User research can't find a product nobody has seen yet

In one quarter my best model was export-controlled out of every account for 19 days, then restored, and nobody gave me notice.

• The test for a frontier product is one question: could this have shipped 12 months ago, at any budget, with a bigger team? If not, every input you'd use to de-risk it came from a world where the capability didn't exist.
• Show people a capability with no analog and they describe the nearest analog. That feedback is honest, but acting on it builds a faster version of the past. Research still finds the job, like where someone loses 40 minutes today.
• Four forced decisions in 12 weeks: a model pulled for 19 days, a rival lab shipping open weights at frontier level, and a silent default change that repriced every token budget I had. A feature that is the whole product in March is a checkbox by September.

Read the full article: Frontier Products Have No Priors.

This summary was written with AI assistance (Claude) from the full article at https://www.orbytlabs.ai/blog/frontier-products-have-no-priors.