting request-for-cost response emails from various suppliers and outputting the data in a machine-readable way so it can be easily ingested by another API

Interesting, what do you work on? I've heard of such wizardy.

Using it for teaching and lesson planning? Really ? I mean I know it might be considered mostly right but I'm not sure if I'd be using it unless I had a very good grasp on the subject matter, is this a good thing for students to be using ?

Not trying to tell you it's not worth using, but it seems funny to have a model trained and running that's cost billions of dollars to be used for a lot of random tasks. It is literally a really expensive Clippy?

[komali2]

> is this a good thing for students to be using ?

Absolutely not without a teacher there anyway, which basically defeats the purpose.

For older students, I think it's a relatively nice alternative to Wikipedia. I asked it some complicated questions about some obscure bits of political theory and it put me onto some authors that were I not already such a freak, I probably wouldn't have known.

> Interesting, what do you work on? I've heard of such wizardy.

This wasn't really a product, just someone at a hardware startup I was doing some work for improving their workflow. It's not really a good long term solution I think, each supplier has a relatively standard format, so eventually you just tweak your API intake to handle the various formats. I actually never looked at the intake code, maybe it just grabs by keywords, who knows, point is, overkill to bring in chat GPT. Probably quite tedious to manage the emails, it sounded like a one off experiment to avoid the boredom of tweaking email greppers. Chat GPT was 100% accurate in transforming the data though, over probably a set of less than 100 emails.

> It is literally a really expensive Clippy?

I mean we probably won't hear about the really good ideas until those ideas hit funding rounds, right? I'm always careful to be arrogant about this kind of things because I don't want a famous dropbox comment attributed to my name, lol.

[ChatGTP]

All good points, cheers for the discussion.

[biztos]

> a place that spends too much time on slack and too much time on email

That describes most large companies.

While I agree it’s an obvious use case, the first startup to reliably extract the signal from the noise of daily communication at big organizations will make huge piles of money.

And whoever can do the same for Europeans while pretending to comply with GDPR, and probably a bunch of other related smaller markets. China without accidentally mentioning 1989 or cartoon bears. And so on.