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Everything is a spectrum.

At what point can you claim that you did "it"?

Do you have to use an open source model instead of an API? Do you have to fine tune it? How much do you need to? Do you have to create synthetic data for training? Do you have to gather your own data? Do you need to train from scratch? Do you need to come up with a novel architecture?

10 years ago if you gathered some data and trained a linear model to determine the likelihood your client would default on their loan and used that to decide how much, if any, to loan them- you're absolutely doing "actual AI"

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Any other software you could ask all the same questions but with using a high level language, frameworks, dependencies, hiring consultants / firm, using an LLM, no-code, etc.

At what point does outsourcing some portion of the end product become no longer doing the thing?



> At what point can you claim that you did "it"?

When the core of your business ist something that’s shamelessly farmed out to <LLM provider of choice>.

It would be like calling yourself a restaurant, and then getting uber eats deliveries of whatever customers ordered and handing that to them.


Restaurants are a spectrum too. Some restaurants may not have much of what you call as kitchen. It's not like they make food from raw ingredients. They might just assemble the food. A lot of it could be instant food, pre-made. They might just do wrapping, stuffing and heating it up. Not too different from what uber eats does.


Great analogy. I don't eat at those kinds of "restaurants" though.

If I buy pre made it's at best from supermarkets for heating at home.


If restaurants can't use pre-made food, they would have to have a farm in their backyard with all sorts of animals, veggies and grain crops.


What an incredible false dichotomy.

Yes clearly the only 2 options are “sells someone else pre-made meals” or “farms everything on premises”.

Clearly no other alternatives exist. /s


I mean- yeah I think that's a fair analogy.

The customers don't see where the food is coming from and are still coming to eat. If you can make the economics work...

You don't have the moat other restaurants have, but you're still a restaurant.




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