The interesting question is that now that things are a little bit settled what should we expect.
Some thoughts that seem obvious:
- OpenAI to slow down progress with newer models and double down on AI safety.
- Microsoft to boost the LLMs that it has - competing with Google, Amazon, and OpenAI.
As for which OpenAI employees leave - I imagine we will see answers in the next few days.
But what about...
- Is the GPT Store going to still happen?
- What is going to happen with the GPT-5 training?
- Was there an AGI breakthrough?
Overcoming this 'mistake' is very hard. I have faced it many times. As long as I am an engineer on something it is never good-enough for me.
I am now trying a different approach that seems to work - the essence is that after some time to give up ownership of the code. I am involved in day-to-day dev decisions, but play more of the role of the Product-Manager - talk to potential customers for pilots, and define tight scopes so that the pilots and subsequent launches are successful.
Violet implements the most common voice UX Patterns and makes using them be easier.
The typical enterprise web app can be said to consist of just navigation (i.e. menus, breadcrumbs, tabs, accordions) and forms (to collect data). Most voice apps can be broken down similarly, and Violet is really a great tool at supporting them.
I am the author - I did 10% of this for my job, but 90% of it has been a nights & weekends activity. I would love feedback. And feel free to ask me anything.
I think that unfortunately, the answer to this question is: it depends!
My $0.02 is that it depends really on the market size (based on your startups focus) and its growth. If you are early to a space then trying to grow your startup full-time will burn you out, and similarly if it is a large market that is not growing much you might need to work on it with a team full-time and put in a lot of effort to get market share.
My bias is to keep it on the side until you have a certain amount of product/market understanding. Doing that and having enough insights about your industry can take time once you start playing in it. Once that happens, and if you can make it happen, do a pivot as needed and double down.
The challenges of starting a company are different form the challenges of running/growing a $25 million dollar company. That being said, you will still learn a lot from shadowing him.
I think you have a few options:
a. Shadow him. This in itself will be fairly useful.
b. Shadow him plus. If you want to do this, I feel like offering to potentially sending him an end of month report later-on on a particular aspect he wants might not be a bad idea. To do this well, you might want to spend 25%-50% of your time in meetings where he is not there depending on the report topic.
c. Offer to help on a top strategic initiative of his - This is personally what I would do. You will have an awesome project under your belt and will learn from the experience.
d. Work for him - If he is paying you he will likely want you in a specific role. I feel like this might be the least helpful to you in the long term.
While I also like to consider myself above pricing, it is worth noting that innovation with pricing is perhaps the most important part in building a great business.
Arguably Google Search's success is more to do with their revenue innovations than their algorithms.
I love the guy challenging the big companies and so want them to succeed. But, when I look at their site I wonder about so many things:
- What do VoIP and Internet Speed Test have to do with what they do.
- I wish they have a business model that is not selling ads or my personal information to others. As long as they do that, it is hard to trust them, especially with their malware past.
- Who are their target users, is it me (a developer) or someone else?
- Why do they equate free to open source. Free means so much more in for developers. I use open source despite it being free to use, but because I know I can use it in interesting ways if I need to.
And if I ask you how long it takes to build a Wordpress blog for a music band, based on your experience building blogs for realtors. You guess will likely be good enough for me. :-)
I had the chance to see a demo a few weeks ago and it seemed impressive. Now to actually do the challenging, and build something useful with it :-)