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

Bhutan's first AI startup is seven college kids in a dorm

restofworld.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

1–10 of 28 posts

Re: Bhutan's first AI startup is seven college kids in a dorm

#4

Post by simonw »

thaithrowawayy wrote: post #3

So fascinating, we have 7 college kids "struggling" to build an webapp using AI apis......

Are they using APIs? It's not clear from the article, which mentions that many international cloud services are unavailable in Bhutan (presumably due to those companies not accepting payments from Bhutan residents).

> “One of the main challenges we face is the inability to access international payment platforms such as Stripe and PayPal. Additionally, we do not have access to cloud servers like AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud to host our AI models, which is crucial for reducing costs and improving the quality of our AI,” said Dendup. Many of these services are not available in Bhutan, “making it impossible for us to even open an account,” he said.

Hard to tell exactly what they are building from this article.

Re: Bhutan's first AI startup is seven college kids in a dorm

#6

Post by airplanejane »

simonw wrote: post #4
thaithrowawayy wrote: post #3

So fascinating, we have 7 college kids "struggling" to build an webapp using AI apis......

Are they using APIs? It's not clear from the article, which mentions that many international cloud services are unavailable in Bhutan (presumably due to those companies not accepting payments from Bhutan residents). > “One of the main challenges we face is the inability to access international payment platforms such as Stripe and PayPal. Additionally, we do not have access to cloud servers like AWS, Azure, and Google…

Looking at their website looks like they are building an integrated AI chatbot service - it's inserted via JS using wordpress / other plugin see: https://www.nomindbhutan.com/guide

As a complete aside I enjoyed their about us section: https://www.nomindbhutan.com/#aboutus

Re: Bhutan's first AI startup is seven college kids in a dorm

#8

Post by FinnKuhn »

simonw wrote: post #4
thaithrowawayy wrote: post #3

So fascinating, we have 7 college kids "struggling" to build an webapp using AI apis......

Are they using APIs? It's not clear from the article, which mentions that many international cloud services are unavailable in Bhutan (presumably due to those companies not accepting payments from Bhutan residents). > “One of the main challenges we face is the inability to access international payment platforms such as Stripe and PayPal. Additionally, we do not have access to cloud servers like AWS, Azure, and Google…

I think this section of their website shows some examples of their work: https://www.nomindbhutan.com/#featuredbot

It seems to be mostly chatbot integrations and development. I think it is difficult to judge for anyone in a western country, what challenges they are facing regarding services not being offered in their country.

Re: Bhutan's first AI startup is seven college kids in a dorm

#9

Post by __rito__ »

beezlebroxxxxxx wrote: post #2

> As of June, NoMindBhutan had 150,000 ngultrum ($1,799 [USD]) in the bank For context, google search puts the average monthly Bhutan salary at ~200 USD.

Yes, the money is extremely, extremely low. Even from an Indian subcontinent point-of-view. I didn't expect them to boast hundreds of thousands of USD, but they should have at least made 20k-30k USD.
Post reply on HN