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How the AI bubble ate Y Combinator

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Re: How the AI bubble ate Y Combinator

#181

Post by [deleted] »

vonneumannstan wrote: post #93
rappatic wrote: post #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 founda…

>CAD optimization. Guess what, you aren't getting into YC as a CAD company and you aren't raising further rounds either.

[deleted]

Re: How the AI bubble ate Y Combinator

#182

Post by insane_dreamer »

ashwindharne wrote: post #79

HN's AI hate-boner has always been a bit off-putting to me. This is a technology forum, and it's pretty much the biggest advance in recent technology that has potential implications for all of our lives. I definitely also get AI-fatigue, but it's no mystery why there's a preponderance of content about LLMs, diffusion models, self-driving cars, etc. YC's goals are to manage risk and to make money, and new tech like th…

It’s because this is a tech forum that we actually put our thinking caps on rather than just accept whatever BS comes out in corporate press releases.

Re: How the AI bubble ate Y Combinator

#183

Post by jacquesm »

hackable_sand wrote: post #173
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.

You can always fault the supply side.

No, you really can't. You either are going to play ball or you'll simply not get funded. It's pretty dumb but that's the way it is right now, maybe they'll come to their senses again once the bubble inevitably bursts but that could be quite a while.

Re: How the AI bubble ate Y Combinator

#184

Post by pessimizer »

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.

> I don’t know how you can claim all this when ai is nondeterministic and hallucinates.

It's so bad. I was thinking that it would at least replace people whose job is largely to give their worthless opinions, but it won't even do that. Those people's real job is often to add head count, to give your uncle's kid a job or to be fired when things go wrong. AI can't do any of that, it just generates the worthless opinions. Now the idiot won't even have to imitate the verbiage they sort-of heard in college; they're the ones that are using AI the most, to bullshit for them.

It's good for helping you think through stuff you're thinking about by repeating back to you in different words (and getting even that wrong often, forcing you to clarify.) It's horrifically bad at finding or following references, reasoning, or coming up with anything new.

It's not eating software, it's barely even touching software, other than being shoveled into it randomly. The obvious proof that AI is bad is that there are actual geniuses who came up with the algorithms to speed up, parallelize and to bias in a way that makes them seem more productive and creative. LLMs don't seem to be helping amazing minds like that improve AI itself. If LLMs were even going to be fertile, that pairing would be a semi-singularity even if these exceptional humans couldn't be taken out of the loop. My bet is that they don't help at all.

Re: How the AI bubble ate Y Combinator

#185

Post by roncesvalles »

bix6 wrote: post #127
Macha wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Is it fair for someone with privileged information to back a direct competitor? I say no but YC clearly thinks otherwise.

Yeah, to me that’s always been the obvious most "expensive" part about doing YC. It’s not the chunk of equity, it's that they now know everything about your company, your road map or ideas, and the way you think and operate. And that's a pretty good deal for whatever little money they're spending on you. The whole thing has a "frenemies" vibe.

Re: How the AI bubble ate Y Combinator

#186

Post by pixl97 »

skeeter2020 wrote: post #137
pixl97 wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So like internet startups in the 90s. Like .com in the late 90s. Like social media startups in the late 2000s/2010s. It's all cycles. Every bubble is talked about on HN (and similar sites) because that's the purpose of sites like this.

maybe a big difference is those hype cycles were net-positive for developers. This is the first one in a while that has VCs and upper management salivating with the idea of cutting all the devs lose. Who do YOU think this is likely to replace first, technical developers or administrators?

"Developers surprised automation takes them out after decades of taking other people out with automation"

But hey, mention the word union here and you'll still get beat with a stick.

Re: How the AI bubble ate Y Combinator

#187

Post by BobaFloutist »

saltcured wrote: post #74
Analemma_ wrote: post #19

If you drive through San Francisco on I-80, every single billboard between the Bay Bridge and the 101 is for some kind of AI service (except, amusingly, the one for Yudkowsky's new book about AI doom). All of them look terrible and completely useless. There was one that said "Still using PowerPoint? Use our AI slide maker instead" with a picture of a three-eyed cat, as though to brag that their service makes unappeti…

Yeah, a few times per year, I take a drive to SFO, and I am again struck by the absurdity. It's not just the current AI fixation. They always seemed bizarrely niche to me. I assumed billboards were for mass consumer marketing. What tiny percentage of the people on these highways are actually in a position to act on any B2B tech marketing? I don't understand the economic choice to pay for a billboard like that. The on…

> I assumed billboards were for mass consumer marketing.

My hunch is that billboards on I-80 through San Francisco are a vanity product. Their actual purpose isn't marketing, but to flatter the egos of the CEOs that own the service - they get to dominate the sky, the eyes, and the brains for thousands of tech commuters twice a day. The one thing I'm not sure about is whether or not the people paying for the billboards actually think that their sales are going to materially benefit, but I'm pretty sure the sellers are clear that they absolutely will not - and either way, I'm sure people see it as a mark of prestige to have an ad there.

Re: How the AI bubble ate Y Combinator

#188

Post by claudiulodro »

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.…

> "How paid subscriptions ate the spread of information"

The "irony" here is that news organizations are moving to gate their content precisely because that's the only effective technique for preventing AI crawlers from ingesting it all ...

Re: How the AI bubble ate Y Combinator

#189

Post by pixl97 »

pessimizer wrote: post #175
pixl97 wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I see far fewer discussions of open source as compared to AI. Because the big discussions of open source were decades ago now. If you add up all the discussions of open source in the past I'd assume they'd out number the AI discussions now. Also, there is very little novel to discuss about open source. Now novel and 'important' are different things, but novel is what tends to write articles and get eyeballs.

There's an enormous amount to discuss about "open source," and it's neglected enough that the bro generation of programmers doesn't even understand it, or the difference between it and Free software, and what those differences materially mean to developers and the public at large. The reason that HN is eaten up by LLMs is because it's eaten by any trendy topic that's in the mainstream news. HN used to be directed by…

Even if pg where here to do so, it wouldn't happen the way you think it would. Open source got ate by AWS and closed behind paid for services. We had those discussions in the past, we lost, the market spoke.

Moreso the internet evolved into something we don't like. In the early days it wasn't that hard to have an energetic conversation because you were having conversations with real people at their digression. Yes, there were some number of trolls you had to deal with, but over time they went from being the exception to being the rule. Any and every site you create now, the moment you collect a worthwhile market will be flooded with those attempting to market their wares to the point that actual conversation can no longer exist. The walled-gardens and verified signatures are a side effect of the infection that the internet has become.

The world you lived in aged and died and now a brave new world screams for your attention 24/7 without care for your health or sanity. The days where a large portion of people were into programming because they enjoyed it are long past. People need paychecks to support the ever spiraling costs of basic needs. Consolidation and monopolies aren't just a thing in websites and computer hardware, it's a thing everywhere with everything especially in the US. The power scaling laws of technology have come home to roost. The cyberpunk dystopia we were warned of is already here and the masses invited it with open arms.

The FOSS utopianist need to realize they lost, and it's human laziness and apathy that was the killing blow. If you can come to terms with that, maybe a rebirth of FOSS that targets our base instincts can arise.

Re: How the AI bubble ate Y Combinator

#190

Post by bakugo »

atonse wrote: post #62
em-bee wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i disagree. if your product or business model are tied to the use of AI so much that you put AI in your description, then you are an AI company.

By that metric, every single software company is now an AI company. I can't think of a SINGLE company (except ours maybe, only because we haven't updated our website yet, not because we don't want to) that doesn't vomit AI terms _everywhere_ in their product messaging. I don't know whether consumers/buyers are demanding that, or what. But it seems everywhere and in every discipline. It's in research grant application…

> I don't know whether consumers/buyers are demanding that, or what.

Consumers aren't demanding it, investors are.

They see the hype and ridiculous amounts of money being invested into AI startups, and they're afraid of missing out, so they throw their own money in. No time to stop and think about it, there's too much hype and things are moving too fast. Then other investors see even more money being thrown in, and throw more money in themselves - monkey see, monkey do. Repeat ad infinitum and the next thing you know, majority of venture capital is being blindly funneled into anything AI related.

If you're leading some unrelated company and paying attention to where all this money is flowing, the path forward is obvious: simply become an AI company. Doesn't matter if you're actually building something valuable with it or not, because as long as your landing page fulfills a certain quota of AI buzzwords, the investors won't care. They only care about making the line go up, because it's good when the line goes up.

It's a bubble.

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