41–50 of 121 posts
I was pretty shocked that of 275 companies in the Winter 2023 batch, only 12 have received Series A deals. Granted, I know a huge part of that is that the VC environment has just collapsed due to the end of the ZIRP era, but those numbers at least sound pretty brutal to me.
a) The next two years are the reckoning for a lot of these AI startups. In the enterprise space everyone was being pushed to trial AI products to see whether they can deliver the ROI that was being marketed. Newsflash: it hasn't. And many of these startups will see serious churn. b) Everyone needs to stop perpetuating the YC lie that they invest in the best founders and they just happen to want to do AI. It's rubbish…
Other than the "request for startups" YC publishes YC doesn't push founders to start a specific type of business. AI is simply where the opportunity is (or is perceived to be). YC (and everybody else) understands that most AI enterprise startups will fail, as you point out. The gamble, as always, is that a few startups in the current batch will get huge.
a) The next two years are the reckoning for a lot of these AI startups. In the enterprise space everyone was being pushed to trial AI products to see whether they can deliver the ROI that was being marketed. Newsflash: it hasn't. And many of these startups will see serious churn. b) Everyone needs to stop perpetuating the YC lie that they invest in the best founders and they just happen to want to do AI. It's rubbish…
Other than the "request for startups" YC publishes YC doesn't push founders to start a specific type of business. AI is simply where the opportunity is (or is perceived to be). YC (and everybody else) understands that most AI enterprise startups will fail, as you point out. The gamble, as always, is that a few startups in the current batch will get huge.
Of course it does.
Founders look at YC batches, see that it is 99% AI companies and are then forced to also go in that direction if they want the benefits of the accelerated YC path.
And YC deliberately chooses founders with AI companies because they have an investment thesis that is different from "request for startups". Garry Tan has been a massive e/acc fanboy since the beginning and genuinely believes that AI in every use case will advance humanity. And the partners all align with this.
This is all inarguable because amongst the tens of thousands of applications there are surely many amazing non-AI companies. Is this implication that they are all worse than what was selected in the batch ?
Do "AI Startups" even make sense? There appears to be a pattern. Unmet need is identified: "I want ChatGPT -- but able to read PDFs" or "I want ChatGPT -- but able to do research and produce lengthy reports." Startup gets funding for this and, if they're lucky, releases a rough beta that leans heavily on the OpenAI API. Two months later OpenAI launches a better, much more polished and seamless version, which is integ…
Its a good point and it comes back to why Google can't take up projects that other startups are working on. Google has all the technical infrastructure, talent and everything to make something like AirBnB, Docusign and hell even intellij. Why not?
What does he/she mean by tooling in this context?
Later section talks about developer tools so not that by the sounds of it. So tooling around inference maybe? Pretty sure ollama is in YC and that's surely "tooling"?
YC is going all-in on a technology with no proven business value, driven mostly by ideological desire. It might prove to be their downfall.
Do "AI Startups" even make sense? There appears to be a pattern. Unmet need is identified: "I want ChatGPT -- but able to read PDFs" or "I want ChatGPT -- but able to do research and produce lengthy reports." Startup gets funding for this and, if they're lucky, releases a rough beta that leans heavily on the OpenAI API. Two months later OpenAI launches a better, much more polished and seamless version, which is integ…
If for nothing else openAI won't be able to market itself for every single use case, and so long as people aren't using chatGPT for some use case (even if it could perform the task) there's still an opening.
Do "AI Startups" even make sense? There appears to be a pattern. Unmet need is identified: "I want ChatGPT -- but able to read PDFs" or "I want ChatGPT -- but able to do research and produce lengthy reports." Startup gets funding for this and, if they're lucky, releases a rough beta that leans heavily on the OpenAI API. Two months later OpenAI launches a better, much more polished and seamless version, which is integ…
> going so far as to download the fulltext of every legal ruling ever made in the US -- something like 400GB Where can I find this?
This was trickier 18 months ago, but every major LLM provider has solid support for this now. You can just drop an API call to Google, OpenAI, etc. your existing pipeline. What am I missing? Maybe the selling point was batch, but all LLM providers have a batch product now too.
classification_response = requests.post(
"https://platform.reducto.ai/extract",
json={
"document_url": f"jobid://{job_id}",
"schema": {
"type": "object",
"properties": {
"document_type": {"type": "string", "enum": ["W2", "Passport", "Other"]}
},
"required": ["document_type"],
},
},
headers=headers,
)