In July, we welcomed Brent Heeringa to help us kick off our Summer Startup Series with “AI For Startup Founders.” We had a great discussion, and many tips, tricks, and software recommendations were shared. Here’s a recap:
Brent, a computer scientist, shared his journey of integrating AI, particularly GPT-4, into his coding and development processes. He highlighted how GPT-4 acted as a valuable “expert friend” that provided efficient Q&A interactions and enabled him to create projects, animations, and even a clone of a New York Times game. Participants also shared their own experiences and insights into using the GPT API for chatbots, content generation, and code translation.
Top Takeaways
- Prompt engineering: If you’re going to adopt any AI model for use as a startup founder, it’s good to get a primer in prompt engineering, the process of refining instructions in order to get the optimal result. Asking ChatGPT for a summary of your notes is great; asking it to write a summary as though it were a system logistics expert will get you better results.
- API Usage: Participants explored the GPT API, which, through the use of an API key, can help you build chatbots for customer service, content generation for blogs and articles, and more.
- Hugging Face and Other Models: Participants were introduced to Hugging Face, a platform where creators share AI models and templates. They discussed other language models like Bard, Llama, Cohere, and Anthropic, each with its unique features and use cases.
- Limitations: It was acknowledged that while GPT-4 had impressive capabilities, it does have its limitations. It relies on prior input and might “hallucinate,” producing content that is incorrect or just completely made up.
- Fun DIYs: Ben Parfitt, founder and CEO of Reiform, shared two cool things he built with the GPT API: Chat Jointly, a tool that can incorporate messages and conversations into machine learning, and Telephoto, an image-based game of telephone you can play with AI.
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