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by abxytg 1115 days ago
there is literally a "how to" in the open AI api docs for the exact use case. I need to be more shameless the next go around.
3 comments

I’ve seen this argument repeatedly. The example is just that - an example. It doesn’t cover anything related to productionizing the application, dealing with user management, rate limits, cost controls, hosting the service, data persistence, documentation, billing, marketing, or any of the other 100 things you need to do to turn a simple script into a product that people are willing to pay for, trust with their data, and embed into their own websites.

So sure, be shameless, but don’t be surprised when your copy/pasted version of the example doesn’t take off.

OP didn't worry about any of that stuff, which is why they got a first mover launch and quick revenue.
I beg to differ. They worried about marketing (this article is marketing. Their tweets about building it are marketing). And you expect me to believe that they just lumped the example from the docs straight to production? No user management? No website? No auth? Everyone’s data just commingled so the chat bot is responding to user A about user B’s website.

Why does the audience of HN insist on being so dismissive of effort. Yes they moved quickly. No, that doesn’t mean they just copied an example with no other work.

theres no argument. They productionized a docs example, something I did consider too shameless to try. Wish I had tried. Kudos to this dev he is rolling in the cash.
The key ingredient here is that he was lucky and had a viral tweet. Marketing is everything.
Link? I didn't find it in https://platform.openai.com/examples
I wrote more about this in another comment ("Postmortem"), as I developed a similar idea from Mid 2022 to early 2023, but made different decisions.

OpenAI had a serious focus on this that did see adoption; as early as Spring 2021 this was in their docs (linked by others), but more crucially, they quickly added an Answers endpoint(https://platform.openai.com/docs/guides/answers) specifically for this use case (query against uploaded files).

The creator of this project did almost everything perfectly, for sure. They had speed, UI, a converting page, found virality. But they also had timing: OpenAI had banned this open-ended use case till that time, they got lucky that people did not develop Explainpaper competitors, and ChatGPT improved quality while reducing run costs by 10x right when they came into this area, meaning many companies that fore-aware of these changes would have taken it's place, were not trying to enter the market (OpenAI approval was hard, and the costs of models before December 2022 were literally 10x as much for decent quality, making it unprofitable)

He might be referring to a page in the tutorials section titled, How to build an AI that can answer questions about your website: https://platform.openai.com/docs/tutorials/web-qa-embeddings