Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why AI Infrastructure Startups Are Insanely Hard to Build

nextword.substack.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 190 posts

Re: Why AI Infrastructure Startups Are Insanely Hard to Build

#81

Post by hiAndrewQuinn »

IanCal wrote: post #64
walthamstow wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anecdote: me (SWE) and my wife (executive) each have a $20 subscription.

n=3 now so it's full on anecdata, I've got a $20 sub professionally (swe). It has to save me so little time to be worth it it's easily great. Might add claude, though at this point probably better to find a nice interface and use the APIs. These things are products.

n=5, my wife and I split a subscription between the two of us. While our needs are usually pretty minor, we both work in the computer science space and GPT-4o's ability to e.g. generate good example sentences for my Finnish vocabulary learning is astonishingly good. I'm building a wrapper around it so I can generate them en masse at [1], but it's still quite early days and very obviously not software I intend to sell

https://GitHub.com/hiAndrewQuinn/wordmeat

Re: Why AI Infrastructure Startups Are Insanely Hard to Build

#82

Post by belter »

dvt wrote: post #18

Infra has always been a tarpit idea. Google didn't start out as an "infra" company, and neither did Amazon or Facebook. In fact, the few "infra companies" that did start back then (companies like Godaddy) are minuscule compared to the aforementioned. VC pouring money in LLM infra is legitimately crazy to me. It's clear as day that there will be winners of this AI cycle, but, as always, they will be companies that pro…

> We need a Dropbox or a Slack or an Instagram: something people love that makes their life easier or better.

None of those three make my life better or easier:

Dropbox -> We drop your data directly on S3 but give you worst security...

Slack -> Being able to navigate our messy interface is an IQ test in itself...

Instagram -> Only makes your life better if you have bikini posts to share....

Re: Why AI Infrastructure Startups Are Insanely Hard to Build

#83

Post by raincole »

dvt wrote: post #18

Infra has always been a tarpit idea. Google didn't start out as an "infra" company, and neither did Amazon or Facebook. In fact, the few "infra companies" that did start back then (companies like Godaddy) are minuscule compared to the aforementioned. VC pouring money in LLM infra is legitimately crazy to me. It's clear as day that there will be winners of this AI cycle, but, as always, they will be companies that pro…

> Even OpenAI doesn't really have a product.

...What?

Like, what? I feel like stepping into another timeline reading this.

Re: Why AI Infrastructure Startups Are Insanely Hard to Build

#84

Post by raincole »

belter wrote: post #82
dvt wrote: post #18

Infra has always been a tarpit idea. Google didn't start out as an "infra" company, and neither did Amazon or Facebook. In fact, the few "infra companies" that did start back then (companies like Godaddy) are minuscule compared to the aforementioned. VC pouring money in LLM infra is legitimately crazy to me. It's clear as day that there will be winners of this AI cycle, but, as always, they will be companies that pro…

> We need a Dropbox or a Slack or an Instagram: something people love that makes their life easier or better. None of those three make my life better or easier: Dropbox -> We drop your data directly on S3 but give you worst security... Slack -> Being able to navigate our messy interface is an IQ test in itself... Instagram -> Only makes your life better if you have bikini posts to share....

> None of those three make my life better or easier:

> Dropbox -> We drop your data directly on S3 but we give you worst security...

You're top 1% tech-savvy then. 99% people don't know what S3 is and won't deem Dropbox as a worse S3.

(insert rsync joke)

Re: Why AI Infrastructure Startups Are Insanely Hard to Build

#85

Post by hparadiz »

belter wrote: post #82
dvt wrote: post #18

Infra has always been a tarpit idea. Google didn't start out as an "infra" company, and neither did Amazon or Facebook. In fact, the few "infra companies" that did start back then (companies like Godaddy) are minuscule compared to the aforementioned. VC pouring money in LLM infra is legitimately crazy to me. It's clear as day that there will be winners of this AI cycle, but, as always, they will be companies that pro…

> We need a Dropbox or a Slack or an Instagram: something people love that makes their life easier or better. None of those three make my life better or easier: Dropbox -> We drop your data directly on S3 but give you worst security... Slack -> Being able to navigate our messy interface is an IQ test in itself... Instagram -> Only makes your life better if you have bikini posts to share....

I remember what it was like before Dropbox and Slack and I can tell you both have saved me hundreds of hours directly. Can't say that for IG.

Re: Why AI Infrastructure Startups Are Insanely Hard to Build

#86

Post by pmontra »

dvt wrote: post #33
siquick wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We need a Dropbox or a Slack or an Instagram: something people love that makes their life easier or better. People seem to not mind ChatGPT or Claude and safe to say that a very large majority of AI products are using one of the APIs of those companies.

In my humble opinion, a chat interface (API or not) does not a product make. Not to mention that Llama is free and competitive with both (same with Mistral, heck the 7B model works great on my RTX 3080). If you started a company that blew up because you made a badass product (and let's say you used ChatGPT under the hood), you would just eventually train and deploy your own model because an LLM is not a product .

If I had to use Llama or Mistral for free (money) I'd have to buy that RTX 3080 card plus the computer to fit it into. It doesn't work with my laptop. So I use ChatGPT for free instead, on OpenAI site with the don't archive option or whatever they call it. I think many people use the free (money) and hosted option.

Re: Why AI Infrastructure Startups Are Insanely Hard to Build

#87

Post by latchkey »

weitendorf wrote: post #25

Great article, and pretty relevant to what I'm building (cloud developer tooling, including some genai, but also including non-AI tools + an application platform. Email me if interested.). Obviously I'm not nearly as pessimistic about it. Zoom out for a sec and generalize to SaaS in general, not just AI infra (a subset of Saas) - all the arguments listed apply there too, except the data moat (which honestly doesn't m…

Build bare metal developer tooling for GPUs and you'll get aquihired.

Re: Why AI Infrastructure Startups Are Insanely Hard to Build

#88

Post by belter »

hparadiz wrote: post #85
belter wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We need a Dropbox or a Slack or an Instagram: something people love that makes their life easier or better. None of those three make my life better or easier: Dropbox -> We drop your data directly on S3 but give you worst security... Slack -> Being able to navigate our messy interface is an IQ test in itself... Instagram -> Only makes your life better if you have bikini posts to share....

I remember what it was like before Dropbox and Slack and I can tell you both have saved me hundreds of hours directly. Can't say that for IG.

> I remember what it was like before Dropbox

And despite all that, I get mysteriously being pushed by partner companies I work with, this product named Box. With tactics similar to the push to use Teams. It's like being volunteered for karaoke night by your Japanese boss...

Re: Why AI Infrastructure Startups Are Insanely Hard to Build

#89

Post by MOARDONGZPLZ »

belter wrote: post #82
dvt wrote: post #18

Infra has always been a tarpit idea. Google didn't start out as an "infra" company, and neither did Amazon or Facebook. In fact, the few "infra companies" that did start back then (companies like Godaddy) are minuscule compared to the aforementioned. VC pouring money in LLM infra is legitimately crazy to me. It's clear as day that there will be winners of this AI cycle, but, as always, they will be companies that pro…

> We need a Dropbox or a Slack or an Instagram: something people love that makes their life easier or better. None of those three make my life better or easier: Dropbox -> We drop your data directly on S3 but give you worst security... Slack -> Being able to navigate our messy interface is an IQ test in itself... Instagram -> Only makes your life better if you have bikini posts to share....

All three of these products have made my life substantially better.

Re: Why AI Infrastructure Startups Are Insanely Hard to Build

#90

Post by amarcheschi »

rapsey wrote: post #32
dvt wrote: post #18

Infra has always been a tarpit idea. Google didn't start out as an "infra" company, and neither did Amazon or Facebook. In fact, the few "infra companies" that did start back then (companies like Godaddy) are minuscule compared to the aforementioned. VC pouring money in LLM infra is legitimately crazy to me. It's clear as day that there will be winners of this AI cycle, but, as always, they will be companies that pro…

> VC pouring money in LLM infra is legitimately crazy to me. VC business model is throwing money at the wall and seeing what sticks. They love congratulating themselves on how smart they are but at the end of the day their overall returns trail S&P 500. They are salespeople and their job is to sell themselves to private capital on how smart and connected they are.

Does their return trail s&p 500? I guess there are some of them that are successful and some that aren't, but to be honest I've only heard about vc as people who on average have a very very high return. Now, it is very possible that's just survivor bias, but I would need to search for some data
Post reply on HN