Fireflies CTO and co-founder Sam Udotong recently admitted that his AI transcription startup charged $100 an hour for notes taken by a human.
  • ArchAengelus@lemmy.worldEnglish
    451·
    3 months ago

    The Practical AI podcast interviewed the Fireflies CEO very recently (that’s who this article is about)

    He was super transparent about being a cheap transcriptionist in the beginning, because he was trying to prove market demand in 2017, long before ChatGPT turned the world over. Basically doing it for his friends.

    As someone in the tech and startup fields, I can say one of the best ways to make a great product is to do the thing you want to automate and learn how it works. This is an excellent example of that approach.

    The co-founders held their tech startup together for 3-4 years, doing the best they could with keyword matching and voice transcription from the olden days, before it exploded in 2021(?) up to about 10m in revenue. Then they got early access to gpt 3.5 in 2022 because one of their investors was also an investor in OpenAI.

    They were almost ahead of their time, and they were well positioned to take advantage of the huge power that GPT models brought to their business.

    Excellent example of being in the right place at the right time, with a great vision and good network.

    • DupaCycki@lemmy.worldEnglish
      7·
      3 months ago

      Very interesting context. The article, and especially its headline, make it sound a little different.

  • Gladaed@feddit.orgEnglish
    2·
    3 months ago

    I do find it incredibly expensive. Why prefer a ai offering if it ain’t cheap?

  • Railcar8095@lemmy.worldEnglish
    71·
    3 months ago

    A decade ago my company was selling some “ML classification” service for service request calls, which in fact was 200 people in India being paid low wages even for India to do that 10 hours a day.

    They were replaced by a simple neural network and I see they advertise now advanced AI agents, which I’m pretty sure are again 200 people in India

  • DupaCycki@lemmy.worldEnglish
    14·
    3 months ago

    Gotta love how corporations are just resource burning machines.

    1. Have all employees commuting to the office.
    2. Organize meetings.
    3. Add transcription agents, because nobody’s paying attention.

    The result is the same or worse than just sending an email to people in their homes, but burns through 800x more resources.

    • errer@lemmy.worldEnglish
      311·
      3 months ago

      A couple years ago I worked for a robotics startup that I learned got their start by 100% faking a demo for early customers. They had some magic box that an item would lower into and then the device would “scan” the item and spit out a bunch of data about it. It was entirely fake, the data was predetermined. That landed them a few early series investments that allowed them to do some “real” work. The founders were proud of this sham enabling them to start a company. Whole thing made me sick.

      • Telex@sopuli.xyzEnglish
        2·
        3 months ago

        That’s pretty much how all concept demos work at start. At some point they might actually do the thing, but need a lot of careful setup and pushing along. Later on, they start to work for some cases, then more cases and hopefully before they go in the field there’s certainty and fault handling that they more or less work.

        How honest the marketing is about this process and their market research varies. But investors generally know how the sausage is made, too.

        • Telex@sopuli.xyzEnglish
          3·
          3 months ago

          I think Weird Al Yankovic posted a picture some time back saying all his songs have been Al generated or such. Couldn’t quickly find a copy now.