> Summary
By my count, there are three successful types of language model product:
- Chatbots like ChatGPT, which are used by hundreds of millions of people for a huge variety of tasks
- Completions coding products like Copilot or Cursor Tab, which are very niche but easy to get immediate value from
- Agentic products like Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, and Copilot Agent mode, which have only really started working in the last six months
On top of that, there are two kinds of LLM-based product that don’t work yet but may soon:
- LLM-generated feeds
- Video games that are based on AI-generated content
With many of the good usecases of AI the end user doesn't know that ai exists and so it doesn't feel like there is AI present.
To name some of the obvious counter-examples, Grammarly and Deepl are both AI (and now partially LLM-based) products that don't fit any of the categories in the post, but seem pretty successful to me. Lots of successful applications of Vison-LLMs in document scanning too, whether you are deciphering handwritten text or just trying to get structured data out of pdfs.
1. Batch/Pipeline: Processing a ton of things, with no oversight. Document parsing, content moderation, etc.
2. AI Features: An app calls out to an AI-powered function. Grammarly might pass out a document for a summary, a CMS might want to generate tags for a post, etc.
3. Agents: AI manages the control flow.
So much of discussion online is heavily focused towards agents so that skews the macro view, but these patterns are pretty distinct.
Personally I’m waiting for better O365 and SharePoint agents. I think there’s a lot of automation and helper potential there.
If you're a Rust developer reading this, interested in AI + GUI + Enterprise SaaS, and wants to talk, I'm building a team as we speak. E-mail in profile.
What other type of business is there?
- Energy generation and
- Expending energy to convince the folks generating energy to give you money for activating their neurons (food service, entertainment, tourism, transportation, sales).
Any other fun ways to compartmentalize an economy?
Maybe the real value of AI, particularly LLMs, is in the interface it provides for other things, and not in the AI itself
What if AI isn't the _thing_? What if it's the thing that gets us _to_ the thing?
At the level of granularity selected, maybe true. But too coarse to make any interesting distinctions or predictions.
Claude 3.5 was released in june 2024.
Maybe he has been writing this article for a while, maybe he meant Claude Code or Claude 4.0
With hindsight, given that Claude Code turned into a billion dollar precut category, it was a bit of a miss bundling those two announcements together like that!
Yep. Looking forward to the future where you can eat plastic pop-corn while watching the AI-generated video feeds.
- human language translation
- summarization
- basic content generation
- spoken language transcription
Dunno, man, I can spot ai-generated content a mile away, it tends to be incredibly useless so once I spot it, I’ll run in the opposite direction.
Exactly; pretty sure you've seen media or read text that you thought was human created..
I love how they occasionally come up with a turn of phrase, a thought path, or surprising perspective. I work with them iteratively to brainstorm, transform, and crate compose content that I incorporate into my own work.
Regarding spotting AI-generate content, I was once accused of posting AI-generated content where I bona-fide typed every single letter myself without as much as glancing at an LLM. People's confidence in spotting AI content will vary and err on fake-positives and fake-negatives too. My kids now think all CG movies are AI generated, even the ones that pre-date image and video gen. They're pretty sure it's AI though.
I make a lot of business reporting where I work and dashboards for various things. When I get user requests for data, it's rarely clear or well thought out. They struggle with articulating their actual requirements and usually leads to a lot of back and forth emails or meetings and just delays things further.
I now paste their initial request emails into an LLM and tell it "This is what I think they are trying to accomplish, interpret their request into defined business metrics" or something similar and it does a pretty good job and saves a ton of the back and forth. I can usually then feed it a sample json response or our database schema and have it also make something quick with streamlit.
It's saved me (and the users) a ton of time and headaches of me trying to coerce more and more information from them, the LLMs have been decent enough at interpreting what they're actually asking for.
I'd love to see a day where I can hook them up with RO access to a data warehouse or something and make a self-service tool that users can prompt and it spits out a streamlit site or something similar for them.
can you point me to a useful example of this? i see websites including ai-generated summaries all the time, but i've yet to see one that is actually useful and it seems like the product being sold here is simply "ai", not the summary itself - that is, companies and product managers are under pressure to implement some sort of AI, and sticking summaries in places is a way for them to fill that requirement and be able to say "yes, we have AI in our product"
Now I pass them through an LLM and ask them to point out interesting, unconventional, or surprising things, and to summarize the document in a few bullet points. They're quite good at this, and I am can use what I discover later in my relationship with the counterparty in various ways.
I also use it to "summarize" a large log output and point out the interesting bits that are relevant to my inquiry.
Another use case is meeting notes. I use fireflies.ai for some of my meetings and the summaries are decent.
I guess summarization might not be the right word for all the cases, but it deals with going through the hay stack to find the needle.
My own experience using LLMs is that we frequently disagree about which points are crucial and which can be omitted from a summary.
fireflies.ai is interesting though, that's more what i was looking for. i've used the meeting summary tool in google meet before and it was hilariously bad, it's good to hear that there are some companies out there having success with this product type.
E.g. https://www.thomsonreuters.com/en/press-releases/2025/septem...
B2B AI company, 2 years in sold for hundreds of millions, not an agent, chatbot, or completion. Do you know it exists? No. You only read Hacker News. How could you know?
Additive’s GenAI-native platform streamlines the repetitive, time-consuming task of ingesting and parsing pass-through entity documents
There’s another kind of agent that isn’t about coding: the research agent. LLMs are particularly good at tasks like “skim through ten pages of search results” or “keyword search this giant dataset for any information on a particular topic”.Any tax professional who takes weeks to enter footnote info from a K-1 form into their professional tax prep software is probably just as bad at other job-related tasks and either needs more training or to find another job.
Unless there are serious ethical problems with people generating arbitrary text ie. Writing - then no there isn't
Agents are essentially the chatbot, but without the human in the loop. Chatbot without human in the loop is a slop factory. Things like "multi-agent systems" are a clever ploy to get you to burn tokens and ideally justify all this madness.
Copilot/completion does not work in business terms for me. It looks like it works and it might feel like it's working in some localized technical sense, but it does not actually work on strategic timescales with complex domains in such a way that a customer would eventually be willing to pay you money for the results. The hypothesis that work/jobs will be created due to sloppy AI is proving itself out very quickly. I think "completion" tools like classic IntelliSense are still at the peak of efficiency.
The copilot/completion thing also doesn't work for me. I have no doubt that a lot of developers are having a lot of benefits from the coding LLMs, but I can't make them work.
I think one glaring obvious missing kind of AI is medical image recognition, which is already deployed and working in many scenarios.
Can "AI" in its current form deliver value? Sure, and it absolutely does but it's more in the form of "several hours saved per FTE per week" than "several FTEs saved per week".
The way I currently frame it: I have a Claude 1/2-way-to-the-Max subscription that costs me 90 Euros a month. And it's absolutely worth it! Just today, it helped me debug and enhance my iSCSI target in new and novel ways. But is it worth double the price? Not sure yet...
Is a better de-noisier algorithm in Adobe Lightroom worth $500 billion?
No.
But: a tool that allows me to de-noise some images, just by uploading a few samples and describing what I want to change, just might be? Even more so, possibly, if I can also upload a desired result and let the "AI" work on things until it matches that?
But also: cool, that saves me several hours per week! Not: oh, wow, that means I can get rid of this entire department...
Can AI-as-it-currently-is save FTEs? Sure: but, again, there's a template for that: {{How Many}} -- 1% of your org chart? 10%? In my case it's around 0.5% right now.
Or, to reframe it a bit: can AI pay Sam A's salary? Sure! His stock options? Doubtful. His future plans? Heck nah!
Feeding it the explain, query and current indexes it can quickly tell what it was doing and why it was slow.
I saved a bunch time as I didn’t have to read large amounts of json from explain to see what is going on.
I would def challenge this. “Turn off private relay”, “send this photo to X”, “Add a pit stop at a coffee shop along the way” are all voice commands I would love to use
- Call this government service center, wait on hold for 45 minutes, then when they finally answer, tell them to reactivate my insurance marketplace account that got wrongly deleted.
- Find a good dentist within 2mi from my house, call them to make sure they take my insurance, and book an appointment sometime in the next two weeks no earlier than 11am
- Figure out how I'm going to get from Baltimore to Boston next Thursday, here's $100 and if you need more, ask me.
- I want to apply a posterizing filter in photoshop, take control of my mouse for the next 10sec and show me where it is in the menu
- Call that gym I never go to and cancel my membership
The web caused dentists to make websites, but they don't post their appointment calendar; they don't have to.
Will AI looking for appointments cause businesses to post live, structured data (like calendars)? The complexity of scheduling and multiple calendars is perfect for an AI solution. What other AI uses and interactive systems will come soon?
- Accounting: generate balance sheets, audit in real-time, and have human accountants double check it (rather than doing)
- Correspondence: create and send notifications of all sorts, and consume them
- Purchase selection: shifting the lack of knowledge about products in the customers favor
- Forms: doing taxes or applying for a visa
Thing is, there is no library for it to work in.
There may be different ways to access it, but the product is always the same.
I would disagree with this.
Part of how security is handled in current agentic systems is to not let the LLM have any access to how the underlying tools work. At best it's like hitting "inspect" in your browser and changing the web page.
Of course, that assumes that the agentic chatbot has been built correctly.
8organicbits•2h ago
This is actually a low bar, when the agent wrote those tests.