Tiny Frequencies

Your business probably doesn't need an LLM

Anita — Tue, 25 Nov 2025 23:27:12 GMT

The solutions that will enable companies to solve 80-90% of the problem are simple solutions, not complex ones. In most cases, generative AI is not the correct solution for problems the business needs to prioritize tackling.

More complex models do not always lead to better business outcomes. I’m loath to quote Ernest Hemingway for his general character a…

What LLMs can't do well today

Anita — Sun, 09 Nov 2025 19:08:02 GMT

I’ve historically been skeptical about mainstream popularity of different ML / AI trends, convinced that it’s overblown, and that most problems in industry are probably solvable with far less complex ML solutions — if one is even needed at all. In 2011, it was “big data” and Hadoop, then in 2016 it was natural language processing, and since early 2023 i…

So you're using a chat bot as your therapist

Anita — Mon, 27 Oct 2025 21:00:58 GMT

On a balmy Thursday night this April, at the New York City classique Old Town Bar, I found myself deep in discussion with some girl friends about the state of the world (burning), relationships (very hard, always entertaining), and the business of art (changing-ish). Slowly - and then all of a sudden - it became clear that each of them was using a chat …

I recently learned about system-dependent paths

Anita — Mon, 15 Sep 2025 01:34:32 GMT

I recently learned about the idea of a “system-dependent path” A.K.A. “path-dependent process.” It is a concept in physics and seems fancy, but really is just what it sounds like: the specific path followed by a system depends on the conditions of that system. And what this means is that the final state depends on the specific sequence of events taken b…

Three-ish flavors of product management cultures

Anita — Thu, 04 Sep 2025 04:38:22 GMT

As you know, I work in product management, and the thing that is really interesting about this craft is that:

It is still pretty opaque, so
not all product managers (PMs) work the same way.

For me, this is kind of fun? Like we are still figuring things out. It reminds me a lot of working as a data scientist when the industry was nascent and people would as…

What is useful genAI tool usage?

Anita — Tue, 26 Aug 2025 01:20:55 GMT

In April, the press blew up when Shopify’s CEO’s memo about reflexive AI use was leaked. Shortly afterwards, there was an internal acceleration to measure genAI tool usage, by doing things like tracking the number of vibecoded pull requests put out by product managers (“PMs”) and other non-engineers.

Engineering thought-leadership has been against metri…

ChatGPT's a smart product

Anita — Sat, 22 Jun 2024 12:49:00 GMT

If your company is building a product that uses an LLM, you might at some point find yourself advocating to continue investing in it simply because it means your company is building a generative AI product. This would be entirely understandable: after all, you saw OpenAI release one that became very popular very quickly.

But what you really should be pay…

Career ladders for data scientists

Anita — Wed, 15 Jun 2022 17:43:00 GMT

Several years ago, I stumbled into data science while the field in industry was nascent. Since then, I’ve navigated my career via trial and error. Today, I’m sharing the below data science career ladders (linked to at the bottom of this article), a culmination of my hard-knock learnings and research, with the hope that they are useful to the broader com…

How to leverage a data science / machine learning background as a product manager

Anita — Thu, 07 Oct 2021 12:56:00 GMT

Early in my product management career, I was told I had a unique point of view because of my data science background. I was skeptical — and hard-pressed to find guidance in existing product management literature.

Since then, I’ve learned that product managers (PMs) with a background in data science have a superpower that can turbo-charge their team’s imp…

A model for widening the AI innovation funnel

Anita — Tue, 02 Feb 2021 01:58:00 GMT

A couple of years ago, a friend shared that he was a big Container Store fan — he believed all things tended towards chaos, and there was something incredibly relieving about having a place to organize your life. That was the image that stuck with me in the first part of 2020, as I was building out a set of processes to facilitate artificial intelligenc…