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The AI feeding frenzy in VC land is reminiscent of the early days of the public access internet aka the .com boom. That corrected itself sharply but eventually most of those .com boom dreams came out, just a bit later and lots of VCs lost lots of money because they got the timing wrong. Every time there is a major shift in tech you see this pattern repeat but I don't recall seeing it on that scale again since ~2000,…
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May I ask what your profit margins are? Why can't someone just use ChatGPT instead?
Around 85% profit. It wouldn't be possible to get the same result from ChatGPT without a ton of prompt engineering and manually retrieving data and inserting that into your prompts. Plus, we don't just do a single API call and call it a day. A single button press in our app can set off a process which calls the OpenAI API over a dozen times plus retrieves data from several other APIs to help with the prompting
I develop a few interesting features using OpenAI in an existing product. After a wow-effects of the first days, few users are still using it. If I talk to users they say features are awesome but they are not actually using it. Really funny. Do you have experience of OpenAI API-based product that has high retention ?
Yes I developed a SaaS and the functionality is solely based on output from OpenAI. We have several thousand paying users already with ARR above $1.5M
Isn’t this the same logic the crypto bulls said during their mania?
The difference is crypto is useless and AI is useful. That’s a pretty important difference.
Is that why Stripe, TicketMaster, Moneygram, Checkout.com, TransferGo, VISA, etc and many other companies continue to use it?
> That’s a pretty important difference.
Nope. The important difference is that crypto has energy efficient alternative methods of consensus available today such as proof-of-stake, byzantine fault tolerance (BFT), etc and even a former PoW blockchain (Ethereum) cut their emissions by 99.99% [0] by switching to a proof-of-stake consensus method. For crypto it is possible to switch to greener methods.
AI (Deep Learning) continues to destroy the planet since it has no efficient alternative methods available for training, fine-tuning and inference. This means their methods waste tons of resources, water and electricity. [1] [2]
It is a serious issue in the field after decades of its existence all to produce unexplainable black-box AI models which cannot reason and have to be retrained, fine-tuned again once it gets confused by a single pixel or regurgitates nonsense output.
The AI hype is another grift that the VCs are taking advantage of just like they did with thousands of crypto companies. The reality is, 90% of these AI / crypto companies will fail and the remaining 10% will still be around that are useful.
[0] https://consensys.net/blog/press-release/ethereum-blockchain...
[1] https://gizmodo.com/chatgpt-ai-water-185000-gallons-training...
[2] https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/chatgpt-data-centre-water...
Big mistake imo to hop on trendy grifts. Please focus on the founders as before.
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The difference is crypto is useless and AI is useful. That’s a pretty important difference.
> The difference is crypto is useless and AI is useful. Is that why Stripe, TicketMaster, Moneygram, Checkout.com, TransferGo, VISA, etc and many other companies continue to use it? > That’s a pretty important difference. Nope. The important difference is that crypto has energy efficient alternative methods of consensus available today such as proof-of-stake, byzantine fault tolerance (BFT), etc and even a former PoW…
“Use” is inaccurate. Accept and immediately sell. It persists in being a pot of unsophisticated money, so yes, it will be accepted.
I develop a few interesting features using OpenAI in an existing product. After a wow-effects of the first days, few users are still using it. If I talk to users they say features are awesome but they are not actually using it. Really funny. Do you have experience of OpenAI API-based product that has high retention ?
Yes I developed a SaaS and the functionality is solely based on output from OpenAI. We have several thousand paying users already with ARR above $1.5M
Is it https://prompthero.com/ ?
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> The difference is crypto is useless and AI is useful. Is that why Stripe, TicketMaster, Moneygram, Checkout.com, TransferGo, VISA, etc and many other companies continue to use it? > That’s a pretty important difference. Nope. The important difference is that crypto has energy efficient alternative methods of consensus available today such as proof-of-stake, byzantine fault tolerance (BFT), etc and even a former PoW…
> Is that why Stripe, TicketMaster, Moneygram, Checkout.com, TransferGo, VISA, etc and many other companies continue to use it? “Use” is inaccurate. Accept and immediately sell. It persists in being a pot of unsophisticated money, so yes, it will be accepted.
Nope. Inaccurate to you. They would NOT use it if it was "useless".
The truth is, they continue to use crypto in their services.
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> Is that why Stripe, TicketMaster, Moneygram, Checkout.com, TransferGo, VISA, etc and many other companies continue to use it? “Use” is inaccurate. Accept and immediately sell. It persists in being a pot of unsophisticated money, so yes, it will be accepted.
> “Use” is inaccurate. Nope. Inaccurate to you . They would NOT use it if it was "useless" . The truth is, they continue to use crypto in their services.
Of course they would. It’s useless, not worthless. If it were useful they’d actually use it.
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They will still do that, but within the context of having an application that takes advantage of recent developments in AI. Whether that's smart or not is an open question, time will tell. But, given that YC is a seed level investor (with some follow on capacity) it makes sense because the 'downstream' VCs are handing out money like candy to start-ups that can plausibly claim to be AI startups. The idea is that some…
When you say handing out money like candy, it makes me think I should try to apply to something. I am spending most of my time doing low-paying contracts that integrate generative AI for other companies or startups. And then I use that money to build out my own project for a few weeks before I run out of money and have to get another contract. If it's actually easy to get money? How would I find a VC who would be imp…