At DAIN Studios, we believe that complex problems are often best solved in a relaxed and informal setting. To this end, we recently set our teams an April Fools challenge.
This was the brief: create an application that makes people smile by using OpenAI.
Following the release of EmojiPT, we interviewed our teams and asked them what they learnt from their experience. We have summarized their learnings in these five PoC development tips.
1. Keep creative discussions open
When we were coming up with the concept of EmojiPT it proved helpful that our discussions were loose and fun. We didn’t worry about the “how” too early in the process.
It was only once we had decided we wanted an emoji conversational tool that we started to worry about the nitty gritty of how to bring the project to life.
It’s important to remember that OpenAI APIs are fairly flexible and can be plugged into any technology. This means you can afford to be creative when developing new tools. OpenAI recently introduced developer functions to the API which can be read about here.
2. Be aware of outages
OpenAI is a highly sought after service. It’s estimated that by January 2023, just two months after release, the software reached 100 million monthly active users. This demand has stretched the capacity of OpenAI to the limit.
So a useful PoC development tip is to prepare for these sorts of service disruptions. Mitigation measures include creating error messages that inform users of why an app might be temporarily unavailable.
3. Don’t be intimidated by the cost of developing new POCs
Building an OpenAI app can seem like a long and expensive project. But our experience has shown that it doesn’t have to be.
When assessing the cost for PoC development, costs per prompt are very marginal and usually only account for less than $200 in total. One token costs $0.0012 and equals 1.3 words. While cost control in a large-scale organization is important, in PoC development it isn’t something that should be worried about too much.
This was all made possible by the accessibility and user-friendliness of the latest tech tools, which can be integrated quickly and easily. A project that once might have taken years to create can now be turned around in a matter of days with generative AI.
Here’s the list of the tools we used:
- OpenAI API and OpenAI NodeJS / NextJS Quickstarter
- Azure Web Services, CosmosDB
- Docker, Github
4. Fail fast. Iterate faster.
It’s important to remain open to the evolution of your ideas, as they can often surprise you by improving and expanding over time.
Failure is an inevitable part of innovation. So, with our prototyping we embraced an iterative approach that kept costs down by pushing ideas to their moment of truth as fast as possible.
5. Have a strong monitoring and logging process in place from the start
Here’s another development tip: establish a strong monitoring and logging process from the outset of a project. It will save you time and resources.
In the case of our EmojiPT PoC, we encountered some last-minute issues that could have been avoided had we implemented a more rigorous process earlier.