Ask HN: Why aren't companies hoarding AI talent?
Nothing is really coming out of the layoffs - all the money is pooling in maybe 10 companies, and most don’t stand to gain anything from this - maybe slightly better candidate pool when they do hire.
For the most part, the AI layoff trend has ran its course and isn’t innovative. Nothing big will come out of it - if all AI can do is lay off but can’t make anything.
My question is this: Why is seemingly nobody taking advantage of AI?
Nobody wants to be the next Netflix?
Nobody wants to be the next Blizzard or Pixar?
Nobody wants to be the next Steve Jobs or Walt Disney?
Nobody with money wants to hire a small team of experts to obliterate Google Search as it leaves the opportunity wide open? Google just switched to AI abandoning their old product leaving it wide open for disruption - nobody wants it? Huge ad business there.
The next FAANG can’t be born out of layoffs and unproductive speculation but from making something new that everyone uses.
Why aren’t companies hiring like crazy - putting AI to direct use to disrupt just about every vertical? Put people in seats using this stuff to make WAY better stuff than exists now.
Everyone is just sitting on their hands wondering what Amazon or whoever will do next.
They aren’t doing anything - and never will again. If you’re one of the very few benefiting from the layoff trend sure good for you - most of us just aren’t! My question is why isn’t everyone else jumping at this massive disruptive opportunity?
If I had a $1 billion fund I would be throwing it at AI startups doing product-focused work.
You have tech talent now operating at their best and brightest levels ever, disruption just WAITING in the form of AI, office space vacant as far as the eye can see, and nobody’s doing anything. Nobody wants to. Nobody apparently sees this gold mine of opportunity to be the new leader in just about any category.
Why?
36 comments
[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 62.6 ms ] thread1) LLMs just aren't good enough
2) Making a billion dollar company is too expensive. Netflix lost money for years. Amazon lost money for years. Tesla lost money for a decade. Spotify took 18 years to become profitable. The AI companies are losing billions of dollars each month.
And 2 - yeah I really mean "product focused" companies, not these YC AI wrapper replicas you see everywhere (no offense to YC but hey, they know what they are doing lol). Those companies must be only there to drive usage to the model providers they wrap.
The disruptive potential is not limited to those who use AI, or those who offer it in their product to end users. The potential is here regardless. Because of the fact workers use it in their workflows - in Adobe software, in their IDE, and so-on, it's effectively here.
The company does not need to do anything special - just hire.
Why build a new Google when the potential Google customers now just get their results from LLMs instead of SERPs?
How to be the next Jobs when there's no actual new product, just essentially an assistant tool?
How to create the next Disney, Netflix, Blizzard or Pixar when LLM's are still not good enough to produce quality content and many people are also starting to despise AI generated content? Art is still an intrinsic Human thing, even if LLMs are able to produce it.
So, although these LLMs are super amazing and definitely revolutionary, this whole AI/AGI hype is still a bit on bubble territory imho so I'm not really sure we'll see what you're hinting at with this generation of LLMs.
Also, wasn't AI supposed to be the last product we'd ever need to invent and then it's utopia and singing kumbaya for all eternity?
We won't need new companies, big personalities or heroes once Skynet/Hal9000/GLaDOS/Agent Smith/etc are in charge :)
And we do see that (Proton, DuckDuckGo, even iCloud is becoming very Google-like in recent years).
As for "AI is not good enough" I remain unconvinced - I've seen production quality work, granted not 1-shot from a model but produced by a talented artist.
I never said AGI, (I believe that's only a marketing term from OpenAI). The other stuff at the end of your comment has nothing to do with what I'm talking about here! I really am focused on the low cost of code, video, and other media compared to the massive opportunity to serve content to people worldwide and how much money and disruptive potential is being left on table.
People don't just jump social networks because a new one exist, there has to be a compelling reason to migrate over to it. And for a lot of people, there needs to be a sufficient number of people (and probably existing friends) already using the app for them to expend the effort to start using it.
It's not like there haven't been other attempts at competitors for these over the years, and you haven't heard about them probably because none of them ever got any traction. And that takes more than just building software.
Like DuckDuckGo has been competing with Google search for years (it first came out back in 2008, it looks like), and likely is way better developed than anything someone will crank out with A.I. in a short period of time. And it still has a tiny fraction of Google's marketshare.
I'm not saying there won't eventually be other competitors to these, but it'll take more than just whipping up an MVP with A.I. in a few weeks.
I'm saying across the board there is massive disruptive potential because of AI (no matter what you are building) that seemingly no major corporate player is taking advantage of.
If Google goes all-in on AI, then yes the opportunity is a "non-AI" one (taking the market they left behind when they abandoned conventional search and advertising models), and to your point those like DuckDuckGo, I might even add Proton, are doing just that - going after that market Google built an empire on.
> whipping up an MVP
That's one way to think of it. Or you can take a purely mathematical and finance perspective:
Code and pixels are cheaper than they have ever been, and yet still have the same or greater earning potential than before. Replace [code and pixels] with real estate, gold, or anything else and the economics would be simple: BUY. It's cheap - buy. Hoard.
For some reason, very few finance people are seeing it that way. I would bet that even a company like DuckDuckGo (in all their benevolence /s) are still benefitting greatly from cheap code and cheap pixels. It can't be avoided - it has pervaded the industry and is providing value whether or not you believe in it or partake.
Literally (not literally) RAINING pick axes.
But here's another thought: Code and pixels are still cheaper than ever before.
Another one: The earning potential from code and pixels is the same or greater than it was before AI.
Put it together. If it was real estate where land was cheap but selling at the same rate as before, then investors would be all over it.
Innovation is something you have to believe in - I get that - but from a purely finance perspective why is there not a massive movement to obtain swaths of low cost, high potential IP? Data, engagement, emails and cards on file. Series A-F growth, greater fools and IPOs - either way it's massively generative of productive wealth, and you'll get a few game changers here and there.
I fail to see why it's not a great opportunity for, say, a $1B+ fund in just about any category.
Here is an example of software that can scale with a single person assuming AI can write software: a web-based alternative to Photoshop built on wasm. Figma is analogous to that and it's worth $10Bn.
I agree with you that it doesn't replace a person, but it certainly makes code a lot cheaper.
If code is cheaper than ever, and the earning potential is the same. Why aren't investors all over it?
The playing field is now completely level with any and all comers who want to attack Adobe. You now not only have one huge competitor, but the potential for hundreds of other competitors.
How are you going to convince someone that your execution is the one that's going to displace Adobe and steal market share? Why would I invest in your variant rather than one of your competitors?
The logical conclusion of this is that even if Adobe released its source and the theoretical price drops to zero, you're finding yourself at best in the same situation as Linux distro companies in 1999.
Assuming perfect LLM code generation (a huge assumption that is nowhere close to reality), a company built on this is going to replay the same open source dynamics, with additional steps/expense.
"How Photopea Quietly Beat Adobe into a $2.8M Business" – https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/team-budget-problem-how-photo...
I wouldn't bet against him yet.
The reality is, Photopea is unique because no one with LLMs can easily produce something similar. Also Photopea does not compare to Adobe offering similar to how Figma does. Not even close.
I thought that was the whole idea?
Lemon market - maybe - but it remains to be seen IMO. The market seems almost entirely unrealized. There are only a few major AI companies in the media, and it seems like innovation is largely directionless or stalled.
I haven't really seen any "startup boom" for AI yet. It's all the same kind of AI wrapper startup still. The most innovative thing in San Francisco right now is AI complaince.... Compliance... I'll leave you with that.
Man I’m sick of Faceboogle!
Isn’t anyone else yearning for some je ne sais quoi
The only new things or features I’ve really seen are related to AI. So it’s just AI adding AI to stuff. I’m still waiting for this big renaissance of innovation.
That is the point!
Before AI, your favorite B2B SaaS codebase was never poetry. It always sucked! Now it's cheap and sucks.
Seems like basic math. If it became suddenly trivial to build anything else but the valuation was the same investors would be all over it.
If the cost to build drops, it stands to reason that the valuation drops as well, unless they can actually get traction in the market.
I’m not sure if you’ve watch the show Shark Tank, but Kevin brings this idea up a lot. If they have a generic product and no protection around it, it can be easier and cheaper to just spin up a clone with their own team than to take on the risk of an investment.
The market seems flooded with slop startups. I’ve seen many where people use AI to make a site to pitch the idea, but there isn’t even a product. It’s all smoke and mirrors. The industry is full of opportunistic charlatans right now. A good crash is needed to clear the field before real growth can happen.
Those who are building products with AI, probably aren’t advertising the fact. I’ve seen some stuff in the App Store tho I assume nothing of at first, then read the description and it was clearly written by AI, which makes me assume the whole thing was vibe coded. The stuff is out there, but it’s all so small and spread out, that all noise and no signal.
I could be way off, but that’s my read on the situation.
Big dck money. Big dck ROI -- The next great Batman film, a World of Warcraft 2, autonomous robots on the moon, one of those humanoid robots doing my laundry!
The cost to build has dropped considerably, yes, the barrier to entry has lowered, but the bar is raised and valuations have skyrocketed and set records with trillion+ dollar IPOs too. More capital flowing into individual companies than ever before, albeit a small set of companies.
The potential has gone up, 10-fold, 100-fold.
To me, the market is saturated with pickaxe vendors looking for scrap metal miners, that is, model wrappers hoping to be the next wave of SaaS serving a largely misunderstood - disenfranchised (laid off from their jobs, no hope for the future) - customer base (gen y/z developers) that isn't meeting overall sales expectations. Nobody likes AI. Nobody needs it. They're also being told "Hey, don't be developers anymore". It's very confusing messaging!
So you got Google accidentally dominating most of it anyway just by being in everyone's house and pocket. Deer in headlights they're like "Who me?" They weren't even trying. Gemini surprises everyone. Surpasses everyone. Haha. Don't worry, they're doing a lot worse now that they are trying.
I digress, beyond "AI", what is needed is clearly... <AlexCarp>The Application Layer</AlexCarp>
> Those who are building products with AI, probably aren’t advertising the fact.
Perfectly fine - and gets to the spirit of what I'm talking about. Forget AI, focus on the product (and customer).
Not vibe coded...
But vibe... moated...
Vibe... goated...
If you will
The last startup boom began in the mid-2000's (around when Y Combinator began, you can read all about it on Paul's blog), when cloud computing was still new and lowered the cost of creating online businesses. It was also in the wake of the tech bust - a lot of tech employees became unemployed.
My view is, when the layoffs complete, the dust settles and you have millions of tech workers who are willing to accept only equity, with a new technology they can rent for $200 a month from DeepSeek or Anthropic or OpenAI, we may see the green shoots of a new wave of disruption.
If models have peaked, have pure AI companies also peaked? How else can they differentiate?
When I said "a $1B fund should throw money at AI startups" I really just mean any startup (with a viable business model ofc don't get carried away!).
The AI part is now automatic, every company is an AI company now.
Flagged, downvoted, now it’s banned. Anyone know why? @dang
What does work is a short, polite, to the point email to hn@ycombinator.com that identifies this submission, your other account, and your question.
Was it actually banned? I see @tomhow made a comment but didn't state that the account was banned: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48774378
Did you follow that up and read the guidelines?
> Makes me wonder if the mods here bit the other kids, and shit their pants until they were 15.
It's clutter like this that attracts downvotes and flags.
How many unique users are left on this site? It seems like the same few of you: Simon, Dang, Tom, you, and a handful of others and then like 4 million sock puppets that are ran by you guys lol
You'd be more interesting if you were less wildly wrong <shrug>. Still, if Discord's your thing you should embrace that.
Oh you wish I was more like you?
Hard pass! I'm good bro.
Name 1 impressive thing you've ever done
Exactly
A shit filled pop tart.
An empty nutsack!
A useless bag of piss.
But you don't see me complaining!
You crooked boner
Literally nobody cares whether or not you of all retards approve of them.
A lot of you guys on here have scarily inflated egos, you think people care about you in the slightest or your tiniest preferences - but nobody does.
You haven't done anything, you're a nobody.