ChatGPT ‘continuously shuts down’ and people continue to use it. What that tells Google alum Elad Gil about bad advice in Silicon Valley

news7f01/29/2023

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ChatGPT 'continuously shuts down' and people continue to use it. What that tells Google alum Elad Gil about bad advice in Silicon Valley

ChatGPT has taken the world by storm. The artificial intelligence chatbot from OpenAI has captured the imagination around the world and attracted huge investments from Microsoftwhich said this month it plans to pour billions of dollars into the venture and incorporate its technology into a range of its products.

But The rapid growth of OpenAI—it launched in late 2015 and shared ChatGPT with the public two months ago—will surely leave some entrepreneurs wondering if they are doing something wrong with their little-noticed business ventures are not.

Elad Gil, a widely respected angel investor in Silicon Valley—he soon bet on Airbnb, Instacart, and Square—believe that “ChatGPT’s ongoing shutdown right now is a great sign that the product is a good fit for the market. That’s because too many people are using it. That’s a great problem to have.

Gil makes a comment about an episode of the The Logan Bartlett Program Friday podcasts. alum of Google and Twitter notes the “problem” OpenAI faces after Bartlett, a software investor at venture capital firm Redpoint, asked for his thoughts on product-market fit when considering an investment. .

One sign he looks for are positive testimonials from customers and users, he says: “It really showed in the enthusiasm the initial small team had for the product.”

However, he also added, “If a product keeps breaking down but people keep using it, then it’s clear that the product is right for the market,” noting that he has witnessed That was in the early days of Twitter and now seeing it with ChatGPT.

On the other hand, he says, many ideas simply won’t work, no matter how much time an entrepreneur spends on them. He says the Silicon Valley myth that “you should sharpen forever and then something will work out eventually” is false, noting that people have wasted years of their lives on “bad advice.” ” so.

“Ultimately, people spend years and years of their lives brooding over something that doesn’t work, because maybe it would work if I made these three more tweaks, and maybe it would work in the future. this month if I continue, he said. “For a very small number of cases it happens, but for the most part it works immediately or almost immediately.”

While it’s true that entrepreneurs may need to get through tough times during a recession, he adds, “When the time is right, the worst piece of advice you can give someone is keep going no matter what.”

“There’s a lot of opportunity cost of your time, and most of it doesn’t work,” says Gil. “Most of the time, you should really figure out when to give up and when to really give up. It’s really hard to know.”

Meanwhile, when an idea works, it tends to work very quickly, something he’s seen many times with the companies he’s worked with and invested in for years — and now with. OpenAI and ChatGPT.

“The reality is that most of the companies, not all, but the vast majority of the companies that I have worked with are active, have ended operations quite early. And once they start working, they just keep working.”

He also follows other people who have noticed the same thing.

“One thing I’ve noticed is that people who’ve been researching things that don’t work for the product market—that they think are right for the product market—when they finally get to work on something that really works, they realize the vast difference and the extent to which they are deceiving themselves.”

In the first case, “you are going after everyone and every sale is terrible and everything is terrible,” he says, but in the latter, it is the case, “’Hey, people keep calling me.’ And that’s this transition, and until that happens, you don’t realize how it really feels.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com