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How the AI bubble ate Y Combinator

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Re: How the AI bubble ate Y Combinator

#161

Post by SJC_Hacker »

kjkjadksj wrote: post #150
kordlessagain wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

I don’t know how you can claim all this when ai is nondeterministic and hallucinates. Menu based software is merely a way to trigger a function, the same function, every time you want to run it. Ai in its current incarnation cannot even do that.

Yeah, having to type out, or even speak "rotate this by 90 degrees about the Z axis" would get annoying fairly quick. Not to mention the inference is probably going to consume several seconds.

Blender user, or probably any other, would be able to pull that with a mouse click, followed by a few keystrokes. Bam, done.

Now something time consuming like UV-unrolling, sure go ahead and incorporate AI. But I'd bet it would need quite a bit of tweaking for a "pro" job, although of course thats not always necessary

Re: How the AI bubble ate Y Combinator

#162

Post by tdiff »

Timsky wrote: post #82

YC remains a great source of creative inspiration for me. However, I tend to skip most AI-related content on HN, as the topic does more harm than good to me in my daily life. Some people around me delegate more and more decisions to the chat, and that frightens. Especially if you are somehow dependent on them or your work gets evaluated by some creepy AI-driven bossware. We should admit that AI, particularly LLMs, is…

One should aim to be in the food chain at a level, where there is no bossware above you.

Re: How the AI bubble ate Y Combinator

#163

Post by anthonypasq »

Mistletoe wrote: post #25

AI ate HN also. It’s ridiculous how many articles are about AI now. Are we truly out of any new ideas? Can we not talk about something else? I kind of like AI but it’s a tool, I don’t talk about my screwdriver constantly.

If hackernews existing during the dawn of personal computing you bet your ass that every single cpu release by intel or ibm or whatever would be front page news and everyone would be talking about how they were going to use computers to automate all paperwork etc etc.

you just need some perspective.

Re: How the AI bubble ate Y Combinator

#164

Post by Imustaskforhelp »

pixl97 wrote: post #142
Imustaskforhelp wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't really know man half the population doesn't know what open source means or cares whereas a lot of people seemingly have lots of opinions about AI. One can liberate people from big tech and the other ties them to it in sorts. And there are very very more conversations about the latter than the former. The point of discussion is to bring change. There has been a real change in how usable Linux has been lets say…

>One can liberate people from big tech A very small portion of the population, yes. The percentage of the population that is going to run things on their own is comparatively tiny. Mass adoption isn't going to happen because convenience and support is what most people want. Again, these things have been discussed for decades, and yet we keep seeing tighter and tighter centralization of data and services. In phones it…

yes I understand and your points are valid.

Yet I still feel like things like grapheneos are really valid nowadays and there are definitely some de-facto low hanging fruits of open source where you still get the same-ish level of convenience and support and the only reason I can't think of the same thing happening is knowledge.

my country is literally filled with everyone owning whatsapp, when I ask people why not signal... they don't even know what signal is.

Everyone has always been doing chats on whatsapp and now there is this weird lock-in but all it takes is for masses to use signal and spread the word as an example for a small victory towards a path of good. I will try to do my part I suppose, we can all be pessimist but atleast I feel deep down that we can create a system of convenience and support for other open source projects too if we can donate to these projects too and have a reasonable assessment of that too.

Too many people think of open source as free and yes its free but I also think that its the responsibility of us as a whole as a society to fund open source if we want support otherwise we should stop thinking about it.

Regarding google locking down, what can I say except that I think that this decision should be fought against with as much scrutiny by the people advocating for freedom as possible.

There is a way to do things with adb but still, it is a shame that google went down this path and we should definitely fight against this too of sorts but I have hope in grapheneos + f-droid too tho. I definitely need to enlighten myself more if the google's thing is gonna cause an issue for things like grapheneos too as that would be a real deal breaker / cause even more severe issues as from what I know grapheneos is one of the safest os roms/ most privacy friendly android rom for mobile and gives a lot of security advantages that are definitely something to look at and admire.

Re: How the AI bubble ate Y Combinator

#165

Post by [deleted] »

tdiff wrote: post #162
Timsky wrote: post #82

YC remains a great source of creative inspiration for me. However, I tend to skip most AI-related content on HN, as the topic does more harm than good to me in my daily life. Some people around me delegate more and more decisions to the chat, and that frightens. Especially if you are somehow dependent on them or your work gets evaluated by some creepy AI-driven bossware. We should admit that AI, particularly LLMs, is…

One should aim to be in the food chain at a level, where there is no bossware above you.

[deleted]

Re: How the AI bubble ate Y Combinator

#166

Post by ghaff »

skeeter2020 wrote: post #139
ghaff wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI (or specifically LLM-related) seems to have sucked so much oxygen out of the room that it's harder to focus on other things. I moved on about 18 months ago and I'd like to work as an analyst again on some other things but AI seems to pretty much dominate the conversation. I'm not disinterested in AI but it seems to simultaneously be the topic with the most interest and the most noise.

I've been exhausted by this for at least a year, so much so that (for a big part) I left my good job in August. The past 7 weeks have been amazing!

I'm not sure I'm exhausted but, given a bunch of other things going on (that have been exhausting), I've been less inclined to keep as involved in tech as I would otherwise have done. Probably do a reboot after the holidays and decide what I want to do (or not).

Re: How the AI bubble ate Y Combinator

#167

Post by bilekas »

nh23423fefe wrote: post #138
bilekas wrote: post #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.…

pretty entitled take. why use the phrasing about subscriptions preventing spread of information instead of something like "stingy readers preventing authors from eating"

> "stingy readers preventing authors from eating"

Because as I just counted for you I'm subscribed already to 6 others.. at different rates. Some of them crossing over with articles. To you I sound "entitled" but there's a limit to my miscellaneous spending.

Re: How the AI bubble ate Y Combinator

#168

Post by layer8 »

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.

It’s why it’s called “stupid money”.

Re: How the AI bubble ate Y Combinator

#169

Post by layer8 »

jacquesm wrote: post #151
skeeter2020 wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That impact is very real, but you aren’t getting the same thing for free that you were getting with 20¢/word.

Re: How the AI bubble ate Y Combinator

#170

Post by Terr_ »

randycupertino wrote: post #122
Timsky wrote: post #82

YC remains a great source of creative inspiration for me. However, I tend to skip most AI-related content on HN, as the topic does more harm than good to me in my daily life. Some people around me delegate more and more decisions to the chat, and that frightens. Especially if you are somehow dependent on them or your work gets evaluated by some creepy AI-driven bossware. We should admit that AI, particularly LLMs, is…

I was recently in a work AI training where we were encouraged to have AI review all our vendor and contractor budgets and find holes and create rebuttals to line items. Was wondering what if the vendor has ai review our rebuttals and create counter-points to our ai-created arguments. At some point it will just be AI talking against itself to another AI chatbot.

> At some point it will just be AI talking against itself to another AI chatbot.

And then something like this [0] will happen, creating a weird wasteful meta-game about the model(s) used by each company.

It makes intuitive sense: If you outsourced "generate awesome assertions" to a contractor, then someone else hired the same contractor to "judge the awesomeness of these assertions", they are more likely to get lots of "awesome" results—whether they're warranted or not. The difference might even come down to quirks of word-choice and formatting which a careful human inspector would judge irrelevant.

[0] https://www.theregister.com/2025/09/03/ai_hiring_biased/

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