The AI stood for Actual Intelligence
AI stood for An Intern.
It was just his name. Names Alan, Al for short
Article says it was the two co-founders taking notes themselves.
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.
Reminds me a bit of Theranos. “Pay no attention to the man (or woman) behind the curtain”…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dropout is a good mini series on it, I wasn’t overly familiar with the story
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.
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
