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The Fall of Babylon is a warning to AI unicorns

wired.com

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Re: The Fall of Babylon is a warning to AI unicorns

#11

Post by woah »

I've found that VCs in the past have not ever really inquired much about a team's technical ability to get their project done, but just about the business and competitive aspects. They just assume that if you're talking to them, you know what you're doing. This probably made a lot sense in the 2010's, because most startups were pretty basic web or mobile apps, and 99% of teams are going to fail because of lack of adoption.

But now that the low hanging fruit has been plucked, and a new generation of hucksters has learned to take advantage of investor's lack of technical due diligence, they may need to start being more diligent.

Re: The Fall of Babylon is a warning to AI unicorns

#14

Post by kozikow »

vessenes wrote: post #8

I'd like a word for what is now the ritualized 'weirdo CEO anecdote' as a hook into why a company failed trope. Make no mistake: if Babylon were currently worth $20bn, Antigua standups and calling employees Babylonians would be the subject of business-school case studies. That said, this is a puff piece in Wired for so many reasons, not least of which is the question of whether or not app-based diagnosis and triage i…

If you go to any startup founders gathering, I typically wonder "I am usually the biggest weirdo in the room. But in this crowd I feel among the most normal people ".

And it's still true for the later stage startups as well, but indeed it's the most prominent at the seed stage. There's really just a lot of weirdos among startup founders.

Re: The Fall of Babylon is a warning to AI unicorns

#15

Post by lowbloodsugar »

vessenes wrote: post #8

I'd like a word for what is now the ritualized 'weirdo CEO anecdote' as a hook into why a company failed trope. Make no mistake: if Babylon were currently worth $20bn, Antigua standups and calling employees Babylonians would be the subject of business-school case studies. That said, this is a puff piece in Wired for so many reasons, not least of which is the question of whether or not app-based diagnosis and triage i…

I think it was IBM that demonstrated in the 80s that a decision tree out performed doctors at diagnosis.

Re: The Fall of Babylon is a warning to AI unicorns

#16

Post by cjbgkagh »

woah wrote: post #11

I've found that VCs in the past have not ever really inquired much about a team's technical ability to get their project done, but just about the business and competitive aspects. They just assume that if you're talking to them, you know what you're doing. This probably made a lot sense in the 2010's, because most startups were pretty basic web or mobile apps, and 99% of teams are going to fail because of lack of ado…

People tend to believe what they do is the important part and everything else is fungible. From my observations VCs tend to think getting funded is what matters and doing the technical work is just a function of spending that money on people.

Re: The Fall of Babylon is a warning to AI unicorns

#17

Post by rnk »

icyberbullyu wrote: post #7

There's a difference between a company that overextends itself and fails to live up to its own promises, and the current explosion of LLMs. Are there some snake-oily VC pitches that over-promise what LLMs can do? For sure. The big distinction is that LLMs already have a whole bunch of things they're great at while Babylon was never really able to perform even one of it's promised features very well.

The article suggests they really didn't make any ml based approach where they take in huge numbers of case mates to train a system, so I think it can't be used to say anything about that f that approach works.

Re: The Fall of Babylon is a warning to AI unicorns

#18

Post by gumballindie »

The fact that that company even made it so far is quite of a mystery to me. The tech stack, the complete lack of understanding of how things worked in the real world, the occasional illiterate product manager, and many many other things made me quickly understand that it will go belly up in a couple of years.

Fast forward to today and i was absolutely right.

Re: The Fall of Babylon is a warning to AI unicorns

#19

Post by Fomite »

woah wrote: post #11

I've found that VCs in the past have not ever really inquired much about a team's technical ability to get their project done, but just about the business and competitive aspects. They just assume that if you're talking to them, you know what you're doing. This probably made a lot sense in the 2010's, because most startups were pretty basic web or mobile apps, and 99% of teams are going to fail because of lack of ado…

There is also an assumption I have found, in both VCs and tech founders, to assume that subject matter experts can either be trivially replicated or hired downstream.
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