Pura vida. It’s the CRO Roundtable Roundup!
Thanks to Iqbal Ali, Matt Beischel, Slobodan Manić, Veronika Morozová and Craig Sullivan for joining us. Want to get in on the action and talk with other cool CRO people? Then you should probably…
One Sentence Takeaway
I’m a busy person; give me the TL:DR
Concerns over AI’s environmental, economic, and ethical impacts are growing faster than most people’s understanding of the technology.
The Notes
What we discussed this week
- Streamlining video content workflows with automation
- Video uploads trigger automatic generation of course materials
- Manual processing previously required hours of human effort, automation produces outputs in under ten minutes
- Review and approval is the only remaining manual step
- Building custom AI tools for data labeling and model training
- Building an app to extract structured examples from raw input
- Few-shot prompting improved consistency in output formats
- Consider using lightweight models for local task-specific deployments
- Evaluation metrics remain a challenge for validating model quality
- Data ethics in AI companies
- Chat logs were unintentionally exposed through indexing behavior
- Privacy risks increased due to misleading interface language
- Leaks leading to speculation about partnerships and data deals
- These incidents may be a symptom of deeper structural issues
- Use of chat transcripts for training raises philosophical questions
- Shifts in how people interact with digital products
- AI-generated interfaces are becoming more common in consumer tools
- Invisible layers replacing visible UI in many user journeys
- Personal assistants are starting to mediate digital access
- Control over how content is presented may shift away from brands
- New abstraction layers changing expectations for usability
- Wider impacts of AI on employment
- Mass layoffs occurred after internal AI projects concluded
- Job losses are often not reflected in official statistics
- Demand for certain roles has decreased without new hiring
- Economic uncertainty is slowing investment and hiring decisions
- Structural unemployment may become more visible in the coming quarters
- Growing limitations in AI training data
- Legal pressure has restricted use of previously relied-upon sources, so synthetic data is being used more as compensation
- Data from open forums and user interactions is now highly valued
- Scarcity of high-quality, permissioned data affects model outputs
- Access to new sources of training data is driving commercial partnerships and deals
- Hype around AI in business settings
- Capabilities are often overstated in marketing and media narratives
- Procurement teams often request AI capabilities without clear context
- Decision-makers may lack the technical background to evaluate solutions
- Buzzwords influence vendor selection regardless of actual functionality
- Overemphasis on AI may distort evaluation of real business needs
- Shifting definitions of intelligence to fit AGI
- New terms like “superintelligence” are emerging to replace AGI
- Large models being treated as general-purpose tools
- Sustainability is a growing concern as energy demands rise
The Quotes
Standout quips from this week
“OpenAI's only value is in the data they’ve captured from people’s brains.”
“What that's really doing is making your stuff public on Google.”
“There's never been more hype around something that fewer people understand.”
“C level people see AI somewhere in newsletter and they want to see the demo.”
“All these SEO people were scraping over dead carrion… ambulance chasers.”
Book Club
Relevant reads recommended this week
Empire of AI
When AI expert and investigative journalist Karen Hao first began covering OpenAI in 2019, she thought they were the good guys. Founded as a nonprofit with safety enshrined as its core mission, the organization was meant, its leader Sam Altman told us, to act as a check against more purely mercantile, and potentially dangerous, forces. What could go wrong?
CRO Link Digest
Useful and thought-provoking content shared this week
- Streamlit – an open-source app framework for Python
- n8n – Flexible, locally hosted AI workflow automation
- Product Management Festival – a conference for product practitioners seeking depth, practical insights, and real connections
- Mind the Product – a community, providing articles, meetups, training, and events that support the careers of 300,000+ product people globally
- That means your convos with AI that you shared via link? They can show up on search. – LinkedIn post by Elena Verna
- Hackers steal images from women’s dating safety app that vets men – BBC News article about the Tea app data breach
- Tea dating app disables direct messaging as it investigates data breach – CBS News article about the Tea app data breach
- There are no secrets on the internet. Just ask the women who entrusted their data to Tea – The Guardian news article about the Tea app data breach
- Beyond the Vibe: A Deep Dive into the Dangers of Vibe Coding – Medium article by Adnan Masood, PhD. about how “Vibe Coding” and Unchecked AI Create Fragile Systems, and a Framework for Building Resilient, High-Velocity Teams
- Sean Cook, founder of the Tea App, only has a 6 month coding bootcamp under his belt. – Reddit thread in r/webdev about the Tea app’s lack of security, potentially due to vibe coding
Off-Topic Sidebars
Experimentation isn’t the only thing we talk about at the CRO Roundtable. There’s often a healthy dose of discussion on shared interests, personal passions, and hobbies.
- Personal travel experiences
- A short London visit included a single day for sightseeing
- Surf lessons on a quiet beach in Costa Rica
- Reflections on political systems
- Capitalism is unstable without regulation
- “Animal Farm” by George Orwell is an example of fleeting equality
- Political influence linked to wealth and corporate power
Sidebar Shareables
Amusing sidebar content shared this week
- Secret London – ultra-shareable online guide to news, events, and things to do in London
- Museum of the Home – museum that explores the history of domestic life