I agree. I wrote a book on LangChain and LlamaIndex [1] and was initially very enthusiastic about possible applications. However, most of what I now do is just writing simple scripts to interact with my data. I feel like my “lines of code per month” metrics are at an all time low. I wanted a local chat interface that worked with all the books I have written, and various local PDFs that I have collected on the semantic web and other technologies. I ended up with two Python scripts that use a new library embedchain (which uses LangChain) that total 30 lines of code. So easy to do this stuff, that I am not so sure about the idea of using products from the new flood of LLM startups. All of this does require either using the OpenAI APIs, or the Hugging Face APIs, or renting something like a Lambda Labs GPU server and running a 33B model (if you use FastChat, you get an OpenAI compatible API).
I would urge companies and people to build their own stuff because there is so much value in learning the tech. For off the shelf LLM tools, it is hard to beat OpenAI’s web app, Microsoft Bing+ChatGPT and Office 365, and Google’s beta Bard integrations with Google Docs, etc.
Part of this post is very similar to a famous reply from Dropbox launch on hb when someone said roughly: "why do we need Dropbox, here's steps to roll your own".
The average non tech person doesn't know what an http API is.
This trope gets trotted out every time someone casts a skeptical eye on buzzy tech. In this case GP is saying that OpenAI, Microsoft and Google's apps are already "Dropbox-y" enough and that (paraphrasing fairly hard) the flood of "AI" startups are wafer thin combinations of "Bootstrap UI + GPT API calls + a vector store".
Maybe there's a killer unicorn app hiding in one of those wafer thin wrappers, but OP's point is precisely that it's disappointing how wafer-ish all these "exciting applications" actually are, relative to the massive sense of expectation that existed only a few months ago.
I would urge companies and people to build their own stuff because there is so much value in learning the tech. For off the shelf LLM tools, it is hard to beat OpenAI’s web app, Microsoft Bing+ChatGPT and Office 365, and Google’s beta Bard integrations with Google Docs, etc.
[1] https://leanpub.com/langchain