Fred Plais created a natural language search engine in the early days of the internet. Here’s what the AI founders of today can learn from his mistakes

How did you feel when ChatGPT was released in 2022? Amazed by the advances of technology? Intrigued by the possibilities it created? Maybe worried about what AI could replace?

Me? I could barely speak or sleep. ChatGPT (and other LLMs) did what we tried to do with a company I founded in 1999, which was killed by the dot-com crash.

But with that failure came a lot of lessons – both for me, and today’s AI start-ups.

ChatGPT before AI

I co-founded search engine, Infoclic, in 1999. Google was yet to go mainstream, and many of the search leaders were relatively primitive. Relevancy of searches was remarkably low.

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