Last Week’s Struggles and Lessons (Week Ending 11/10/24)

Current Project: Reading books about entrepreneurs and sharing what I learned from them

Mission: Create a library of wisdom from notable entrepreneurs that current entrepreneurs can leverage to increase their chances of success

What I struggled with:

  • No material struggles this week.  

What I learned:

  • Getting the “book library” MVP to provide quality results that add value is the priority. After that’s accomplished, I can start thinking about how to put it in the hands of other users. Trying to figure out the path to allowing others to use it publicly was premature. I need to get this thing working and adding value first; then I can figure out how to share it.
  • I’ve been reading up on retrieval augmented generation (RAG) because the MVP isn’t working as intended. RAG has more limitations when you feed it a ton of information (e.g., multiple books) than I initially thought. It struggles to make connections between related information, but that’s essential. If the MVP can’t do that, providing value-added responses will be hard.
  • There’s a good chance that the Google Cloud Platform throttling of my account is impacting the depth of results I get. This is frustrating because you don’t get a warning or confirmation of throttling.
  • AI is good at many things, but it isn’t yet good at making sense of large, unstructured text data sets like books. Creating a structure or taxonomy for this kind of data could unlock what AI can do with it.
  • Google makes it easier for nontechnical people to test with and tune Gemini large-language models (LLMs). The throttling has me thinking about adding LLMs from other companies into the testing.
  • The more I learn from this project, the more I respect the human brain and its ability to store and process information from books.

Those are my struggles and learnings from the week!