When your AI Announcement should Have Leaned on your AI Feature

You can't make this stuff up.

Yesterday's grand AI announcement by Airtable leads off with a headline that contains a missing word that could have been spotted and auto-corrected by -- wait for it -- AI.

If it were not for the fact that the newly announced features represented a predictable (and actually predicted) lazy roll of the AGI dice, I would have quietly informed the author and let it pass. But this cannot pass. It deserves a rant.

It's openly apparent that this company cannot get through the composition of a single headline that extols the virtue of its new AI feature (more on that later) without failing to use AI for its own benefit. This is common at Airtable, a product whose no-code lineage and stellar user interfaces have earned it great respect. They espouse the incredible benefits of their database platform but openly demonstrate a failure to eat that dog food themselves. They are not "platformative".

As one Airtable customer observed:

AI would not even appear on our wishlist. To us this current type of AI is a hype with often concerning consequences.

The AI hype type he is referring to is ChatGPT completions. This is the laziest form of AI, typically bolted onto an existing product in a hasty attempt to get that checkmark for Gartner and unwitting enterprise customers. It is the knee-jerk of AI, a plague that still ripples through software companies that are desperate to have an AI story.

Airtable's infusion of GPT-like completions is sadly representative of a broad remedy for laziness which has two dimensions - it's the corner to cut if all you care about is to become an "AI company" and it's exactly the right feature for customers who see the big productivity mirage.

AI, specifically AGI (artificial general intelligence), has its place, and there are vast opportunities to employ it for great user benefit. Innovators often mistake newfound AI capabilities as features.

Artificial general intelligence (AGI) straightens the line between what is known and what we need to know while adding our own context.

Some of the comments in this announcement have called out the most apparent AI benefit - using their data with LLMs. This is the magic of AGI; a?straight line?between users with questions and answers.

AI is the UI; Data is the API.

While Airtable takes its first shaky and perhaps misdirected steps in AI (which I sarcastically?predicted?it would take two weeks ago), it still needs to deliver a modern search and findability feature. Yet, at the core of AGI and large language models lay the answer to an issue that has plagued Airtable for nearly a decade - semantic search. Building an embedding-based search and discovery feature is the least expensive, most powerful capability that AI could provide.

Henry Ford heard customers loud and clear; they wanted?faster horses. He gave them automobiles. Airtable announced embroidered saddles.