← All IntelClip / EducationThe economics that killed an early AI recommendation feature
From Fireside Chat: Simon Eskildsen on Building Turbopuffer · ≈22:33
“So you had to reach for search very quickly.”
“I found out that one of the co-founders wife was pregnant through the recommendations that I was getting when I was running it on his feed.”
What’s in it
- Recounts why tiny early GPT context windows forced developers into search
- Shares a real story of AI recommendations exposing private life details
- Breaks down why a $30k/month AI feature killed a bootstrapped startup's margins
Clip transcript
out there that's why I left and this problem kept coming up again again and again and again right like ChachiBT came out in 2022 and I was working with with a company then and They wanted to connect a bunch of documents to AI and that's when the context windows were really small. So you had to reach for search very quickly. >> So it's like a few kilobytes. >> It was eight kilobytes or four kilobytes depending on the model. It was very very small. So you had to reach for search very quickly. Right. And >> so I I I worked with them and I was I was I created a little recommendation engine and the recommendation engine was actually quite good. Um, like I s I found out that one of the co-founders wife was pregnant through the recommendations that I was getting when I was running it on his feed. Um, like it was it was it it >> weird but >> it was recommending. Yeah. I mean it was just like you know he was reading about like and I did get permission. I just like I don't think anyone expected to be good enough and just like okay it's this this thing is working and then I ran the back of the envelope math on what it would cost to do this for everyone like all the users. This is a company called Readwise. So it's like articles that you save and then and insert later. And it was going to cost 30 grand a month. And this was a company. It's a bootstrap Canadian company. They spend about five they at the time they were spending about 5k a month on all the other infrastructure combined. So it just it didn't the you know fundamentally in a company if you're doing an investment you have have to run some gross margin on top of whatever you're paying right and it just didn't line up. Um and so we just didn't ship it. I worked on I you know tuned to
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