Howie Liu: evaluation

Transcript context

…Did you actually do this? Is there something you made? Yeah. That's literally an example of something, just a fun weekend project. And to be honest, these things only take you an hour if you become kind of pretty proficient with using the products. They're all so easy to use. You can literally do the deep research thing, kick off query, make a coffee, come back in 20 minutes. Okay, let me prompt it to generate me some dialogue. It's a little bit like what NotebookLM does for you out of the box, but sometimes I like to just do it myself. And then, okay, let me take the script and cut it up and turn it into a HeyGen avatar and then download the video and play it. And just for fun. I'm not trying to make that into an actual YouTube video business. But I think coming up with these different fun weekend projects is a really useful construct to force myself to actually try these products in a more than just a Twitch click way. And what it gives me is, A, it's not just understanding the models, which is also very, very important, right. GPT-5 came out yesterday, and playing around with it a bunch just on a variety of different personal use cases, but there's a difference between just understanding the model but then also understanding the product form factors in which they can be placed, right. Meaning when you apply the model in a more structured way, when you apply the model with different tool calling than maybe what ChatGPT has in its out-of-the-box form, when you apply it with a more agentic workflow, again, that might be different from what ChatGPT gives you out-of-the-box, that's when you kind of learn you really get to inspire yourself on what are the product's form factors that these new models can take. And plus, by the way, I find it to be really fun. There is to me a delight and entertainment value to just using AI, period, because A, it's not perfectly predictable. So I think the element of you're not quite sure what you're going to get. It's like a box of chocolates. And B, it always blows my mind just to think about, "Wow, five years ago we didn't have any of this stuff." AI was like, okay, it's like we can do predictive analytics. There's some basically very advanced kind of regressions that we could run with AI, but it looked nothing like this in its current form, and it's just actually super fun, in my opinion, to get to play around with all the different types of products that come out. I think that is a big part of it because on the point about the pace of the world moving so much faster in AI than any other landscape in SaaS, in the mature SaaS era, it was important to study your competition. If you were building a SaaS company, you'd be crazy not to follow Salesforce every year and see what the major releases they're putting out are, or ServiceNow, or so on. This is the equivalent of that, but there's major new releases and products and so on every week, not every year. year and see what the major releases they're putting out are, or ServiceNow, or so on. This is the equivalent of that, but there's major new releases and products and so on every week, not every year. And so I just think you have to say abreast of all... of it all and combining this with our point earlier of a lot of this has to be experienced, not just read. You can't just read the write-up on TechCrunch or even a tweet about a new capability. You kind of have to try it to really get a sense of what it is.…

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