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How the AI bubble ate Y Combinator

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Re: How the AI bubble ate Y Combinator

#21

Post by ta12653421 »

whatever1 wrote: post #12

The one thing that LLMs are good at is prototyping super fast. For accelerators/incubators etc this is a game changer since more ideas can be realized and tested for market fit. Now if the market fit indeed exists then someone needs to rearchitect and rewrite the thing. But wasn’t it always the case? The POC always was a hacked together solution with no real viability to be used as the final product.

think about the early days of Facebook, when it was called TheFacebook.com

a bunch of PHP scripts :-D

Re: How the AI bubble ate Y Combinator

#22

Post by ghaff »

cs702 wrote: post #8

Bubble or not, AI is eating everything , not just YC. In particular, I've noticed the topic of AI is eating up corporate meetings, turning them into a kind of human slop.

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.

Re: How the AI bubble ate Y Combinator

#24

Post by jsheard »

cs702 wrote: post #8

Bubble or not, AI is eating everything , not just YC. In particular, I've noticed the topic of AI is eating up corporate meetings, turning them into a kind of human slop.

According to The Information (which is hard-paywalled unfortunately) venture capital as a whole is set to run out of money in 18 months if things continue at the current pace. AI companies had better turn profitable sharpish.

Re: How the AI bubble ate Y Combinator

#25

Post by Mistletoe »

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.

Re: How the AI bubble ate Y Combinator

#26

Post by schlauerfox »

tipiirai wrote: post #17

90% (154/170) of the latest HN summer batch are AI startups. I was expecting a lot, but not this much.

Or they're including AI as a buzzword in whatever they were already doing, and not exactly ignoring a new tool, but might be overselling how useful AI is to their thing?

Re: How the AI bubble ate Y Combinator

#27

Post by altairprime »

j2kun wrote: post #6

My guess (paywall): they wanted to drive up demand for their existing investments in AI. In other words, the bubble didn't eat Y combinator, Y combinator did it to themselves on purpose.

AI, if it pans out, allows VC gambling to succeed with fewer dollars due to downward pressure on total demand and total pay for workers, specifically annd especially skilled engineers without leadership qualities.

Re: How the AI bubble ate Y Combinator

#28

Post by kordlessagain »

devin wrote: post #3

“All the smart kids of the Bay Area want to work on AI,” Operative word here is "kids", and from what I can tell they're not even the smart ones, just the ones who are more geared toward being money and status-obsessed.

Yup. They couldn't devops/mlops their way out of a paper bag if they had to.

Re: How the AI bubble ate Y Combinator

#29

Post by badsectoracula »

hobs wrote: post #15
devin wrote: post #3

“All the smart kids of the Bay Area want to work on AI,” Operative word here is "kids", and from what I can tell they're not even the smart ones, just the ones who are more geared toward being money and status-obsessed.

You could have said that with any previous investment cycle and the people applying and being accepted to Ycom. Its a thing for generating money not great code or w/e.

FWIW i think that AI (or at least the LLM and some of the other neural network based stuff) can be useful for some stuff and interesting from a technical perspective for many people. Personally i find 99.999% of AI to be way WAY overhyped and i do not really care about the commercial side of it, but at the same time i have found some neat uses for (local) LLMs and i do find the tech behind it interesting (and experimented a bit with it, at least whatever i can do on my own computer).

And on that topic, WRT Hacker News, personally i find someone running GPT2 on their 90s Silicon Graphics retro workstation much more interesting than yet another topic on how AI is eating everything :-P.

Re: How the AI bubble ate Y Combinator

#30

Post by cjs_ac »

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…

Why do you need a community? Build the thing, and then launch the thing by talking to prospective customers. If you're building a SaaS, you don't need funding if you keep working a day job and build your product slowly.

The clever people are still doing good work, they're just doing so quietly.

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