Why AI Infrastructure Startups Are Insanely Hard to Build
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Why AI Infrastructure Startups Are Insanely Hard to Build
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Re: Why AI Infrastructure Startups Are Insanely Hard to Build
#2[deleted]
Re: Why AI Infrastructure Startups Are Insanely Hard to Build
#3Good article, but what is the alternative? What can you build today as a software engineer that can have impact? Nothing seems to come close to AI / AI infra, even of its hard / risky / a moving landscape.
Re: Why AI Infrastructure Startups Are Insanely Hard to Build
#4Good article, but what is the alternative? What can you build today as a software engineer that can have impact? Nothing seems to come close to AI / AI infra, even of its hard / risky / a moving landscape.
Everything we build has some kind of impact.
At risk of getting philosophical, I’d ask yourself what your goals actually are if you feel only AI can have the impact you desire.
Re: Why AI Infrastructure Startups Are Insanely Hard to Build
#5Good article, but what is the alternative? What can you build today as a software engineer that can have impact? Nothing seems to come close to AI / AI infra, even of its hard / risky / a moving landscape.
Data infra?
Re: Why AI Infrastructure Startups Are Insanely Hard to Build
#6Good article, but what is the alternative? What can you build today as a software engineer that can have impact? Nothing seems to come close to AI / AI infra, even of its hard / risky / a moving landscape.
A lot of things, if you're okay with not chasing the next hype bubble
Re: Why AI Infrastructure Startups Are Insanely Hard to Build
#7Way too many founders don't understand the impact of competing with cloud vendors.
Almost all enterprises have pre-committed budgets for cloud which means unless your product is FOSS it's going to be hard to convince someone to bet their business on it. Especially given that in this fundraising environment there is a 95% chance they won't be around in a year or two anyway.
It's going to be a brutal few years especially if we are heading into a period of diminishing returns in terms of LLM accuracy.
Re: Why AI Infrastructure Startups Are Insanely Hard to Build
#8Good tips, especially the point about narrowing the scope. At https://Lemonfox.ai we started with a LLM, image and speech-to-text API. Now we are only focusing on the speech-to-text API as the other areas are already very crowded and there's a lack of innovation in the speech-to-text space.
Re: Why AI Infrastructure Startups Are Insanely Hard to Build
#9Good article, but what is the alternative? What can you build today as a software engineer that can have impact? Nothing seems to come close to AI / AI infra, even of its hard / risky / a moving landscape.
Everything we build has some kind of impact. At risk of getting philosophical, I’d ask yourself what your goals actually are if you feel only AI can have the impact you desire .
Not sure why this is down voted, that is the key question. Impact means different things to people. Could be:
1. Building a sustainable business and making decent money
2. Building a market leader and making ludicrous amounts of money
3. Advancing the state of the art in technology
4. Helping people with their little daily struggles
5. Solving pressing problems humanity is facing
Or many other things I suppose. Now if you believe that AI is eventually going to make anything humans can build now redundant, that'd be a reason to believe nothing else matters in the end I suppose. But even if we get there, there's a lot of road leading to that destination. Any step provides value. Software built today can provide value even if nobody is going to need it ten years from now. And it's not like you could even predict that.
Re: Why AI Infrastructure Startups Are Insanely Hard to Build
#10Good article, but what is the alternative? What can you build today as a software engineer that can have impact? Nothing seems to come close to AI / AI infra, even of its hard / risky / a moving landscape.
I would almost invert that statement. Sorry if this comes off ranty, but what exactly are people doing in the "AI space" currently that isn't "undifferentiated spam/chatbot" being sold to non-techies who heard about AI on NPR? What are real people using "AI" for that is so insanely valuable today? How much "company Y: same product with a chat window, sparks emoji" do we all need before this thing levels out and we all take a breather on the hype?