104 comments

[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 175 ms ] thread
I don't get it. Is it a parody? A copy of an existing website? An attempt to see how many people will sign up without reading the URL or page? An actual startup with an "ironic" URL?
The majority of the results seem like believable bullshit startups. Every now and then it makes a pretty good parody.

"Myescent is like Google Plus but for Gaming"

"Coner, Startup as a service"

"Contracee, Rent a Phone as a service"

"Ultrambu, Using the blockchain to create AI-Chatbots"

"Malicious, Interactive learning"

"Octozu, Using the blockchain in Dating"

"Kwigen is like Twitter but for Communication"

There's some deep truth in that.

I got "like Twitter but for transportation"

I'm still mulling over the possibilities of what that could mean.

Refresh the page
What's not to get? It's telephone calling on demand which is going to be the next youtube! I have already signed up for $89/month and sent them my resume! What a great idea. They already have three CEOs so I don't think 1 more can hurt, frankly.
This is shockingly real.

https://i.imgtc.com/DawgjdH.png

So, Abavu is basically Amazon?
The writer had Shipt in mind, I think. I've seen that twice now s/stuff/groceries/
You can probably name a dozen that fits without too much effort. All taskrabbit/fiverr clones, all food/grocery delivery clones, etc.
What's next? thisworlddoesnotexist.com? Generate an entire random world with people and everything in it from some ML experiement?
That IS the end game of VR, in some capacity.
Maybe someone is looking right at us now and is about to press the refresh button.
Hopefully they’ll get sued by Choose Your Own Adventure just in time for an injunction to prevent them from pressing refresh.
What if we already lived in such a world? Generated for no particular reason just for "hey look I can generate worlds randomly". I guess you should enjoy your life until the tab is being closed!
That's basically Bostrom's simulation hypothesis.
Yes, amended with the idea that with sufficiently powerful computers, simulation of worlds might be doable within things that people consider as banal as website visits.
thisthisstartupdoesnotexist.comdoesnotexist.com

followed soon after by a version of the Paperclip Maximizer that converts all matter into digital memory substrate to handle the constant buffer overflow of “thisthisthisthis...”

Orbis Tertius
FYI: Press the refresh button. It generates a different fake compay every time you refresh it.

Looks like it is kinda an AI research but I cannot get any detail behind it.

“It’s like Uber, but for healthcare” hahaha man do you want to tip your surgeon extra today?
Not tipping the doctor, but the hospital:

"Many hospitals conduct nightly wealth screenings — using software that culls public data such as property records, contributions to political campaigns and other charities — to gauge which patients are most likely to be the source of large donations.

"Those who seem promising targets for fund-raising may receive a visit from a hospital executive in their rooms, as well as extra amenities like a bathrobe or a nicer waiting area for their families."

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/24/business/hospitals-asking...

On the one hand, overpriced premium services is great way to finance core services. On the other hand, it gives influential people a distorted view of how most people experience the world. ("Doesn't even know the price of a gallon of milk.")

Also, I thought HIPAA would prevent that behavior.

Nothing in HIPAA would prevent that behavior. It does prevent hospital management from unauthorized access to your medical records for purposes unrelated to care delivery or billing. However it doesn't mention anything about access to public financial records.
Wealth has buffered individuals from the unpleasantness of life for time immemorial. It's kind of the point when you think about it.
Anyone else get the sense this is more of a Mad-Libs style fill-in as opposed to the sort of AI-generated content found in other thisXdoesnotexist sites?
Yeah. Oddly enough, this should be the easiest variation on the this-does-not-exist idea, but it's the least believable.

If I didn't know it was an experiment, I'd think it was a bot-driven ad-fraud popup site or something.

Clearly. The images are all just stock "...male-105.png," the page format is exactly the same.

It's cute but less interesting than, say, thisdoesnotexist.

(comment deleted)
As author of 'This Waifu Does Not Exist' https://www.thiswaifudoesnotexist.net/ (which does use StyleGAN+GPT-2-small, with even better anime-finetuned GPT-2-small samples coming tomorrow or so), I feel a little insulted that the 'X Does Not Exist' brand is being diluted by Mad-Libs-style efforts. The snowclone exists to show off neural net work specifically, not just any old aleatorics.
Fake tricks, in my AI/ML offering? It's more likely then you think.
Thats understandable. Where "This Waifu Does Not Exist" serves as a demonstration of GANs, "This Startup Does Not Exist" is more of a satirical jab on how "disruptive" startup endeavors are really generic efforts that don't amount to anything
Is this really as impressive as I think it is, or is it more or less recoloring different images?
That's getting into hard to answer territory: do humans 'more or less recolor different images' when they do art, too? Many people use tracing, copy elements, imitate other artists' styles, and so on. No one learns anime art in a void. All culture is remix. And this is true of writing, as well. Consider Gene Wolfe's "The Just Man" ( https://www.gwern.net/docs/culture/1983-wolfe-thecitadelofth... ):

> From this story, though it was the shortest and the most simple too of all those I have recorded in this book, I feel that I learned several things of some importance. First of all, how much of our speech, which we think freshly minted in our own mouths, consists of set locutions. The Ascian seemed to speak only in sentences he had learned by rote, though until he used each for the first time we had never heard them. Foila seemed to speak as women commonly do, and if I had been asked whether she employed such tags, I would have said that she did not---but how often one might have predicted the ends of her sentences from their beginnings.

You could look through the various sets of samples and the more extreme psi examples and the interpolation videos and perhaps get a better idea of the extent to which the StyleGAN 'understands' faces and is being creative: https://twitter.com/gwern/status/1093701790971953152

Would it make sense to compare the output images to their nearest neighbors in the training set in order to establish some metric of "originality"? Sorry if that is a basic question, I haven't read much on image synthesis with neural nets.
Yes, and they don't usually look too much alike (see the BigGAN appendix nearest-neighbors for example of doing this) but some people argue this isn't a good enough check because the GAN could just be shuffling around patches of textures or something, which is a little goal-post-move-y for my taste.
I think "humans also do X" is fallacious. Humans also draw paintings like The Black Square by Malevich (and he wasn't the first to do it) and there's a poem consisting a single letter "i" by John Curry and another consisting of one word "lighght". Does this mean a printer capable of printing random letters is a poet and one that can produce a black page is an artist?

It's true it is hard to define what art is. But I'm pretty sure /dev/random isn't an artist, even if a human artist can produce random things.

> Does this mean a printer capable of printing random letters is a poet and one that can produce a black page is an artist?

You're asking that rhetorically, assuming people will just agree there's a difference because a human artist did it and a computer doing it isn't an artist, but you know a lot of people would be happy to take one of those forks.

Well, I guess for these people general AI already exists, or at least AI capable of producing art. Just take a random pattern, imbue it with whatever meaning you please, and treat it as artistic intelligence. With this approach, any innovation (at least as far as producing art goes) does not carry any value beyond novelty value - if /dev/random has everything one ever would need in art, then what's the difference between any new sophisticated model and just another dump of output of /dev/random?
True, but humans are generally able to start from scratch and make something. It doesn’t seem like that’s entirely what is happening here, but to be honest, it would be hard to say given the quality of the output.

I really enjoyed the videos that transition through the different options for Holo.

It’s fitting for a fake startup generator to use fake ai. Most of these fictional startups would probably be faking their ai as well.
For those who were as confused as I was: Every time you refresh the page, it comes up with a new startup, with new people and titles etc.
My first suspicion was seeing a company based out of Islamabad.
Business happens anywhere and everywhere. "No matter your transportation needs we can meet them with some combination of mopeds and small cars" sounds believable for a startup from any of the midsize cities in the region.
It's the capital of Pakistan why wouldn't it have startups? I'm not familiar enough with Pakistan to understand.
Are the founder images also deep-fakes, or are they of real people?
Most likely no. I came across the same person twice. Interestingly, in one company her name is "Tera" and in the other "Terah".
Its address generation is a bit wonky. It doesn't respect address formats of different countries. It assumes all addresses follow this format: "<Street name> street no. <number>, <5 digit postal number>, <City>".

An actual working random address generation would be kind of cool. But this really isn't. Plus, as far as I know, postal numbers are available from OpenStreetMaps' database or Google Maps.

I laughed at this one:

"Get your groceries supplied by badly paid people because you're too lazy."

"Infratz is more than just a random Idea"
This could be used to create mockups for Envato/Theme Forest templates.
"Amicious is like Facebook but for Communication"

Perhaps not a brilliant startup idea.

"Sumile is like Google Plus but for Faith", actual lol!
This is boring, you drop a bunch of resources and templates and then use random() to choose templates and resources to fill them in.

How about going more meta with thisthisdoesnotexistdoesnotexist.com?

Right...at this point, skewering sites that build auto-generated sites would have been way more fun and interesting.
HAHAHAH!! This is frickin hilarious! Thanks to whomever created this for sharing.
I'd like to see an AI driven predictor of which Google service/api will not exist in five years so we can go ahead and not use it now.
The second result I got was Audible. Not sure Amazon would allow startup with this name…
Quape "Get your groceries supplied by badly paid people because you're too lazy"

If it were an ML-model, it would be AlphaZero of sarcasm.

Well no, this exact sentence is mentioned twice on this page, I just got it too.