The sepia-tinted color scheme and the way LLMs overuse rounded corner tiles to the absolute death is part of it. Really what it comes down to, is that these LLMs have a design vocabulary of like 15 traits. None of the websites they generate have every single trait, but they are composed of some subset of 10 such traits, so it's still overwhelmingly obvious the moment you open the page, even though each one is slightly different. Humans might use 1~5 of those traits, but they'll also be mixed in with a much wider set of traits with more individuality to them.
Most AI-generated sites have coopted the Inter font, and usually they go for a dark colour scheme, the rounded tiles, a container representing a macOS-styled terminal with code, and, the thing that annoys me the most, divs that fade is as you scroll.
The site infers that 105 people are working at the two companies. What’s the denominator though?
After 20 or so years of YC, with multiple catches per year, and the insanely high failure rate of start ups, there must be a lot of former or floundering founders.
YC has tens of thousands of founders, more are probably at Google and Facebook than Anthropic and OpenAI. I’m not sure a sample of 105 founders shows… anything?
Effectively, industry roles are a tiered system which determines access to the cashflow. Going the YC founder route is a much faster and more efficient way to secure a high tier than climbing the SWE ladder.
This is a very hot take. Being a founder might confer you some career advantage [1] if you're one of the few to make it to series A and you grow a large team, but if you're like the vast majority of founders and never make it past seed (or realistically, to seed), your network is the alpha and omega of any subsequent job search. It's a bit like saying that being an NBA starter is a good way to get a job at Google.
Point being: don't start a startup if your goal is to get a job. Just get a job.
[1] Note that I'm not arguing about experience -- you can gain a lot of experience as a startup founder, but that experience is rarely directly marketable. Also, most startup founders are completely clueless when they start, so "a lot of experience" is a relative term.
I’ve seen many people climb the SWE ladder or build a YC company (having done both myself), and trust me the founder route is not the most efficient. You only believe this because you didn’t see the 2 failed startups and 10 year journey grinding 80h weeks almost running out of cash a few times.
This. I saw way more people build a few millions of retirement egg reliable in 10-20 years, by working on a boring good swe job and manage their investment a bit better. It's a much safer route.
Not that I disagree, but it doesn't refute the original argument. It could even support it, class protecting their own from more people figuring out there's no clothes on the emperor.
What part of "start a company" requires "grinding 80h weeks"?
Sounds to me as inability to delegate. Or implicit in the [acquire VC, aim for high growth] mindset as if that were the only path to success.
Companies can grow organically. With a positive cash-flow early on & reasonable work/life balance for founders & employees alike. Heck, there's even non-profits.
Yes they can, but unless you strike luck, they take many years, often decades of work to grow to a level where you can retire and enjoy the money.
With FIRE and similar concepts being pushed around everywhere, and the plight of the masses to keep their jobs and homes, I see where that desire for "make money fast" comes from. And from a game theory mindset - it's not wrong.
> Heck, there's even non-profits.
Non-profits often enough run on conditions bordering on (self-)exploitation.
I would say closer to a skilled black jack player. You can’t really change the odds in lottery but a good player can improve their chances in gambling.
> Going the YC founder route is a much faster and more efficient way to secure a high tier than climbing the SWE ladder.
YC has funded over 5,000 companies. If you assume 2-3 co-founders per company, that's more than 10,000 to 15,000 people. The vast majority of these founders aren't producing "generational wealth" outcomes. There's no glamorization of the companies that shut down, the ones that are scraping by, and the ones that get their founders a normal job, but those are the far more likely outcomes, especially in the more recent spray-and-pray batches.
This is not even close to true. I work at a big tech company and we reject applications from YC founders every week. Most of them are broke with failing companies and would love a cushy mid-level engineering or management job at a faang. People are biased by the success of the top few but there are tens of thousands who are going absolutely nowhere.
This analysis doesn't actually prove the title, as it only considers founders that have gone to OpenAI or Anthropic, however even if it did it isn't particularly suprising.
Sam Altman was the president of YC, so it's not particularly suprising that he has hired lots of talent from YC - these are people that are pre-qualified because he has seen their work before outside of a job interview (better the devil you know than the devil you don't).
This happens everywhere - person leaves company A to company B and then poaches the best talent from company A. Obviously in this case the talent are founders rather than staff members, but still.
I think it is more than just money. Having a hand in steering the ship that they think will change the world is pretty attractive. I came out of retirement just to watch the spectacle.
> I came out of retirement just to watch the spectacle.
While I certainly have no hand in steering the ship, agentic building brought me out of hibernation/depression. I am not young, nor rich. But I still had lots of product ideas, and now I am able to create, and test them. I am actually making sales now.
I got into this early at Sonnet 3.5 time, so I went through initial AI psychosis almost two years ago, but still today, I am more excited to wake up and work than I’ve ever been in my life.
I would do that in a heartbeat if I was in that situation.
Having a major leadership role at a big company is kind of a slog. Getting a chance to go back to a fast growing startup as an IC in a way that will only benefit their career (ex-Anthropic or ex-OpenAI makes your resume gold plated) is an easy choice. They can go back to any job they want after this.
I think this might only be shocking to some people who have forgotten that many people in these positions actually enjoy working on hard things and being surrounded by other like minded people. If you’ve only worked in po-dunk startups or other companies where leadership looks like a Game of Thrones style fiefdom building game it’s harder to imagine executives who are smart, capable, and enjoy working hard. It’s pretty common in Silicon Valley despite all of the sneering here.
Do you have examples? Because besides the other reasons mentioned about huge earning potential and being part of an important moment in history, the not-so-hidden secret is that any management position below C-level and above small team manager is usually extremely shitty. You are responsible for cat herding but rarely get to make the decisions in the first place. There are very few people IMO who desire or excel at "mid-high level" management positions (again, levels from director to anything below CTO) - I've seen people who enjoy and are good at leading small teams, but people at the director level are either there because it's lucrative or with the hope to get to CTO level ASAP, but otherwise it's one of the worst jobs in the "stress to moments of enjoyment" ratio.
So I could imagine tons of people in those roles who would love to be ICs again if there was also a chance at outsized wealth.
I think most of HN can't logically arrive at this conclusion because they don't exactly buy into the premise that
(1) (digital) AGI is a real concept, and will be achieved imminently
(2) AGI will be world (and possibly more) changing.
(3) Anthropic will be the one to do that, or at least capture a large part of it
If you buy into all of these, which I'm assuming a lot of SV does at this point, then its kind of a no brainer to go to OpenAI or Anthropic. And optics wise it seems like Anthropic is "winning" right now, so thats the lab with the talent flow.
If Anthropic actually creates a singleton, contributing to that is way more impactful than being CTO at some random company (though I may disagree that said singleton would treat equity holders any differently).
A successful unicorn founder once said a billion dollar company is just made up of a bunch of people who could each have started a $10m company by themselves.
I guess you can extrapolate that and say a trillion dollar company is made of a bunch of people who could have started a billion dollar company.
IMO we are in the era of “Final Companies” and the appeal of being a founder these days just isn’t great compared to the entrepreneurial boom of the 2010s and 2000s. The risk to reward ratio has never been worse.
If Product-Market fit for small companies take 3-4 years and AI can streamroll you by coming from behind, it makes sense to join the big boys rather than trying to finetune your creation in the hope of making something big.
Yup. Capitalism is a dark forest now. If you try to do anything really interesting, big players will take you out fast and take over the market.
Any business that relies on loudly marketing itself to wide audiences is at risk.
The only viable business path now is niche domains with limited visibility, B2B sales. No social media presence, no website, just quiet business deals being done in exchange for goods or services that is all under the radar of megacorps. In tech this is now virtually impossible as all useful services that could be provided have already been provided in some form by now.
There are no low or mid hanging fruit, everything is now very high up.
The question I have is why are these companies hiring these people and what does it say about their hiring practices and the amount of capital they’re poorly spending?
It’s exceedingly unlikely that any of the people who were working on YC startups previously have any real professional experience with any of the following: slurm, collectives, NUMA systems, RDMA, compilers, systems programming, general HPC performance estimation or measurement, CUDA or ROCM or any kind of GPGPU/accelerated computing. But that is the core business of both of these companies.
I’m not surprised that these companies are well funded and hiring a lot of people. I’m surprised that they chose to hire the people who were previously making “Uber but for dogs” gimmick apps and not just hollowing out the HPC specialists from national labs.
Not to try to grab any pity, but I have pretty deep experience in the GPU optimization space and have not been able to even get an engineering screen even with referrals.
I have a sinking feeling that AI models have gotten so good internally, and/or the GPU guys in their labs have found a good enough processes, that AI is doing the research behind the doors right now (it should be at least capable, at heuristic optimization problems that are benchmarkable), while the hard part of their business is the political game: convincing other companies to buy into AI, integrations, trying to gather more data where they can.
People ask the same question of why YC funds yet another Uber for dogs or a button on the Touch Bar that cost $10/mo to help join a meeting faster.
They invest in people more than ideas, so you’ve got, at least in many cases, people with good pedigree and skills (age adjusted anyway) building on stupid ideas, but that are eminently employable.
Obviously there are other factors, I’m not really trying to defend anything but just point out that there are legit reasons why someone impressive enough to get into YC would also be impressive enough to get a good job. It’s not like it’s random founders off the street.
This is what always stood out to me. Founders talk about the risks they take as their major legitimizing force. But what risk? They’re the types who can (mostly) skip an interview and go direct into a six figure job - because of the sales and founder networks they develop.
Startup founders with no risk doesnt sound like a recipe for great companies.
YC founders aren't the ones taking risks. The risk comes from pouring your life savings into a company and not getting into any incubators and never getting any VC funding and then having no savings and nothing to show for it.
There is an opportunity cost in working on a startup that may fail and leave you with nothing while your uni peers have been cashing juicy RSUs in FAANG-type companies so the actual "risk" could be "having 0 net worth while living in a high CoL area by the time they reach middle age".
The actual AI part of AI startups are at constant risk of commoditization. Where the companies will survive or fail is how they manage to attract customers and lock them into their offerings so they can't move away to the next competitor.
Someone with experience running a startup that has no moat probably does have some relevant experience in that area.
> The question I have is why are these companies hiring these people and what does it say about their hiring practices and the amount of capital they’re poorly spending?
The top % of YC founders are legitimately quite talented, and high agency/entrepreneurial talent goes a long way in these companies, even if its not in deep infra or research
Maybe they're sales hires. Hiring influential folks gets them aligned with your business. It means you get their Roladex and tap into their network. They can poach good people. They can convince folks to buy into Claude. If they were able to fund Uber for dogs they could probably pitch AI just fine.
How many times have you heard a C-level person say "I was just meeting with a bunch of my C-level friends and they're all talking about how AI is the future. We should look into this Claude thing"?
They are hiring HPC experts too. It’s a small community and you just don’t hear about it.
These 100 people repress a tiny fraction of the people who work at these labs. And many of the people that work at the labs are building on top of the models, not building the models themselves.
I'm on the list. I had real professional experience with HPC infra for comp bio, but that wasn't my role at Anthropic. There's a lot more to do at the company than manage infrastructure.
Tom Brown, an Anthropic co-founder who was also a YC founder, does lead compute. There were many years between his YC company and Anthropic, including time at OpenAI.
Others on the list went straight from their startup to OpenAI/Anthropic but to a team that fit them well. For example, Stefan went to a team at OpenAI where he works with startups, Lenny went to work on product (early ChatGPT), and Raza's YC startup was evals/observability for LLMs.
Whatever you think of AI for your own work, the fact that the entire economy is betting everything on it is really concerning. It’s not just the fact that it may not work well economically speaking and would end up with a market crash, or all the negative externalities from AI development, it’s also the opportunity cost we are paying. With so much human capital and resources dedicated to developing and running LLMs all the other business, research opportunities aren’t being explored and invested in
> Whatever you think of AI for your own work, the fact that the entire economy is betting everything on it is really concerning. It’s not just the fact that it may not work well economically speaking and would end up with a market crash, or all the negative externalities from AI development, it’s also the opportunity cost we are paying.
It's worth pointing out that "entire economy is betting everything on [AI]" you're talking about here is in the economy in the "numbers go up sense" (e.g. the stock market). It's not the economy in the providing for the general well being sense (e.g. gives people jobs so they can get housing and food).
Investment from VC and wealth funds is going pretty much only to AI projects. The massive capital expenditure we are currently seeing is going to AI infrastructure (HBM has pretty much no use case outside of LLMs and a few niche industries). It’s real money being allocated to a single bet
I also think this is a huge problem in government. A lot of government services could be digitized via simple CRUD API/UIs and instead politicians talk about AI...
I prefer that scenario to the one we had before where too many smart people were building out social networks and similar services trying to maximize ad impressions.
We are still dealing with the consequences…
I'm not even sure that I do prefer the AI train to the social media / ad train. I certainly would if the direction was "we're throwing ourselves blindly in AI so to gradually free citizens from the need to work", but right now it's "we're throwing ourselves blindly in AI so that we can sacrifice workers for higher corporate profits".
Not to mention how they will be used by terrorists and evil people to create biological weapons and other tools of mass slaughter. Or how it will be/is being used by criminals to target vulnerable people and businesses. Or how coupled with drone warfare the world becomes an unlivable hellhole in the next decade. But Marc Andreesan said only losers are against “tech accelerationiism” on twitter so here we are.
You can, right now, find out how to synthesize VX or sarin, or how to weaponize anthrax. You can and have been able to acquire this knowledge without the use of AI. Knowledge is not the obstacle to proliferation of biological and chemical weapons. It's hard to set up the infrastructure. See Aum Shinrikyo.
If you believe that AI is powerful enough to help the good people (however you define that), why isn't that also coupled with the belief that it is powerful enough to help the bad people (ditto)? Either the capability of this tech is completely overblown or it can help a wide swath of people including those with conflicting ideologies.
I absolutely believe that AI can be used by bad people in harmful ways. I don't think that's going to take the form of mass murder. I don't think knowledge is the missing component there.
Well, you’ve convinced me. Ai changes nothing, so then we should be terrified of the capital being poured into and the opportunity costs lost to the current thing(tm).
> too many smart people were building out social networks and similar services trying to maximize ad impressions.
Honest question: where should these very smart people work then in your opinion? Nearly all suitable-looking, "smarter" ideas that come to my mind will bring less revenue/profit in expectation than, for example, letting them maximize ad impressions.
I of course wish we lived in a "more intelligent" world where this is not the case. :-(
Call me crazy, but the smartest people I know have rejected maximizing their employer's revenue and profit as their goal. Or even their own company if they go that route. Find a niche, work it, enjoy it, and enjoy the rest of your life, too.
> where should these very smart people work then in your opinion?
Anywhere else. Ads are a net negative to society and provide no value. ANY activity outside of pushing ads is a better contribution to society as a whole.
Probably not on systems that rot democracy, freedom, and human expression. Companies like Google and Meta are net negative for humanity and the people that built these companies and continue to work for them are evil in their apathy towards the human cost of their salary.
The problem with this is people investing their time/expertise/money/energy into the common good and then have a small number of people ruining the benefit for their own ends, knocks the well-meaning out of the most positive people. The common good only works well when everyone wants the common good.
> Ah, then my second wish will be for everyone to want the common good.
People have very different, often contradictory opinions what the "common good" is.
I would even claim that this question is a special case of the millennia-old philosophical problem of defining what "good" actually means (i.e. defining ethics), which has resulted in myriads of different opinions:
You seem to have independently discovered the market failure commonly know as the Free-rider problem, for which there are many solutions, and which is not a dispositive preemptive argument against the establishment or management of common good(s).
> I remember lamenting all through the 2010s that all the high paying jobs were basically ad revenue supported.
That's never been true for financial services, many of which offer very high-paying jobs for high-frequency trading, hedge fund management, market operations, etc. There are many other industries with high value IT jobs that are not ad-supported.
Those jobs are much more niche, and require much more specialized knowledge. Google alone probably has more software employees than all of the high paying trading firms combined. It's a possible career path, sure, but its like comparing taxi driver opportunities with stretch limo driver opportunities IMO. Totally different scales.
AI is much more similar to classic cloud/infra with a lot more OSS than finance afaik, and probably already employs more devs than prop firms.
(I'm not counting big bank jobs because those are definitely not high paying)
I don't know, I feel like llms are the even worse replacement for social networks and maximized ad impressions. Now you don't even need a network or users to produce the addictive content and inject narrative that is so impactful on our brains and lives
I have more meaningful intellectual conversations with LLMs in a given day than in a month on social networks. And the LLMs never try to make me feel angry or stupid, they never ignore my arguments to go on their own soapbox, they almost never feed me misinformation (and never deliberately), and they've yet to tell me to my face that the purpose of their interactions with other people is not to convince or even communicate with those people but to perform for an audience (often one that doesn't feasibly exist).
Some caveats here: my view of social media is biased by the fact that jerks tend to pull me out of the woodwork- I get ragebaited, although I think I avoid the literal bait- so many of my interactions are with jerks. Looking around, I expect I'm not alone, but this may not be the default experience. And the LLMs certainly aren't perfect. They can hallucinate, they're often sycophantic, they're bad at judgment in a number of ways, probably others I'm missing.
Compared to actual people, they suck. Compared to social media as it exists today, they have orders of magnitude to fall before your comparison makes sense to me. And, at least for now, the LLMs are the ones getting better while the social networks are- AFAICT, universally- getting worse.
> I have more meaningful intellectual conversations with LLMs in a given day than in a month on social networks
Social media felt this way in the early days, too.
> they almost never feed me misinformation (and never deliberately)
This is dangerously untrue. LLMs will deliberately tell you the things you want to hear. They even "call you out" in exactly the ways that are most palatable to you. There is ample evidence that LLMs can be biased. The ability to broadly influence individual opinions, without even needing bot accounts on social media is exactly one of the reasons so many people who want power/money are flocking to control these LLMs.
> so many of my interactions are with jerks
This is one of the ways that the LLMs are "scarier" and more powerful than social networks. Real people are more likely to be obviously pushing agendas or otherwised easily dismissed.
> LLMs are the ones getting better
Getting better at what? The things you list are exactly the things that make LLMS subtly powerful and far more dangerous that social media. It's the reach and anonymity of social media without needing to control a feed algorithm, deal with content or people that doesn't fit your agenda, or produce fake content that does.
Did you mean to say you feel LLMs will be made into an even worse replacement? Otherwise not clear on your "early days" point.
The second half of your second paragraph is also forward looking- as I said, LLMs would have to get orders of magnitude worse for this to be a concern versus social media. I am surrounded by people- smart, informed people- who were convinced by instagram or TikTok or whatever that Mitch McConnell was brain dead a few weeks back, despite their being wrong about Trump in the same way several times already. We're in a thread mentioning "all the negative externalities from AI development", and I just have to hope they're not talking about water usage and electric prices and silent-but-deadly infrasound because everybody inexplicably believes that those are real, serious concerns. LLMs aren't doing this! This is the status quo!
The chatbot I'm interacting with does not tell me the things I want to hear. This is just not true. I don't know how to convince you otherwise.
>Getting better at what? The things you list are exactly the things that make LLMS subtly powerful and far more dangerous that social media
? At not hallucinating, not being sycophantic, making good quality judgments, making good strategic judgments. The things I listed. I don't know how this connects with the rest of this paragraph.
My "agenda" is believing true things and not believing false things. Sorry, but if someone is opposed to this for me, they are not a person I'd like to speak with.
This both destroys discourse, and centralizes the means of production into ~4 companies, with everyone else paying them an economic tax in order to be competitive.
None, but for actual communication by lay people, it cost a ton of money for audio and video calls by having to pay their phone service provider a lot, or calling cards, or whatever.
My guess is these AI companies are counting on the money to come from traditional SAAS style services only. This whole AI would be used to gather enough capital to rewrite most of the existing SAAS services under one umbrella, sort of super APP concept. The SAAS businesses doing the layoffs will soon realize that for this whole time they were just pouring their money into their own demise
I mean there are ads in certain chatGPT plans. There have already been multiple studies showing that regular use of genAI makes you less intelligent...
Additionally, it's pretty clear that the owners of this tech (dario, altman, etc..) do not have the best interest of "the people" at heart and only care about accumulating as much power and wealth possible. Not sure this future is much better...
"The smartest people" were not working on ads because building an advertising behemoth is not a smart thing to do.
When there's nothing good being invested in, "the smartest people" are simply underutilized. They do things that they think are good instead.
"The smartest people" have never sought maximum capital accumulation, and have not historically been driven by "highest wages" jobs.
The computer industry formed out of WW2 because a bunch of smart people ran into each other and did what they thought was really cool and had realized was suddenly possible. Von Neuman literally met one of the other guys and discussed computers as a theory at a train station and that meeting was influential on the future industry. They did not try to make billions of dollars. They had fairly average jobs that paid average. Often working for the government itself.
"The smartest people" did not work on targeting ads at people, and while some of them may have been involved with early transformer work, they certainly would be disillusioned with LLMs by now and would not be working at companies burning trillions on them.
> With so much human capital and resources dedicated to developing and running LLMs all the other business, research opportunities aren’t being explored and invested in
It probably feels this way if you only see headlines like this, but the LLM companies and even extending into their data center buildouts are still only a part of the economy. Investment dollars get spread around far and wide. Investors can’t even get allocations in these companies if they want to because they’re so oversubscribed.
This headline and website are a good example. If you think being a YC founder is rare and reserved for the truly elite, you may not have seen the size of YC batches lately. The number of YC founders is in the tens of thousands. Showing a list of 100 of them who joined a couple big tech companies doesn’t mean anything by itself.
It’s on the order of 1% of YC founders. YC startups don’t work out all the time and their employees and founders go work for other startups. Barely worth noting, if not for a website making it look like a big deal.
I fear another related possibility. With *so* much money on the table, if this new industry shrinks or collapses, it is hard to believe that it will collapse same way dot-com did, and instead investors will seek to protect their capital who knows at what cost. Given the influence they have it is not hard to imagine the impact on policies, etc. I fear that tax payers are not the winners in either case, whether this industry grows or not.
Researchers are increasingly using LLMs and other transformer based AI. My friend at a well known research institution asked Anthropic for access to their biology model (not sure if it's Mythos or some other sort of uncensored model) and recently made breakthroughs with it and other AI.
I know Ed Zitron is a dirty word on HN most days but having recently read some of his (highly editorialized) work… it seems like he’s right and the numbers just aren’t making sense.
Combine that with the fact that “good enough” is a real thing and cheap Chinese models are either there or close depending on your use case and it’s hard to see how this ends well.
Oh definitely. Personally, I think it will get to the point where we have local good enough models.
I’m just incredibly confused how these companies and investors don’t see the writing on the wall UNLESS the point is to just extract as much money as possible and not be left holding the bag.
Well I think it's possible some of these American AI companies could still end up being a good business. It's like Apple vs Android. Globally Android is the most common, but Apple still has a good business as a premium brand for people who are willing to pay more for higher quality. Anthropic and OpenAI could end up as the Apple of the AI industry.
I don’t really buy the opportunity cost argument. The bets we are placing look EV-positive to me.
The 90th percentile upside is way, way higher than is priced into the current stocks, the 10th percentile looks to me like 2000 where a bunch of investors loose their shirts and then for the next few decades new companies boom on all the infrastructure that was built.
The “failure mode” for this tech is that we don’t advance much beyond Sol/Fable and the existing models just get cheaper. If there is an AI bust in hindsight it likely will look like the doom bust did, which is a small blip on the decades-scale GDP curve.
Not only that but with so much human capital and resources devoted to AI’s explicit goal of replacing human labor there are two outcomes: 1) it succeeds and we have a serious social problem on our hands with large swaths of the population out or a job, or 2) it fails and we have a very large market and economic crisis as the AI bubble collapses.
Maybe there’s a partial success future that isn’t those two, but I’m not hopeful. And I’d take the Ai bubble collapse over AI BigTech achieving its goals
Opportunity cost arguments are more convincing when there’s some specific opportunity that you’re comparing against.
Otherwise, it’s sort of like saying that people will find a job doing something else, without any thought to what that something else would be. The jobs don’t create themselves.
It speaks to me of these fascinating Jungian shadows, where a thing/person has a front claiming to do their thing and in some non-obvious way they facilitate the opposite.
YC mints companies, founders, it disrupts.
Its shadow feeds your disruptive moves into SV's establishment tier, and selectively shuts down efforts, and moves people into its favored buckets of enterprise.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 81.8 ms ] threadI still can’t put a finger on it. I’ve seen real people use these fonts and layouts yet theirs look original.
Whoever finds an explanation for this solves AGI (/s)
So you're saying the site screams "Claude's style!" to you. Not too different from "I know a WordPress site when I see one".
Would be curious what some of the VP+ people are building inside Anthropic if they joined as engineers
After 20 or so years of YC, with multiple catches per year, and the insanely high failure rate of start ups, there must be a lot of former or floundering founders.
Also, this lists Emmett (co-founder Justin.tv and CEO Twitch) as an OpenAI employee, so don't put much faith in it.
Point being: don't start a startup if your goal is to get a job. Just get a job.
[1] Note that I'm not arguing about experience -- you can gain a lot of experience as a startup founder, but that experience is rarely directly marketable. Also, most startup founders are completely clueless when they start, so "a lot of experience" is a relative term.
Jensen Huang himself says nobody in their right mind should start a company https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2024/05/11/jensen-huang-i-didnt-kno...
Not that I disagree, but it doesn't refute the original argument. It could even support it, class protecting their own from more people figuring out there's no clothes on the emperor.
Sounds to me as inability to delegate. Or implicit in the [acquire VC, aim for high growth] mindset as if that were the only path to success.
Companies can grow organically. With a positive cash-flow early on & reasonable work/life balance for founders & employees alike. Heck, there's even non-profits.
Yes they can, but unless you strike luck, they take many years, often decades of work to grow to a level where you can retire and enjoy the money.
With FIRE and similar concepts being pushed around everywhere, and the plight of the masses to keep their jobs and homes, I see where that desire for "make money fast" comes from. And from a game theory mindset - it's not wrong.
> Heck, there's even non-profits.
Non-profits often enough run on conditions bordering on (self-)exploitation.
YC has funded over 5,000 companies. If you assume 2-3 co-founders per company, that's more than 10,000 to 15,000 people. The vast majority of these founders aren't producing "generational wealth" outcomes. There's no glamorization of the companies that shut down, the ones that are scraping by, and the ones that get their founders a normal job, but those are the far more likely outcomes, especially in the more recent spray-and-pray batches.
Sam Altman was the president of YC, so it's not particularly suprising that he has hired lots of talent from YC - these are people that are pre-qualified because he has seen their work before outside of a job interview (better the devil you know than the devil you don't).
This happens everywhere - person leaves company A to company B and then poaches the best talent from company A. Obviously in this case the talent are founders rather than staff members, but still.
105/13000 is a very small number to focus on. This data doesn't really mean anything.
While I certainly have no hand in steering the ship, agentic building brought me out of hibernation/depression. I am not young, nor rich. But I still had lots of product ideas, and now I am able to create, and test them. I am actually making sales now.
I got into this early at Sonnet 3.5 time, so I went through initial AI psychosis almost two years ago, but still today, I am more excited to wake up and work than I’ve ever been in my life.
Having a major leadership role at a big company is kind of a slog. Getting a chance to go back to a fast growing startup as an IC in a way that will only benefit their career (ex-Anthropic or ex-OpenAI makes your resume gold plated) is an easy choice. They can go back to any job they want after this.
I think this might only be shocking to some people who have forgotten that many people in these positions actually enjoy working on hard things and being surrounded by other like minded people. If you’ve only worked in po-dunk startups or other companies where leadership looks like a Game of Thrones style fiefdom building game it’s harder to imagine executives who are smart, capable, and enjoy working hard. It’s pretty common in Silicon Valley despite all of the sneering here.
So I could imagine tons of people in those roles who would love to be ICs again if there was also a chance at outsized wealth.
(1) (digital) AGI is a real concept, and will be achieved imminently
(2) AGI will be world (and possibly more) changing.
(3) Anthropic will be the one to do that, or at least capture a large part of it
If you buy into all of these, which I'm assuming a lot of SV does at this point, then its kind of a no brainer to go to OpenAI or Anthropic. And optics wise it seems like Anthropic is "winning" right now, so thats the lab with the talent flow.
If Anthropic actually creates a singleton, contributing to that is way more impactful than being CTO at some random company (though I may disagree that said singleton would treat equity holders any differently).
I guess you can extrapolate that and say a trillion dollar company is made of a bunch of people who could have started a billion dollar company.
Any business that relies on loudly marketing itself to wide audiences is at risk.
The only viable business path now is niche domains with limited visibility, B2B sales. No social media presence, no website, just quiet business deals being done in exchange for goods or services that is all under the radar of megacorps. In tech this is now virtually impossible as all useful services that could be provided have already been provided in some form by now.
There are no low or mid hanging fruit, everything is now very high up.
Where are YC founders now who went to openai and anthropic ? OpenAI and Anthropic, mostly
It’s exceedingly unlikely that any of the people who were working on YC startups previously have any real professional experience with any of the following: slurm, collectives, NUMA systems, RDMA, compilers, systems programming, general HPC performance estimation or measurement, CUDA or ROCM or any kind of GPGPU/accelerated computing. But that is the core business of both of these companies.
I’m not surprised that these companies are well funded and hiring a lot of people. I’m surprised that they chose to hire the people who were previously making “Uber but for dogs” gimmick apps and not just hollowing out the HPC specialists from national labs.
They invest in people more than ideas, so you’ve got, at least in many cases, people with good pedigree and skills (age adjusted anyway) building on stupid ideas, but that are eminently employable.
Obviously there are other factors, I’m not really trying to defend anything but just point out that there are legit reasons why someone impressive enough to get into YC would also be impressive enough to get a good job. It’s not like it’s random founders off the street.
This is what always stood out to me. Founders talk about the risks they take as their major legitimizing force. But what risk? They’re the types who can (mostly) skip an interview and go direct into a six figure job - because of the sales and founder networks they develop.
Startup founders with no risk doesnt sound like a recipe for great companies.
Someone with experience running a startup that has no moat probably does have some relevant experience in that area.
They are hiring for sales.
Why spend to resources to invent AGI when you can just gaslight the whole world by telling everyone that LLMs are already better than people?
I figure most of these are working on products, rather that deep frontier research.
How many times have you heard a C-level person say "I was just meeting with a bunch of my C-level friends and they're all talking about how AI is the future. We should look into this Claude thing"?
These 100 people repress a tiny fraction of the people who work at these labs. And many of the people that work at the labs are building on top of the models, not building the models themselves.
Tom Brown, an Anthropic co-founder who was also a YC founder, does lead compute. There were many years between his YC company and Anthropic, including time at OpenAI.
Others on the list went straight from their startup to OpenAI/Anthropic but to a team that fit them well. For example, Stefan went to a team at OpenAI where he works with startups, Lenny went to work on product (early ChatGPT), and Raza's YC startup was evals/observability for LLMs.
It's worth pointing out that "entire economy is betting everything on [AI]" you're talking about here is in the economy in the "numbers go up sense" (e.g. the stock market). It's not the economy in the providing for the general well being sense (e.g. gives people jobs so they can get housing and food).
I wasted like a half hour trying to find decent sources but I guess I don't know how to search the internet anymore.
I think we're betting more than the stock market on AI, even if I can't say for sure how much.
The real economy didn't change at all, but confidence was gone and so was lending.
We've had text to speech for a while for example but everything is now AI. Does it use any AI features? Not at all ...
Edit: all that and spellcheck still sucks too.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/10/us/politics/ai-terrorism-...
During the AI boom: Attention is all you need
Honest question: where should these very smart people work then in your opinion? Nearly all suitable-looking, "smarter" ideas that come to my mind will bring less revenue/profit in expectation than, for example, letting them maximize ad impressions.
I of course wish we lived in a "more intelligent" world where this is not the case. :-(
Call me crazy, but the smartest people I know have rejected maximizing their employer's revenue and profit as their goal. Or even their own company if they go that route. Find a niche, work it, enjoy it, and enjoy the rest of your life, too.
Anywhere else. Ads are a net negative to society and provide no value. ANY activity outside of pushing ads is a better contribution to society as a whole.
People have very different, often contradictory opinions what the "common good" is.
I would even claim that this question is a special case of the millennia-old philosophical problem of defining what "good" actually means (i.e. defining ethics), which has resulted in myriads of different opinions:
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outline_of_ethics
Now its AI.
Maybe AI doesn't materialize the way we want, but I'll take that bet over business as usual before every time.
That's never been true for financial services, many of which offer very high-paying jobs for high-frequency trading, hedge fund management, market operations, etc. There are many other industries with high value IT jobs that are not ad-supported.
(Edit: typo)
AI is much more similar to classic cloud/infra with a lot more OSS than finance afaik, and probably already employs more devs than prop firms.
(I'm not counting big bank jobs because those are definitely not high paying)
Seems like an even bigger opportunity to inject ads, influence thought, and scrape user information.
Whereas ads are almost exclusively negative.
Some caveats here: my view of social media is biased by the fact that jerks tend to pull me out of the woodwork- I get ragebaited, although I think I avoid the literal bait- so many of my interactions are with jerks. Looking around, I expect I'm not alone, but this may not be the default experience. And the LLMs certainly aren't perfect. They can hallucinate, they're often sycophantic, they're bad at judgment in a number of ways, probably others I'm missing.
Compared to actual people, they suck. Compared to social media as it exists today, they have orders of magnitude to fall before your comparison makes sense to me. And, at least for now, the LLMs are the ones getting better while the social networks are- AFAICT, universally- getting worse.
Social media felt this way in the early days, too.
> they almost never feed me misinformation (and never deliberately)
This is dangerously untrue. LLMs will deliberately tell you the things you want to hear. They even "call you out" in exactly the ways that are most palatable to you. There is ample evidence that LLMs can be biased. The ability to broadly influence individual opinions, without even needing bot accounts on social media is exactly one of the reasons so many people who want power/money are flocking to control these LLMs.
> so many of my interactions are with jerks
This is one of the ways that the LLMs are "scarier" and more powerful than social networks. Real people are more likely to be obviously pushing agendas or otherwised easily dismissed.
> LLMs are the ones getting better
Getting better at what? The things you list are exactly the things that make LLMS subtly powerful and far more dangerous that social media. It's the reach and anonymity of social media without needing to control a feed algorithm, deal with content or people that doesn't fit your agenda, or produce fake content that does.
The second half of your second paragraph is also forward looking- as I said, LLMs would have to get orders of magnitude worse for this to be a concern versus social media. I am surrounded by people- smart, informed people- who were convinced by instagram or TikTok or whatever that Mitch McConnell was brain dead a few weeks back, despite their being wrong about Trump in the same way several times already. We're in a thread mentioning "all the negative externalities from AI development", and I just have to hope they're not talking about water usage and electric prices and silent-but-deadly infrasound because everybody inexplicably believes that those are real, serious concerns. LLMs aren't doing this! This is the status quo!
The chatbot I'm interacting with does not tell me the things I want to hear. This is just not true. I don't know how to convince you otherwise.
>Getting better at what? The things you list are exactly the things that make LLMS subtly powerful and far more dangerous that social media
? At not hallucinating, not being sycophantic, making good quality judgments, making good strategic judgments. The things I listed. I don't know how this connects with the rest of this paragraph.
My "agenda" is believing true things and not believing false things. Sorry, but if someone is opposed to this for me, they are not a person I'd like to speak with.
Not yet.
I expect once the initial exploration and development is over, all those sharp minds will turn to monetization and everything else that follow.
This both destroys discourse, and centralizes the means of production into ~4 companies, with everyone else paying them an economic tax in order to be competitive.
Facebook Marketplace also provides me with quite a bit utility.
Additionally, it's pretty clear that the owners of this tech (dario, altman, etc..) do not have the best interest of "the people" at heart and only care about accumulating as much power and wealth possible. Not sure this future is much better...
When there's nothing good being invested in, "the smartest people" are simply underutilized. They do things that they think are good instead.
"The smartest people" have never sought maximum capital accumulation, and have not historically been driven by "highest wages" jobs.
The computer industry formed out of WW2 because a bunch of smart people ran into each other and did what they thought was really cool and had realized was suddenly possible. Von Neuman literally met one of the other guys and discussed computers as a theory at a train station and that meeting was influential on the future industry. They did not try to make billions of dollars. They had fairly average jobs that paid average. Often working for the government itself.
"The smartest people" did not work on targeting ads at people, and while some of them may have been involved with early transformer work, they certainly would be disillusioned with LLMs by now and would not be working at companies burning trillions on them.
It probably feels this way if you only see headlines like this, but the LLM companies and even extending into their data center buildouts are still only a part of the economy. Investment dollars get spread around far and wide. Investors can’t even get allocations in these companies if they want to because they’re so oversubscribed.
This headline and website are a good example. If you think being a YC founder is rare and reserved for the truly elite, you may not have seen the size of YC batches lately. The number of YC founders is in the tens of thousands. Showing a list of 100 of them who joined a couple big tech companies doesn’t mean anything by itself.
It’s on the order of 1% of YC founders. YC startups don’t work out all the time and their employees and founders go work for other startups. Barely worth noting, if not for a website making it look like a big deal.
AI is the one and only possibility for saving millions (likely billions) of lives from “old age”, cancers, Alzheimer’s, ALS… you name it.
It’s a big bet. The alternative is we all die anyway: sadly after a gradual decline at best or horribly after long undignified suffering at worst.
I’ll take the economic risk.
Combine that with the fact that “good enough” is a real thing and cheap Chinese models are either there or close depending on your use case and it’s hard to see how this ends well.
I’m just incredibly confused how these companies and investors don’t see the writing on the wall UNLESS the point is to just extract as much money as possible and not be left holding the bag.
the end goal isnt to serve a chatbot to replace google or a coding agent to build crud
The 90th percentile upside is way, way higher than is priced into the current stocks, the 10th percentile looks to me like 2000 where a bunch of investors loose their shirts and then for the next few decades new companies boom on all the infrastructure that was built.
The “failure mode” for this tech is that we don’t advance much beyond Sol/Fable and the existing models just get cheaper. If there is an AI bust in hindsight it likely will look like the doom bust did, which is a small blip on the decades-scale GDP curve.
Maybe there’s a partial success future that isn’t those two, but I’m not hopeful. And I’d take the Ai bubble collapse over AI BigTech achieving its goals
That's not going to happen.
and would end up with a market crash
That might. Great, it'll give the rest of us a chance to buy in.
Otherwise, it’s sort of like saying that people will find a job doing something else, without any thought to what that something else would be. The jobs don’t create themselves.
This is untrue. Spend is about 2% of GDP.
SELECT * FROM yc_founders WHERE employer IN ('OpenAI', 'Anthropic');
If there are 7k founders [1], the graph only shows 1.5% of the people from YC.
[1]: https://www.ycombinator.com/investors
YC mints companies, founders, it disrupts.
Its shadow feeds your disruptive moves into SV's establishment tier, and selectively shuts down efforts, and moves people into its favored buckets of enterprise.