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How the AI bubble ate Y Combinator

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Re: How the AI bubble ate Y Combinator

#151

Post by jacquesm »

skeeter2020 wrote: post #125
jacquesm wrote: post #106

I was at a meeting of a bunch of VCs a while ago (a couple of months). The principal partner of one of the larger funds said that they will now only consider investments that are AI related. Just to give you a data point, I'm not saying that that is a trend. But if that's a market representative you can't fault the supply side for adapting to it.

until recently I worked in learning management systems (LMS) including the content creation, libraries and delivery. At a recent event with many VCs they all considered the learning space dead because AI was going to do it all. Don't hold your breath!

The one field that I have seen impacted more than just on the periphery is translation services. What was worth 20 cts (or even more, for niche stuff) per word not that long ago is now essentially free.

Re: How the AI bubble ate Y Combinator

#154

Post by psnosignaluk »

Captain Obvious chiming in here, but as one of those boring douche canoes whose concerns are data privacy, data locality and generally the ability to understand how AI trains off of and manipulates the data we feed it, I'm resistant to the tech. We're testing the use of AI to aggregate and explain patterns in the data we have, but this is limited to our ticketing systems and Slack. Until our current choice of AI provider can guarantee that our transactional data won't be stored outside of the EU, the people driving this internally and those keen to make the sale externally can take a long walk off of a short pier. I can almost smell the aroma of the coffee machine from the chamber in which an EU subcommittee is working on the Artificial Intelligence Act (AIA) (EU) 2025/xxxx to add to the raft of regulations that financial entities in Europe need to concern themselves with. Maybe they'll be nice and just append it to an existing act.

AI might be great. AI might be terrible. I'm not all convinced that most data aggregation features baked into AI and used by most normal companies couldn't be implemented in R or SQL (disclaimer: I couldn't code my way out of a wet paper bag if the tool I was told to use was an axe). It's just wanted so that someone can crawl over data sets to ask simple questions like 'how many merchants exceeded n number of transactions between a and b date' or 'My customer needs an eIDAS certificate. What do I ask them to send us without having to talk to Captain Obvious?'. I mean, we're busting a gut on revamping our developer docs, but given that the spec is already public, I'm pretty sure that developers can already vibe code against that. Going to test that and see how it gets on.

Re: How the AI bubble ate Y Combinator

#155

Post by [deleted] »

Macha wrote: post #124
minimaxir wrote: post #121

It's funny because it's causing a tragedy of the commons where there are so many AI startups that YC is funding companies that compete with each other. Case in point, the the PearAI incident a year ago where a YC company forked and rebranded an open source repo from another YC company against its license: https://unfashionable.blog/p/yc/ HN thread on the apology: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41701265 Speaking…

Is placing bets on competing companies that against YC's business model? Like I'd assume the best case for YC's business model is to pick a winner, fund them, sell off at the company's peak, then find a competitor likely to unseat them and fund that competitor so they can enjoy the profits of capturing the same market again.

[deleted]

Re: How the AI bubble ate Y Combinator

#156

Post by programmertote »

A tangential note -- these days when I'm casually reading through job postings, a lot of companies mention in their job requirements something along the lines of "Must be familiar/knowledgeable about GenAI technologies (RAG/MCP)" even for roles that are not strictly related to GenAI.

When you look deeper into most of these companies, they seem better off using third-party services (like Claude/ChatGPT) instead of building their own GenAI models, MCP servers and whatnot. This is not considering that the domain they are operating in would have no apparent and obvious gain from utilizing GenAI (sure, they can buy ChatGPT/Claude organization subscription and that's all they need). I don't know if this is the indicator of how big this AI bubble is, but it sure is interesting...

Re: How the AI bubble ate Y Combinator

#157

Post by LPisGood »

f30e3dfed1c9 wrote: post #83
hshshshshsh wrote: post #16

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…

The self-described "startup community" hasn't produced much of any value to me in a really long time. Dropbox-like things are somewhat useful, but that started in 2007 or so and the one I actually use in maybe 2011 or so. I just took a look at yclist.com, which ends in 2019. Noticed only a few that I've ever heard of and none that I use. Possibly there are some since then but I sort of doubt it. There are a couple of…

Some of the self driving car companies were startups, no? OpenAI as well.

Re: How the AI bubble ate Y Combinator

#159

Post by SJC_Hacker »

hsuduebc2 wrote: post #59
claudiug wrote: post #10

looks a little bit as in the bitcoin/nft/crypto/web3 time :)

To be fair, AI can actually be useful. Crypto projects at one point were tokenizing every random idea, and unsurprisingly most of it turned into scams. Is there any relevant crypto product that truly works differently than just being a tool to buy other coins, apart from Polymarket?

Some sites, especially international, accept crypto in lieu of other payments like credit card. Useful especially if you aren't 100% on the site. You just pay them and don't worry about overcharging or having to dispute payments, etc.

Re: How the AI bubble ate Y Combinator

#160

Post by SJC_Hacker »

kordlessagain wrote: post #58
hshshshshsh wrote: post #16

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…

The AI bubble isn't what everyone thinks it is. Everyone's panicking about "AI features" being bolted onto products like it's 2010 and we're adding social login buttons. That's not the bubble. The bubble is the assumption that current software companies have defensibility. Here's the thing: we're not adding AI to products. We're removing the need for most products entirely. Nobody shipped without search after Google.…

If want your claiming is correct, it goes for nearly every profession.

Why do I need a lawyer if I can just get the AI to do it all for me? Filings, briefs, legal arguments etc. are all just output generated from specific inputs after all.

Why do I need to go to a doctor if I can just have AI diagnose, and eventually even run tests and then operate?

Why would I need artists / marketers for whatever my product, the magical AI can just do it all.

It could be we're headed down this road, but I don't see how software is somehow special in that its the only thing AI can do competently

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