Ask HN: Did your idea get funding from FTX Future Fund?
Curious whether anyone on HN got investment from FTX [1] for their project. I got the rejection letter today, it seems a mind tool powered by AI is not interesting enough :D
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30502742
7 comments
[ 0.18 ms ] story [ 31.7 ms ] threadWhat is a "mind tool" and how is it "powered by AI"?
No VC invests in just an idea unless the founder has been successful in the past.
Is that some sort of reflexive question? I see you are a long time HN reader, so you should know what AI is. Not to be disrespectful, but I'm not fully understanding the objective of that question. It'll be nice to have a philosophical debate on AI, should I proceed that way?
> is this just an idea you have or something that people are currently paying for?
I worked for 3 months implementing the idea with some innovative features that other very famous "tools" are missing, then found that FTX was funding similar projects and applied. I sent them a link to the working app. FTX funds non-profits so it doesn't need people to pay for it.
AI is a famously nebulous term that just means whatever the person using it wants it to mean.
Recent startups have been using the term as a label for one of two things:
- machine-learning algorithms that either don't work as well as linear regressions or just actually are linear regressions.
- human-in-the-loop processes (this is what the Watson group at IBM did -- Watson was not AI and was deployed successfully for customers)
So I'm not asking what AI is. I'm asking what you are calling AI that isn't general artificial cognition. What is it exactly? What does it do in a novel way that other companies aren't doing? Is it a neural network? Does it learn?
> FTX funds non-profits so it doesn't need people to pay for it.
People pay nonprofits. If they didn't, the nonprofit wouldn't have any money.
"Nonprofit" is a tax designation and a set of regulatory conditions. It does not change the necessity of generating revenue, nor does it prevent the nonprofit from selling products or services to consumers.
It matches networks of knowledge, which is not new and can be implemented with the methods you previously exposed. Doing it right is the real value. And what I called an innovative feature of the app doesn't even need AI, it's just something the other apps won't do because it's against their own business, it only benefits its users.
> People pay nonprofits
Ok, then let's wait for other people than me to pay.
Not enough blockchain