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A college student reached $64k/mo in 6 months by being an AI first mover

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Re: A college student reached $64k/mo in 6 months by being an AI first mover

#51

Post by confoundcofound »

koochi10 wrote: post #39

I know this crowd / silicon valley is accustom to these kinds of stories. But we should remember that this is a college kid, who saw an opportunity and took initiative to build a business. The comments here are WAY too critical. We should celebrate these kinds of stories, instead of nitpicking. Additionally these 'A.I apps are just gold rush' comments are too dismissive about the potential. It may be that there are s…

I've been on HN almost since its inception and anecdotally over half of the comments on posts like this are from cranks with nothing productive to offer beyond mean-spirited and tone-deaf criticism. There have been posts of projects by young teens that have elicited unusually harsh feedback. Very few people here are willing to charitably acknowledge the effort and vision of a fellow hacker and to provide supportive guidance. They are the epitome of the "akshually" meme.

Re: A college student reached $64k/mo in 6 months by being an AI first mover

#52

Post by janalsncm »

yamtaddle wrote: post #25
neilv wrote: post #23

> As my time in university went on, I started to focus less on optimizing for FAANG (leetcode) and more on building side projects. That might or might not be a smart move in the current context, but the tragedy of students grinding Leetcode for obnoxious jobs gatekeeping needs to stop.

I'm pretty sure it's to keep FAANG workers from jumping ship too easily, in order to suppress wages. If it were actually for evaluation reasons, FAANG and friends would just get together and come up with some kind of certification with renewal requirements, saving themselves and everyone else an absolute shitload of time and money. [EDIT] My point is, the practice doesn't continue for "gatekeeping" for its own sake ,…

I interview people and ask LC-style questions. It’s not the only part of my interview nor is it a dealbreaker to not get the optimal solution. Being a savant capable of finding a mathematical breakthrough in 30 minutes is not important. But it gives me a chance to see how nimble you are with code which is important.

Re: A college student reached $64k/mo in 6 months by being an AI first mover

#53

Post by yamtaddle »

tqi wrote: post #43
yamtaddle wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Industry associations creating certifications w/ testing?

Hm IANAL so am definitely waaay out over my skis here, but I assume the optics of large employers mutually deciding who is/isn't qualified to work for them lends itself to accusations of collusion and wage suppression.

On the contrary, having a certification not tied to any particular employer (hell, any company could require or prefer X level of that certification) and letting candidates holding that certification skip the grueling, insanely-long hazing ritual they have to go through with every single company they interview at that's in a similar pay-bracket, would tend to do the opposite of wage suppression (versus the current system).

Test once, interview as much as you like for the next, I dunno, two years, no more multi-hour live leetcoding required (the employers shouldn't want to spend money on that, if they just need to make sure you can do it—the certification handles that). Some of the FAANGs already practically publish study guides, so it's not like they're opposed to making the system pretty damn clear and possible to study for. No, it must be that making each interview painful is the point. Else, why would someone who's already passed at two other FAANGs and also the very one they're applying to, a decade ago have to go through it yet again? It's incredibly expensive, and only makes sense if the point is to make sure employees think twice and then thrice about going on the job-hunt again.

Re: A college student reached $64k/mo in 6 months by being an AI first mover

#54

Post by HealthNeed »

becquerel wrote: post #38
atonse wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(genuinely asking) Is there another theoretical system that properly incentivizes people to compete with each other, innovate, and take risks to solve problems? I ask in the "build new solutions" space – we all know there are plenty of rent-seeking businesses that add no value but just take money from everyone. I'm not trying to defend any of that. I'm only asking in the case of "people doing new, innovative things a…

communism, because when everyone's basic needs are guaranteed they have the mental/physical bandwidth to be innovators, and without commodity fetishism, scientific advancements can be made for the sake of responding to human needs, rather than facilitating the creation of products

History says that while the idea may have merit, the implementation has been poor, tragic even.

Re: A college student reached $64k/mo in 6 months by being an AI first mover

#55

Post by paulpauper »

teach wrote: post #3

Somebody always wins the lottery. This doesn't mean that playing the lottery is a useful path to riches for anyone else. Edited to add: This is not an indictment on the college student in question! Congrats to him for being prepared to seize on an opportunity and executing well.

but this is 'doable' or reproducible; guessing correct numbers by chance is not. Even though there is some luck involved, this is more of a skill than just pure guessing.

Re: A college student reached $64k/mo in 6 months by being an AI first mover

#56

Post by echelon »

TrackerFF wrote: post #40

My first thought was: Good on him, that's solid revenue. My second thought was: This sounds like another idea that could easily be killed off by Google or similar companies, if they just add a "this is googlebert, your personalized analysis robot - just link your website/upload docs and ask away!" function. Or this kind of functionality simply becomes part of the batteries included package for ChatGPT etc.

He could raise and try to grow it across company docs - Slack, Jira, Gmail, other docs. That's something Google won't do well that would be incredibly valuable for lots of companies.

No way is being subsumed the only outcome.

Re: A college student reached $64k/mo in 6 months by being an AI first mover

#58

Post by james-revisoai »

Here's a post-mortem and the true history of this tooling approach and being a first mover, or not...

Pre 2021: Useful semantic search widely deployed, used for recommendations for sales. OpenAI has an answers endpoint specifically for this technical use case, full docs, and many companies implement this internally.

Mid 2022: People like me experiment with GPT answering using semantic context on dynamically uploaded content, e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7V3VkNj2bag - but cannot get approved for this use case by OpenAI.

Nov 2022: GPT had banned open ended responses and chat like interfaces until now. Explain paper is the first tool that allows you to chat with your PDFs with multiple questions, and to use it on many types of PDFs, released in November IIRC and viral on twitter: https://twitter.com/rauchg/status/1596220185727275008

December-January 2023: 15+ Chat with PDF tools are launched, including pre-hyped launches on ProductHunt from pivoting products January+ onwards: Almost daily launches, sometimes with USPs. I launched AnyQuestions.ai which was at the time the only question tool able to work with videos [1]. Chatbase catches virality on twitter and makes some other sound decisions [2].

Feburary 2023 onwards: No platforms since February have succeeded.

[1] But it took a long time to process with Whisper and the interface was more answer focused than chat-and-response focused; I also made bets on including a larger context and using non-typical embeddings (looking for entailment/contradictions of the sentence as well as semantic similarity) which turned out to not be the right commercial choice.

[2] Allowing embedding on websites, and sharing the Chatbase branding that way was powerful, as well as being able to easily work for new websites as a quick solution. It spread easily through competitor FOMO and was a fast product.

Re: A college student reached $64k/mo in 6 months by being an AI first mover

#59

Post by nicoburns »

ravenstine wrote: post #49
koochi10 wrote: post #39

I know this crowd / silicon valley is accustom to these kinds of stories. But we should remember that this is a college kid, who saw an opportunity and took initiative to build a business. The comments here are WAY too critical. We should celebrate these kinds of stories, instead of nitpicking. Additionally these 'A.I apps are just gold rush' comments are too dismissive about the potential. It may be that there are s…

A ton of HN'ers seem woefully butthurt over AI. I'm not saying that the current generation of AI is "smart" or "AGI", but every thread mentioning AI has a disproportionate amount of naysayers who think LLMs are either totally useless or that anything involving AI is "the next bitcoin." When people knee-jerk react negatively to these kinds of stories, I can only picture envy and an insecurity of not truly knowing wher…

I think the hype around AI is more like the dotcom boom. Like the internet (and mostly unlike cryptocurrency), AI is a genuinely useful technology and likely to be transformative over the long term. On the other hand, (and also like the internet) it's currently being peddled as the answer to absolutely everything, much of which is pretty ridiculous.

Re: A college student reached $64k/mo in 6 months by being an AI first mover

#60

Post by james-revisoai »

jrpt wrote: post #14
ulrikhansen54 wrote: post #2

There are several stories of companies going from $0 to >$5M ARR in just a few months with the boom in LLM-driven applications. The downside for these types of apps is that churn rates are through the roof, and will probs die when the LLM fad inevitably fizzles.

LLMs aren't a fad though. Yasser has thousands of customers paying him real money because they find value in what his product does. I'm running a somewhat similar website ( https://Docalysis.com/ ) where users chat with files, and it's clear there's a lot of value being added, so people are willing to pay. What's less clear is how this all plays out when there's more competition, but it's not like we'll all go out of…

Beware that most 2020-2021 OpenAI startups haven't survived to today, especially since ChatGPT allowed free use of most B2C use cases (article writing, paraphrasing, etc). I posted a brief postmortem of my experience from 2021 to 2023 when I did at one point launch a similar product to yours which, if you got into this more recently, may be worth reading.
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