We’re all frogs in the AI pot and it’s surprising how much the temperature of the water has increased recently. The commoditisation of LLMs-as-a-service and the proliferation of their capabilities has thrown people’s understanding of how difficult some problems are into disarray. Sure, this isn’t a new problem, as XKCD famously remarked on, but recently I think the dial has moved again.
Software projects and new startups get pitched to me a lot - literally on a weekly basis. A large proportion of these fall into the same template of AI + SaaS (not saying they aren’t novel and unique!). These conversations usually precede any kind of funding, so the question usually is, can this concept be turned into a scrappy product with a paying user base? Herein lies the mismatch of expectations. The fact is that more often than not, people’s “AI” ambitions can be achieved with off-the-shelf APIs, at least to the proof-of-concept stage. So the problem is not really an “AI” problem, it’s a wiring problem.
This leads me to my (slightly sensationalist) point - Building proof-of-concept AI systems is becoming easy, building good SaaS is still hard. The caveat is of course that the off-the-shelf AI services can fulfil your needs.
There’s a new wave of AI composition frameworks borne from this very observation. One such framework is Breadboard, which we’ve been working on with Google Labs. Breadboard lets you quickly design complex workflows with GenAI, bake them into portable JSON, and even live-debug them in a web environment!
As you can see from the video below, if someone came to me with a product idea to respond to business reviews, a working prototype of the “AI” part can be plumbed together in a little over 30 minutes!
https://breadboard-ai.web.app/?board=https://exadev.github.io/boards/business-reply.bgl.json
All that’s left is the frontend, backend, infrastructure, external integrations, testing, billing and subscription management, business operations, support, maintenance.. you get the picture.
N.B. Please come and get involved with Breadboard! It can do amazing stuff already but there is so much more to do. It’s all open source and there is a Discord server.