Function (Fn): A Design Method for AI Applications

This is Function (Fn), a design method for AI Application.

We are experiencing a remarkable time where everyone is talking about AI, from Jamie Dimon the CEO of J.P. Morgan to the guy who set next to me on the Tube today. We have people who are not using Google for search, and they just ask ChatGPT. The adoption of AI is quite remarkable. Open AI’s ChatGPT surpassed the 400 million weekly active users, and that is not including people using other platforms such as Grok by X, Perplexity and Gemini by Google.

My work is on working and advising the startups who build AI tools and applications and it is important to differentiate between two types of AI startups: AI companies who build foundational models the like of Open AI and even the Chinese startup DeepSeek which astounded the world building an open-source AI model which is comparable in performance to the ones Open AI and other US and European companies like Mistral are building. The other type of companies are building within the application layer (not foundational). Those companies are using models (generalist and expert) to solve a specific problem by training models using APIs in order to solve real problems for customers like physicians, accountants and more.