How the AI bubble ate Y Combinator • Hacker News Board

Re: How the AI bubble ate Y Combinator

#71

Post by htrp » Tue, Sep 30, 2025, 3:39 PM UTC

kordlessagain wrote: post #58

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…

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.…

Start a foundation model company ?

Re: How the AI bubble ate Y Combinator

#72

Post by carderne » Tue, Sep 30, 2025, 3:39 PM UTC

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…

If building a foundation model [1] isn’t “AI” then I’m not sure what is.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundation_model

Re: How the AI bubble ate Y Combinator

#73

Post by pavon » Tue, Sep 30, 2025, 3:41 PM UTC

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…

I agree in general that keyword searching for a buzzword will have false positives, as people work it in to their description just to ride the trend. However, that is a bad example. If the core of your business is developing new AI models, then you are an AI startup. Personally I think it is great that someone is using the recent breakthroughs in AI and applying it to something other than LLMs, as well as trying to fuse rules based systems (physics) and AI. Way more interesting than AI startups that are just trying to slap an LLM onto a task that it isn't ready for. But still an AI startup.

Re: How the AI bubble ate Y Combinator

#74

Post by saltcured » Tue, Sep 30, 2025, 3:42 PM UTC

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 ones along the highway that make sense to me are for iPhones and such.

Re: How the AI bubble ate Y Combinator

#75

Post by paxys » Tue, Sep 30, 2025, 3:42 PM UTC

512 wrote: post #56

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.

The smart kids might be happy to work on model interpretability research at Anthropic. But 90% of AI companies are ChatGPT wrappers which don't sound particularly fun.

The vast majority of engineers out there don't have the skills to work in core AI development, so the only option for "working in AI" is building one of these API wrappers.

Re: How the AI bubble ate Y Combinator

#76

Post by Imustaskforhelp » Tue, Sep 30, 2025, 3:43 PM UTC

SoftTalker wrote: post #69

schlauerfox wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Just like every existing SaaS and Enterprise platform is. It's just a new checkbox that you must have.

Why almost lie though? Like, if I am a company and I integrate AI just to say to my investors that I got AI so that they can not feel FOMO is utterly bonkers and well, I don't know but the investors definitely don't sound reasonable and I think that the people who are somehow lending money to these investors who are investing on such basis definitely need to think about their life choices if the company in their portfolio is selected or not just because of this seemingly bizarre checkbox that most general public is actually in fact against of having.

Re: How the AI bubble ate Y Combinator

#77

Post by furyofantares » Tue, Sep 30, 2025, 3:43 PM UTC

tobias3 wrote: post #35

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.

LLMs are good at prototyping something that is similar to something that already exists and is open sourced. It may be that there are such projects which can be monetized or need better marketing. Innovative it is not, however.

I suspect the vast majority of innovations are a combination of a small number of things that already exist.

Almost nobody is making things that are so unlike everything that previously existed that LLMs can't help.

Re: How the AI bubble ate Y Combinator

#78

Post by minimaxir » Tue, Sep 30, 2025, 3:43 PM UTC

Imustaskforhelp wrote: post #50

jsheard wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How would that even work to be profitable? I don't see a way on how they can suddenly become profitable if I can be honest when the fundamental economics of the thing seems a little broken to me...

Additional revenue services aside from selling LLM tokens, such as the commerce play OpenAI announced yesterday.

Re: How the AI bubble ate Y Combinator

#79

Post by ashwindharne » Tue, Sep 30, 2025, 3:45 PM UTC

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 this is almost certain to make someone a lot of money. All these YC companies are just different random initializations of potential ways that this new generation of AI can affect the world. It's a given that most startups of this breed will fizzle out with no impact, but I imagine that a few of them will actually change how something is done (and make a lot of money in the meantime).

Re: How the AI bubble ate Y Combinator

#80

Post by dragonwriter » Tue, Sep 30, 2025, 3:45 PM UTC

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…

> For example, I picked one startup at random, Topological, which is "developing physics-based foundation models for CAD optimization." Just because the company uses AI doesn't make it an "AI startup."

It is interesting that you have an opinion on what a real AI startup is and either (1) don’t know what foundation models are, or (2) do know what foundation models are but think that a company whose core focus is on developing them for a particular field is just a startup that uses AI but not one one whose core business is AI.