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How the AI bubble ate Y Combinator

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31–40 of 237 posts

Re: How the AI bubble ate Y Combinator

#31
"How paid subscriptions ate the spread of information" I can't subscribe to another site and seems the archive link is not working for me either. Would love to read it though because while YCombinator just follows where they see the money being, AI has really seen the majority of investment recently. https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/industry/investing Just doing a search for "AI" its clear there is a preference. Maybe for good reason though. If I could read the article that is.

Re: How the AI bubble ate Y Combinator

#32

Is it just me or anyone else fed up with the startup community. I cannot find anyone who actually cares about values and have backbone. The stories I grew up with of Wozniak, Jobs, Larry and the hacker community does not resemble them anymore. Everyone I know who raised money is a moron or narcissist. YC has became like a resume builder. And the genuine hackers I know of are wasting life away working on pointless pro…

I feel you. Disconnect for a while, touch grass, be the change you want to see, maybe explore parts of the internet that are less “startup” focused and more hacker focused?

Re: How the AI bubble ate Y Combinator

#33

Is it just me or anyone else fed up with the startup community. I cannot find anyone who actually cares about values and have backbone. The stories I grew up with of Wozniak, Jobs, Larry and the hacker community does not resemble them anymore. Everyone I know who raised money is a moron or narcissist. YC has became like a resume builder. And the genuine hackers I know of are wasting life away working on pointless pro…

it is because during from 2004/2005 on, it was seen a way to get rich quick to "just found something" and try it to sell: the "early days" where driven by engineers, tech people, technicians - then the MBA crowd joined and funding became a "pipeline processed thing" to get tons of money quickly.

Re: How the AI bubble ate Y Combinator

#35

The one thing that LLMs are good at is prototyping super fast. For accelerators/incubators etc this is a game changer since more ideas can be realized and tested for market fit. Now if the market fit indeed exists then someone needs to rearchitect and rewrite the thing. But wasn’t it always the case? The POC always was a hacked together solution with no real viability to be used as the final product.

LLMs are good at prototyping something that is similar to something that already exists and is open sourced.

It may be that there are such projects which can be monetized or need better marketing.

Innovative it is not, however.

Re: How the AI bubble ate Y Combinator

#37
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could have said that with any previous investment cycle and the people applying and being accepted to Ycom. Its a thing for generating money not great code or w/e.

FWIW i think that AI (or at least the LLM and some of the other neural network based stuff) can be useful for some stuff and interesting from a technical perspective for many people. Personally i find 99.999% of AI to be way WAY overhyped and i do not really care about the commercial side of it, but at the same time i have found some neat uses for (local) LLMs and i do find the tech behind it interesting (and experim…

I do think that another topic on how AI is eating everything could be nice given how nobody is still believing it and somebody had shared the list of YC companies with AI and you had to see how long the list was and how unimaginative it was, to me it felt Like X but AI, Y but AI....

You yourself say that AI is overhyped and that overhype has formed into a bubble of sorts which has eaten Y combinator.

Also I probably don't understand how your point is relevant to the parent comment if I am honest or maybe I am not finding the relevance in which case feel free to explain it so that I learn something new

Re: How the AI bubble ate Y Combinator

#38
> Going through YC’s startup directory reveals that of the 170 startups in the most recent summer batch 154 are AI startups.

The author calculates this by searching for the term "AI" in the name and description of each startup's YC page. But presence of the term "AI" doesn't make a startup an "AI startup," so to speak. For example, I picked one startup at random, Topological, which is "developing physics-based foundation models for CAD optimization." Just because the company uses AI doesn't make it an "AI startup." AI is rapidly proving itself to be an extremely useful and workflow-changing tool, and many companies now have adopted it somewhere in their product without suddenly becoming AI companies.

Re: How the AI bubble ate Y Combinator

#39
post #30

Is it just me or anyone else fed up with the startup community. I cannot find anyone who actually cares about values and have backbone. The stories I grew up with of Wozniak, Jobs, Larry and the hacker community does not resemble them anymore. Everyone I know who raised money is a moron or narcissist. YC has became like a resume builder. And the genuine hackers I know of are wasting life away working on pointless pro…

Why do you need a community? Build the thing, and then launch the thing by talking to prospective customers. If you're building a SaaS, you don't need funding if you keep working a day job and build your product slowly. The clever people are still doing good work, they're just doing so quietly.

Everyone needs a community, even if it isn't large.
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