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My AI prototype crashed during a demo for a potential investor
I was in a small meeting room in Austin, showing off a new AI tool that helps plan garden layouts. I typed 'shade loving plants for a north facing bed' and the screen just froze. The investor was watching, and I could see him check his watch. I had to restart the whole program, which took about 90 seconds of total silence. It turned out the model got stuck on a weird loop because of how I'd phrased the request. I fixed it later by adding a timeout command in the code. Has anyone else had an AI demo go wrong because of a simple user input?
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parker_price3d ago
Read an article about this exact thing... how AI demos fail on simple stuff. They called it the "parlor trick" problem. The system handles complex questions fine but falls apart on basic wording. The writer said you have to test for boring, normal phrases more than the clever ones. Makes total sense after your story. That silent restart is the worst feeling.
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hugo_robinson252d ago
Ugh yes, the parlor trick thing is so real. I watched a demo where it wrote a whole poem about a database but choked when someone just asked "show me the last 10 entries." @stellanelson that silence is brutal, it's like the air gets sucked out of the room. My team saw one fail on "add a new user" because the prompt said "create user" instead.
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stellanelson3d ago
Did the investor say anything after the restart, or just sit there in that awful silence?
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