Thread · HN Continuity

I was actually thinking the other day that it makes perfect sense for AI companies to develop a professional services oriented software development arm. Imagine that you want to develop a training pipeline for "tasteful" programming: you might make a reward metric for that does some obvious stuff (nothing that anyone could easily agree is a bug like a crash, good performance, perhaps minimize LoC), but you really want to also want to also track "bugs" where the feature was discovered to be missing some unspecified nuance that was only discovered through product use, or train on ability to keep a small codebase while also keeping diffs small (essentially, "maintainability") as real new requirements come in.

So then you want a training set full of real product requirements and product evolution, which is something you could get if you offered custom software development, with a lot more control than you'd get trying to do the same by scraping random FOSS projects on github.

Other industries are perhaps similar. If you offer a service directly, you have much more ability to build collection of training data into the process. Want to make the best law bot? Buy a law firm, offer legal services, and integrate extremely deeply into their workflows. If their models turn out to be as good as they hype up, they should be able to scale to be a major player in any endeavor they move into with a relatively small number of staff and develop a strong feedback loop (not that that would be good for the rest of us).