When to Wait and See

If you ever reach out to us at AICE Labs for a custom product involving AI (say agentic assistance with a tedious workflow, chatting to your data in a way that doesn’t expose it to the outside world, or creating writing and visualizations based on your own data sources), one of the questions we’d ask in our initial discovery call would be: Why now? Why not just wait and see what happens?

AI tools have been evolving quite fast, and rather than paying us the big bucks to develop a custom solution, you could just wait a year and get an off-the-shelf tool to do it for you. A number of startups that were founded right after the initial GPT-3 landed found this out the hard way, when subsequent versions of ChatGPT did perfectly well what they had built custom tools for. And we’d rather have you not suffer buyer’s remorse.

What’s There

If you have a problem where AI could offer a solution, why not check out existing tools first. Would an existing model or tool, maybe with a bit of no-code automation (tools like Zapier, Make, Pipedream) do the job already? If not, why not?

• Maybe you have more stringent privacy requirements and can’t send your data to OpenAI, Anthropic, and co

• You need more sophisticated workflow assistance than a chatbot would give you, and your use case isn’t already handled by other “wrapper” tools.

• Or maybe the workflow and all is fine, but the model’s responses just aren’t good enough.

It’s in this latter option where the most cost-effective solution is to just sit tight and wait for the models to get better, if the reason for the poor answers lies in raw model power and not some flaw in providing the model with the right sort of data.

If that does not sound like you and you’re curious about what we can build for you, get in touch.