#164 How Fireflies.ai is Tripling Down on Becoming a Large Language Model-based Firm

In this week’s SlatorPod, Fireflies.ai CEO Krish Ramineni joins us to talk about scaling the AI meeting assistant and building on the latest advances in large language models.

Krish starts with his journey to co-founding Fireflies, which began as a drone delivery service and as a result of conversations with customers and investors, evolved into an AI meeting assistant to solve their own pain point.

The CEO shares how they found their product-market fit after focusing on automated transcripts over human-assisted note-taking. He discusses the early days of AI investment and how with the rise of APIs and large language models (LLMs), you no longer need multiple PhDs to attract investors.

Krish explains how Fireflies leverages technologies like Whisper to improve their language transcription, allowing them to be more accessible to global companies. He talks about their decision to improve their Super Summaries feature through GPT technology.

The CEO shares his excitement about the potential for LLMs and how Fireflies are building a Chrome extension that uses LLMs to summarize any article or video on the internet. He advises that simply building a wrapper on top of OpenAI is not a defensible moat for companies, but rather you should build a unique platform with a unique angle into the industry you’re selling to.

Kirsh talks about the current fundraising environment where there is a lot of money being thrown around for generative AI companies, but only a few will weather the storm. When it comes to hiring machine learning talent, Krish doesn't believe in prompt engineering and also holds the view that machine learning companies may no longer need to hire large cohorts of ML PhDs to scale.

The pod rounds off with the company’s roadmap for 2023, which includes creating an ecosystem of extensions on top of Fireflies. These extensions will offer powerful functionalities to users in different sectors like healthcare and recruiting.