“All the smart kids of the Bay Area want to work on AI,”
Operative word here is "kids", and from what I can tell they're not even the smart ones, just the ones who are more geared toward being money and status-obsessed.
My guess (paywall): they wanted to drive up demand for their existing investments in AI. In other words, the bubble didn't eat Y combinator, Y combinator did it to themselves on purpose.
The one thing that LLMs are good at is prototyping super fast. For accelerators/incubators etc this is a game changer since more ideas can be realized and tested for market fit.
Now if the market fit indeed exists then someone needs to rearchitect and rewrite the thing. But wasn’t it always the case? The POC always was a hacked together solution with no real viability to be used as the final product.
>The POC always was a hacked together solution with no real viability to be used as the final product.
well that's the different. It is the final product, now. In many cases, you're selling the prototype itself, becuse that's what investors like seeing. User engagement be damned.
And people still seem to doubt that we're in a massive bubble.
Every company is an AI company and you should probably be less interested in building an AI and more interested in how you can apply AI to solve business needs that are not directly AI-related.
If you drive through San Francisco on I-80, every single billboard between the Bay Bridge and the 101 is for some kind of AI service (except, amusingly, the one for Yudkowsky's new book about AI doom). All of them look terrible and completely useless. There was one that said "Still using PowerPoint? Use our AI slide maker instead" with a picture of a three-eyed cat, as though to brag that their service makes unappetizing and unreliable slop.
It's total insanity; comparisons to tulip mania no longer even apply now that people are tossing around numbers like $500 billion when talking about their capex buildouts.
AI ate HN also. It’s ridiculous how many articles are about AI now. Are we truly out of any new ideas? Can we not talk about something else? I kind of like AI but it’s a tool, I don’t talk about my screwdriver constantly.
well HN is also burying the collapse of the country many of community resides in, so I guess that's off the table.
Heck, even the layoff news seems to have been normalized these days. There's this oddly sterile feeling here lately. As if we need to pretend we are still in good times, when clearly many of us are struggling.
AI is kind of more interesting than screwdrivers though. Three AI movies in the IMDB top 100 vs zero screwdriver movies (The Matrix, Terminator 2, Wall-E).
"How paid subscriptions ate the spread of information" I can't subscribe to another site and seems the archive link is not working for me either. Would love to read it though because while YCombinator just follows where they see the money being, AI has really seen the majority of investment recently.
https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/industry/investing
Just doing a search for "AI" its clear there is a preference. Maybe for good reason though. If I could read the article that is.
> Going through YC’s startup directory reveals that of the 170 startups in the most recent summer batch 154 are AI startups.
The author calculates this by searching for the term "AI" in the name and description of each startup's YC page. But presence of the term "AI" doesn't make a startup an "AI startup," so to speak. For example, I picked one startup at random, Topological, which is "developing physics-based foundation models for CAD optimization." Just because the company uses AI doesn't make it an "AI startup." AI is rapidly proving itself to be an extremely useful and workflow-changing tool, and many companies now have adopted it somewhere in their product without suddenly becoming AI companies.
> Just because the company uses AI doesn't make it an "AI startup."
I think you need to expand a bit more this. I does sound to me that if you are using AI in the main product you are an AI startup.
It is similar with if you are offering a web version of your app you are an internet company. And if you are offering a mobile version you are a mobile company.
and a company can be more than one: An internet AI mobile company :)
If all the AI startups are using Anthropic and OpenAI, does this investment in AI startups continue to be the norm until the Anthropic and OpenAI investors see a return?
I'm predicting there will be a startup to focus on large scale forensic identification of archived samples of various things. Particularly items that may have been important enough to save in a freezer for 70 or 80 years. The refinement and availability of devices to measure microscopic amounts, and AI to process and sift through mundane results. From my experience with science, laboratory procedures before the 1980's were generally inconsistent and inadequate. Contamination was not uncommon, something biological investigators had to deal with when investigating early HIV cases. Wouldn't be surprised for an "empty the freezers" order from the FDA or CDC. Probably located underground in a BSL 4/5 facility in Arizona or Utah.
HN's AI hate-boner has always been a bit off-putting to me. This is a technology forum, and it's pretty much the biggest advance in recent technology that has potential implications for all of our lives. I definitely also get AI-fatigue, but it's no mystery why there's a preponderance of content about LLMs, diffusion models, self-driving cars, etc.
YC's goals are to manage risk and to make money, and new tech like this is almost certain to make someone a lot of money. All these YC companies are just different random initializations of potential ways that this new generation of AI can affect the world. It's a given that most startups of this breed will fizzle out with no impact, but I imagine that a few of them will actually change how something is done (and make a lot of money in the meantime).
52 comments
[ 3.9 ms ] story [ 35.2 ms ] threadOperative word here is "kids", and from what I can tell they're not even the smart ones, just the ones who are more geared toward being money and status-obsessed.
In particular, I've noticed the topic of AI is eating up corporate meetings, turning them into a kind of human slop.
Now if the market fit indeed exists then someone needs to rearchitect and rewrite the thing. But wasn’t it always the case? The POC always was a hacked together solution with no real viability to be used as the final product.
well that's the different. It is the final product, now. In many cases, you're selling the prototype itself, becuse that's what investors like seeing. User engagement be damned.
And people still seem to doubt that we're in a massive bubble.
Though I would love if the people who take care of the forest take more responsibility to shepherd the chaos.
In a federated society like ours, I doubt that's possible, for good or bad or extinction.
The stories I grew up with of Wozniak, Jobs, Larry and the hacker community does not resemble them anymore.
Everyone I know who raised money is a moron or narcissist.
YC has became like a resume builder.
And the genuine hackers I know of are wasting life away working on pointless projects.
Maybe it's just me not being able to not get out of the daily job schedule and taking the piss out.
It's total insanity; comparisons to tulip mania no longer even apply now that people are tossing around numbers like $500 billion when talking about their capex buildouts.
well HN is also burying the collapse of the country many of community resides in, so I guess that's off the table.
Heck, even the layoff news seems to have been normalized these days. There's this oddly sterile feeling here lately. As if we need to pretend we are still in good times, when clearly many of us are struggling.
The author calculates this by searching for the term "AI" in the name and description of each startup's YC page. But presence of the term "AI" doesn't make a startup an "AI startup," so to speak. For example, I picked one startup at random, Topological, which is "developing physics-based foundation models for CAD optimization." Just because the company uses AI doesn't make it an "AI startup." AI is rapidly proving itself to be an extremely useful and workflow-changing tool, and many companies now have adopted it somewhere in their product without suddenly becoming AI companies.
I think you need to expand a bit more this. I does sound to me that if you are using AI in the main product you are an AI startup.
It is similar with if you are offering a web version of your app you are an internet company. And if you are offering a mobile version you are a mobile company.
and a company can be more than one: An internet AI mobile company :)
If all the AI startups are using Anthropic and OpenAI, does this investment in AI startups continue to be the norm until the Anthropic and OpenAI investors see a return?
YC's goals are to manage risk and to make money, and new tech like this is almost certain to make someone a lot of money. All these YC companies are just different random initializations of potential ways that this new generation of AI can affect the world. It's a given that most startups of this breed will fizzle out with no impact, but I imagine that a few of them will actually change how something is done (and make a lot of money in the meantime).