A private equity firm once asked the consulting firm I worked at to do a due diligence of a cold chain logistics company. It was ~5 years ago so perhaps things have changed, but some interesting tidbits:
+ Makes sense that this startup is starting with medical applications -- vaccines going bad because of poor refrigeration is a well-studied problem
+ I recall one cold-chain company being well known for its back-up battery because medical products are often stopped in customs, and the boxes cannot be plugged in. So you want boxes that have backup batteries that can remain unplugged for a few days while going through customs checks
+ High end seafood is another big application -- the company we were looking at started transporting lobster before moving upmarket
At the time there was a PE blitz to get into cold chain -- it had a lot of factors that they look for -- high margin, recession proof (at least the medical applications), etc.
> I recall one cold-chain company being well known for its back-up battery because medical products are often stopped in customs, and the boxes cannot be plugged in.
This is very interesting. Is there not a problem with battery-powered devices operating in a cargo plane? The whole point of batteries is that they have a lot of energy in them, which is why they get hot while operating and sometimes simply catch fire. I thought there were a lot of restrictions on transporting them.
I have good relationships with seafood and food distributors though have never thought battery powered cooling packing made sense here. What exactly am I missing? Even in vaccines this is a solved problem with fewer points of failure if you just add telemetry.
Love it. One of the things we're focused on is getting better anatomical movement out of existing models. These models are great with animations like waves, cars, trains, flames, etc., but they struggle with people outside of basic movements. We're optimistic about future models, and we still think there are interesting, funny, exciting stories you can tell with what's available today!
What do you use it for? I haven't found a great use for it myself (outside of generating assets for landing pages / apps, where it's really really good). But I have seen endless subreddits / instagram pages dedicated to various forms of AI content, so it seems lots of people are using it for fun?
Nothing professional. I run a variety of tabletop RPGs for friends, so I mostly use it for making visual aids there. I've also got a large format printer that I was no longer using for it's original purpose, so I bought a few front-loading art frames that I generate art for and rotate through periodically.
Whose frames do you use? Do you like them? I print my photos to frame and hang, and wouldn't at all mind being able to rotate them more conveniently and inexpensively than dedicating a frame to each allows.
Perfectly suited to go alongside the style of frame I already have lots of, and very reasonably priced off the shelf for the 13x19 my printer tops out at. Thanks so much! It'll be easier to fill that one blank wall now.
Have you thought about making more structured objectives? Shameless plug: I built a simple French/Spanish chat app and the #1 piece of feedback I got was that it's a bit aimless without any objectives.
I built out ~20 scenarios that would give users objectives like buying train tickets or ordering coffee. Now that's the most used part of the app (not the generic chat bot). As far as ads go, App Store ads are not bad and can't be ad-blocked, so that's an option.
I'll second this. Consider writing prompts for the LLM that push it towards asking questions of the user, evaluating their responses, and offering corrections and asking them to repeat themselves.
This is an interesting prompting problem, let me know if you want to collaborate. I'm not in the language space, but would gladly riff with you on the topic to improve Giglish and improve my own thinking on the topic.
Hey Peter, that's a great point! I've listed my thoughts below:
A couple things:
1. From a compliance / risk point of view, the customers we've spoke to treat AI-enabled tools differently from standard enterprise products. The main reason is because the standard terms for free-tier usage specifies that model developers might use your inputs to train future iterations unless a user opts out. For that reason, a single third party that doesn't do anything with your data is better than the various AI tools that employees might use (and if you don't have an enterprise license with one provider like ChatGPT, that won't stop your employees from using free alternatives).
2. When it comes to sensitive data, there are different tiers. Companies like to keep their customer lists private, for example, but many tools in the sales stack rely on reading that data out of Salesforce as long as those vendors pass a security/compliance audit. Private keys are another tier of sensitivity, and we absolutely don't expect our users to share those. They can, however flag other text strings like "key=" or "API_KEY" or "username"
+ Makes sense that this startup is starting with medical applications -- vaccines going bad because of poor refrigeration is a well-studied problem
+ I recall one cold-chain company being well known for its back-up battery because medical products are often stopped in customs, and the boxes cannot be plugged in. So you want boxes that have backup batteries that can remain unplugged for a few days while going through customs checks
+ High end seafood is another big application -- the company we were looking at started transporting lobster before moving upmarket
At the time there was a PE blitz to get into cold chain -- it had a lot of factors that they look for -- high margin, recession proof (at least the medical applications), etc.