31–40 of 46 posts
Tech pump & dump in a nutshell --> find trend/exciting tech, make it user friendly/tailor it to niche, sell. It adds value -- OpenAI isn't going to bother making special AI chatbots for car dealerships or whatever. These companies aren't going to hire coders since that's not their main line of businesses. So someone has to come in and middleman. Maybe calling it a pump & dump is unfair, but there's no denying that th…
I think the current LLM trend is way overhyped. The thing these companies are doing, crucially, is extracting money from technologically unsophisticated companies and funnelling it into VC pockets. Silicon Valley bubbles are frequently incestuous. You make an HR platform and you sell it to other tech companies. You do sales analytics for tech companies. You make a bank that caters to only tech companies. The problem…
Yeah, there is a kind of hysteria regarding AI and it looks like traditional business fear that if they don't use it somehow they will perish. But there are so many traps here, such as your customers not wanting interaction with your "AI chatbots", the issues of quality (vide the Sports Illustrated scandal), and the question of whether your niche needs any "AI" at all.
I think wrappers are fine if they add meaningful value. It does seem that mostly you’re getting charged for a little prompt engineering and a UI skin. I’d personally like to see a good wrapper for autonomous LLM coding. Nothing we have yet quite fits the bill, IMO.
No one was interested in ML until a stochastic parrot took internet by storm by mostly taking real facts and producing fiction.
Producthunt has been filled with low effort airtable sheets that they call a ‘product’. A lot of things are greatly inflated over there.
This is the result of the last decade or so where SAAS has become very lucrative and barrier to entry is almost nil with some many tools to quickly build something. AI is just more fuel on that existing fire. Everyone and their mothers are building a "SAAS" these days. Interesting, now I see all these gurus either selling courses on starting SAAS or selling "boilerplates". AI is great but this is a side effect of it.…
The root problem is that there is no good way to bill a modest surcharge on top of OpenAI etc. usage costs. GPT store monetization (if they ever get around to it) would be a partial solution. But anything that depends heavily on LLM's, but provides a UI layer or integrations is just stuck with a complex and expensive subscription or credits system - even if the vendor wants to give away a free service, they can't jus…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The hype cycle repeats again this time with AI. There will be a lot of noise and fury (after blockchain, nocode, big data, cloud etc etc). It's often literally the same people who were riding the last hype cycle, too. The guys behind the Rabbit R1 AI wearable were NFT metaverse grifters before they became AI grifters, for example. All the annoying tech influencers who wanted you to subscribe to their blockchain new…
Who are some noticeable examples?
No one was interested in ML until a stochastic parrot took internet by storm by mostly taking real facts and producing fiction.
The hype cycle repeats again this time with AI. There will be a lot of noise and fury (after blockchain, nocode, big data, cloud etc etc). The good part is that consumers will vote with their attention and wallets. Only the products that bring real value based on non trivial insights into specific markets will survive. The rest will slowly die off and be forgotten. Also a lot of the VC money just ends up going back t…
> Only the products that bring real value based on non trivial insights into specific markets will survive. True, but this can easily take decades - vide Uber.
A company that raises millions or billions? With tech, you can just fire everyone, shut down almost every server, and still keep running. Maybe that's what a lot of them are doing now. Some have laid off almost everyone but the people who know which server to shut down.