Amusingly, the article itself seemed more like a pitch than a scientific experiment.
That's the real risk to the startup ecosystem.
Ideally the most important thing in a pitch deck are the actual facts and substance, not the presentation and storytelling.
So what are the facts used?
* They're bragging, showing why it was so good.
* They're reflecting, analyzing why it was so bad.
You clearly know different founders than I do.
"Well, actually" moments, everywhere, all the time.
This is a completely useless metric and also a common pitfall. It's been shown many times that what people say they would invest/pay for something is completely unrelated to what they actually do when push comes to shove.
It’s asking a lot to recognize a real transactional moment, codeswitch, and present effectively to the narrow goal. Even then, the narrow goal (maximize the chance of external funding) might be misaligned with the broad personal goal (don’t overcommit… on fucking anything).
A robot can just maximize on the funding result. It didn’t spend its whole career being lectured in circles about the next “one-corpco initiative” that will replace everybody’s SAP front-ends or whatever.
we can all make decks that say things people want to hear and then go to jail 12 years later
"This says more about [insert accomplishment] than it does about GPT" is getting tiring. It loses any potential meaning when that's the go to retort for any of its impressive achievements.
It seems there are a lot of people who have no talent but being able to hype up ideas. Often they have overshadowed the actual people who come up with and implement ideas.
GPT-4 and LLMs in general democratizing generating BS may actually shift the advantage more to the actual doers.
For example, There are probably on HN brilliant developers who have written at the core of really groundbreaking services and applications but will never be able to get consideration because they just don’t have the talent for making slick decks. Them being able to use GPT-4 to generate pitch decks would allow them to get their ideas in front of a lot more people.
I get the sentiment, but PR is a critical skill in the free market. Also it's not easy to tell the difference b/w legit good ideas and empty decent PRs.
This could be a net positive, as whatever criterion investors may start using to decide which businesses to finance, at least it would no longer be a proxy of 'which startup had enough money to hire the best PR staff to sell their idea'.
I feel like this meaning of 'democratizing' is jumping the shark. Did that word always mean this? Is it going to keep meaning it?
I.e. there is diminishing returns on a "perfect" pitch deck. You just want to be in the category of not sucking and the decks level of perfection is no longer important.
Today I would even go as long as to say the pitch deck is much less important than a demo.
You can in theory pitch in an email, the rest is just to make everyone feel good about giving and receiving the money.
Indeed, having spent 4 years at a VC where we all took part in initial filtering of decks, the typical reasons decks failed to even make it to our investment committee, were:
* Not describing the team, or not having a team, or thinking you could outsource key functions (e.g. we once rejected a "tech company" where the entire tech function including the CTO were outsourced to a consultancy with no link to the founders)
* Not clearly explaining the idea.
* Not setting out the size of the opportunity clearly.
* Not setting out unit economics.
* Not setting out a long enough plan (some might want 5, we wanted 10) that sets out an optimistic but possible case to a huge exit. If you go to an angel, they might be ok with a case for a 10m acquihire, but for a VC putting in $5m+, you better have a path towards a $100m+/year revenue business even if it's a long shot. It doesn't matter if the opportunity is huge if you plan to take a conservative approach that will hardly get you any of it.
Is there a service for people like me who are much better at that than other things?
I guess that's Product Hunt or something. But it seems even with that it's fairly marketing and networking focused.
What you want to see is a comparison to say pitch deck consultants - it's also more useful to evaluate whether AI or a human should help you build one.
This does suggest at minimum though that if you are a founder that GPT-4 will likely provide positive value in helping you relative to no one.
Just a nitpicking, but I would say GPT can easily beat untrained people. Clearly, GPT has already learned from all the good examples available on the internet, and it's nothing weird about that trained ones mostly outperform untrained ones.
You can often just get funding by having a good team matched to a VC that knows your industry. Pitch deck can be crap and other VCs might hard reject.
Another potential methodology flaw is that they don't seem to group decks by VC industry. I definitely altered my deck for different VCs, in ways which could make it a worse deck for the "average VC". GPT-4 might be better at setting context that industry expert VCs don't need - meaning this isn't even comparing like and like.
Humans are very susceptible to bulls** which might be the most powerful force in the world. AI bulls** generation is already superhuman and continues to accelerate. The only way to counter it will be with your own AI bulls** generator going head to head with the competition.
In the coming years, it will go faster and faster until it is dozens and then hundreds of times faster at generating high-level bulls** than humans. Due to their superior powers of persuasion, these AIs gather more and more power. Civilization ends in a hyperspeed barrage of superbulls** fighting superbulls**.
It's already started. https://m.twitch.tv/trumporbiden2024
Who cares what humans think. What did GPT-4 think about the pitches?
Probably nothing.
We sometimes see BSers of various degrees in business. Four thoughts:
1. A lot of things are seem easier for someone who knows what would be an advantageous thing to say in the moment, to that audience, and just says it, unconstrained by truth.
2. Some people are so good at BSing and complementary skills that they're incredibly slick at presentations. You might want to have them as a frontperson, until you consider...
3. Chickens tend to come home to roost. BSing is a scam tactic, and people tend to get burned by that.
4. Often the BSer themself seems immune to adverse repercussions.
GPT-4 is Robo-BSer.
Unless they have access to Code Interpreter then gpt4 won’t generate graphs and images.
Did they have it generate Python that made the graphs in matplotlib or something ? What did the prompts look like?
The ones I've seen looked more like low-quality ICO pitch decks ;)
Ignoring snark, VC's and founders giving pitch decks are above-average educated intellectual demographics. This shows how much more convincing current LLM are than the majority of the population. Social media can have regular peoples' voices drowned out by a flood of more persuasive bots. Instead of actually talking issues out amongst each other, even on HN, it could be a deluge of output from "Give me the most convincing argument why they stole the election from Trump."
Now imagine what will happen with state of the art LLM in a few years...
https://m.twitch.tv/trumporbiden2024
Anyway, people with different political views generally do not "talk issues out".
