Building a startup on an LLM is like building a house on a foundation of quicksand. As the LLM gets better it naturally erodes your moat. It's a completely different dynamic compared to the internet. It's why I'm watching this from the sidelines.
I have a close friend who is trying to build a company entirely on top of Claude. He doesn't know how to program. He can't do basic arithmetic. Yet, the company he's building is a "Data Science AI for the Government" because, according to him, all of the data scientists at NOAA don't know what they're doing. I have given up on trying to get through to him how bad of an idea this is. He's unemployed and has been worki…
Sounds like YC material.
Y Combinator is accepting applications for the Summer 2026 Batch funding cycle. Make sure they don't miss out!
A recent episode of Matt Levine’s podcast (Money Stuff) covered this: apparently investment bankers spend a huge amount of time preparing pitch decks for companies that don’t want them. Apparently Claude is quite good at making a pitch deck that no one but your boss wants or cares about. I feel like there’s a metaphor in there... maybe I’ll ask Claude about it.
Much like a lot of internal daily status report stuff: The BS generator is actually a great fit when the task is making BS output nobody used or deeply cared-about in the first place.
> Much like a lot of internal daily status report stuff
Everyone wants in on my daily excel auto generated reports - nobody ever opens them. Just being on the list makes you someone.
That’s a gross over generalization. Some of the insurance data here suggests use of AI to make underwriting decisions. There are several states with regulations which could potentially pull these agent solutions into their regulatory oversight if used by the industry to effect insurance outcomes.
Odd lots podcast had an interesting snippet about an financial institution that uses AI to make loan decisions. The guest said that they only use it on applicants who were rejected in the traditional sequence, and then uses AI to accept them if possible. That way there's an articulable reason for a rejection, but they use the non-deterministic AI to allow an extra person through - since the laws about loans are mostl…
That's dependent on the credit laws of the country in question though. In Australia you have it both ways, you cannot unreasonably discriminate (e.g. race, gender etc) but at the same time you are forbidden from issuing credit to applicants who cannot meet the affordability requirements of said credit. E.g. issuing a loan to a customer who provably cannot afford it is a breach of the NCC, and the company is held responsible for this. As a credit provider you must make reasonable enquiries into a customer's financial position, failing to do this is a breach. You must also be able to explain and justify the decision to issue credit if challenged by the civil regulator (AFCA - who are granted significant power in addressing this), on the basis of a customer complaint, and they most certainly do not accept "human said no but the computer then said yes" without hard facts such as proven positive income flow (pay slips, bank statements), known expenses, liabilities and reliable credit history.
Will the big labs leave anything for external competition? This probably killed a thousand startups in this space. in the early internet you wouldn't see google creating their own news site or facebook building their own animal farm. what happened to platformication of everything?
I'm not sure if this was tongue-in-cheek or not, but Yahoo created its own news site in 1996: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo_News and FB had Zynga's Farmville as well.
I think OP meant that Farmville was built by a different party (Zynga). FB was trying to encourage other businesses to build apps on its platform, not build them itself.
Can't wait for Claude to submit fake tax records for me so that I can commit fraud legally.
This is my litmus test. If AI is really as wonderous as everybody says, why didn't all the employees of all the AI companies simply type "Claude, file my taxes for me" as a prompt and walk away?
Because having to ask suggests that the AI didn't already do it for you pre-emptively.
If you're not yet waking up to AI completing tasks for you that you didn't directly ask for, you might be falling behind the curve. A good personal assistant does what you ask, a better personal assistant knows what you need before you do and has it completed before you reach your desk. AI is already starting to reach into the latter category.
Anyone still use claude design? I’ve not seen any mentions on X, here or youtube recently, so wonder if it was all hype or people are actually using it.
Yes. On the accounting side agents can handle a lot of the low value work like recons and other ledger activity pretty well. On the investment side I think like you pointed out it’s going to be a lot of research, industry, company, macro etc. Value in letting run on top of the data you have and put together ideas at a quicker pace than a human can. There is still a human in the loop but it can do a nice job of lining…
What does the integration look like on accounting? Is this a tool provided by the accounting software provider? I'm in that space so naturally interested in what people are up to :)
Likely "dump all your data into our system then we provide you AI tools." Typically how it goes with most fintech startups.
I don't trust these AI-only companies to be overnight experts in properly handling medical, financial and insurance data. They have no business providing these tools, unless they want to take all the risk too.
I think a lot of people are misunderstanding the typical workload of people in Financial Services. They aren't using Claude to transfer money, they're just building a LOT of slideshows and fancy excel docs on made-up numbers to try to sell mergers and new financing options/types of loans. Most programmers would just consider this "sales".
> made-up numbers
It's important to note that in most jurisdictions you can't actually do this legally? Like, you may be able to get away with it, but it is actually illegal to sell financial services by misrepresentation?