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Lessons from YC AI Startups

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Re: Lessons from YC AI Startups

#81

Post by motohagiography »

atleastoptimal wrote: post #2

Something I've noticed going through founder's LinkedIn pages is that it seems that entrepreneurs seem to be significantly more attractive than the average person. I assume a partial causative factor could be that the number of positive impressions you make on people with influence correlates with success of your startup, and one's capacity to make positive interpersonal impressions correlates with physical attractiv…

If you take the intersection of people who are basically fit and lack latent or unmanaged anxiety disorders, then add people who are self motivated and driven, you're going to get a fairly attractive cohort.

Attractiveness is basically fitness and low neuroticism. If you have those and enough emotional intelligence to not be a criminal, you're going to generally fail upwards. Add any one of an elite education, a stdev above average intelligence, good mentoring, self awareness, or a competition level skill, and you can get a seat a most tables.

Re: Lessons from YC AI Startups

#82

Post by pixl97 »

norir wrote: post #75
ekanes wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> an individual's project to provide an AI therapist and while people here and there did mention the cons of having a program provide medical treatment, the overall sentiment wasn't at all negative. Sorta. You're forgetting to compare it to an alternative. Compared to a licensed therapist that you can find, schedule, travel to and afford... for some people an imperfect something is better than the nothing they have n…

For me, the idea of robots being necessary to provide needed therapy that otherwise would be unavailable is enough to induce existential despair. I really can't imagine it as a viable long term treatment. Much of the point of therapy is just having a human advocate who is invested in your wellbeing. AI therapy sends the message that human problems are not worthy of human attention.

> AI therapy sends the message that human problems are not worthy of human attention

Scratch 'AI therapy' and just put in capitalism and you have the answer to the problems we have.

Therapy is a job that people do to pay the bills after the 10th person they've seen that day.

Re: Lessons from YC AI Startups

#83

Post by pixl97 »

monero-xmr wrote: post #77
IKantRead wrote: post #74

> AI is (still) eating the world. Citation needed. I work in this space so am fairly optimistic, but it's worth pointing out we're still mostly talking about AI hype. Nothing has really been eaten at all yet from what I've seen. The article claims that there are tons of startups in this space, which is true, but that doesn't mean any of these startups have actually solved any major problems yet. As a reminder, we sti…

Any task in 2023 that requires paying a human in an expensive western country, despite all of the rules and regulations and legal liability and on and on, means someone tried to automate it already and failed. For whatever reason - the ambiguity, the physical dexterity, maybe it’s even union or government rules - it cannot be automated easily. So in comes LLMs. The developer thinks, “I know, I will just take all the…

Year 1900: Heavier than air flight will never happen, the failure is written before they even started.

Re: Lessons from YC AI Startups

#84

Post by pixl97 »

debacle wrote: post #70
jaynate wrote: post #8

Odd that the first two categories of AI startups were AI infrastructure. Reminds me of blockchain to some degree. Would have expected to see more vertically focused solution on the top 4 list. Eg, transportation, oil & gas, agriculture, etc… all huge markets.

It's startling how much transportation has already been optimized, and agriculture + AI is a natural pairing, but John Deere isn't a startup in the traditional sense. They've said they will have fully autonomous fleets by 2030.

JD has been doing "AI" since a significant portion of the HN readership was even born. Integration of digital info tech into farming was something I was reading about in the '80s and is now just standard on most farms. These days in things like crop fertilization your equipment 'learns' from maps and other tests the quality of the soil and increases/decreases the amount it outputs based on a pretty fine grid system.

Re: Lessons from YC AI Startups

#85

Post by pixl97 »

Supply5411 wrote: post #3

AI startups have inspired me to think more about what "value creation" really is. There's so many AI startups out there that add AI to make silly process X easier, when it really hides the problem of silly process X existing in the first place. From one perspective, adding AI solves the problem. From another perspective, it further entrenches the problem. Does this create net value? AI is both inspiring and demoraliz…

Getting rid of processes is in most industries far, far, far more difficult than you can imagine.

Most of the time you think you can get rid of the problem, it just means you don't understand what the "real problem" is. This is Chesterton's Fence in practice. Quite often when you have this 'silly process', it's about visibility into that process for auditing by others and ensuring legal compliance.

And for this reason it will always bet exponentially easier to provide a drop in replacement for a process then attempting to understand the system it exists in.

Re: Lessons from YC AI Startups

#86

Post by ekanes »

norir wrote: post #75
ekanes wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> an individual's project to provide an AI therapist and while people here and there did mention the cons of having a program provide medical treatment, the overall sentiment wasn't at all negative. Sorta. You're forgetting to compare it to an alternative. Compared to a licensed therapist that you can find, schedule, travel to and afford... for some people an imperfect something is better than the nothing they have n…

For me, the idea of robots being necessary to provide needed therapy that otherwise would be unavailable is enough to induce existential despair. I really can't imagine it as a viable long term treatment. Much of the point of therapy is just having a human advocate who is invested in your wellbeing. AI therapy sends the message that human problems are not worthy of human attention.

I don't disagree. That said we still live in a world that has always known hunger and war, and those are even lower on maslow's hierarchy. So my point is simply that we are where we are and that anything that helps is worth doing rather than not doing because the more ideal alternative isn't happening.

Re: Lessons from YC AI Startups

#87

Post by noduerme »

pixl97 wrote: post #82
norir wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me, the idea of robots being necessary to provide needed therapy that otherwise would be unavailable is enough to induce existential despair. I really can't imagine it as a viable long term treatment. Much of the point of therapy is just having a human advocate who is invested in your wellbeing. AI therapy sends the message that human problems are not worthy of human attention.

> AI therapy sends the message that human problems are not worthy of human attention Scratch 'AI therapy' and just put in capitalism and you have the answer to the problems we have. Therapy is a job that people do to pay the bills after the 10th person they've seen that day.

>> Therapy is a job that people do to pay the bills after the 10th person they've seen that day.

You're contradicting yourself. Either therapists actually care, or they wouldn't do their job without capitalist incentives. Which is it?

Re: Lessons from YC AI Startups

#89

Post by pixl97 »

noduerme wrote: post #87
pixl97 wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> AI therapy sends the message that human problems are not worthy of human attention Scratch 'AI therapy' and just put in capitalism and you have the answer to the problems we have. Therapy is a job that people do to pay the bills after the 10th person they've seen that day.

>> Therapy is a job that people do to pay the bills after the 10th person they've seen that day. You're contradicting yourself. Either therapists actually care, or they wouldn't do their job without capitalist incentives. Which is it?

You seem to only deal with black and white situations, reality rarely present clean cut scenarios like that.

For example I deal directly with customers quite often. The amount of "I give a fuck" is much higher at 8AM then it is at 4PM. To find people that can give out a continuous amount of caring at 40 hours a week is difficult. Then you tend to have some percentage of employees that "Don't give a fuck" at all and are there for a paycheck.

It turns out that if you take away that paycheck you'll find that 99% of your therapists and your engineers will go do something else. :)

Re: Lessons from YC AI Startups

#90

Post by distant_hat »

siva7 wrote: post #37
somenameforme wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Contrary to Hollywood stereotypes, attractiveness and IQ are extremely strongly correlated. You can find a million studies affirming this with a search - it's not controversial, though the reason for it is. For the lazy here's a random study. [1] The typical effort to dismiss it is to claim it's a bias or halo effect. But as that paper lays out there's a really simple and logical explanation for it as well. Intellige…

It's not exactly scientific evidence that intelligence is highly heritable.

There's a ton of well controlled studies that show the degree to which intelligence is heritable. This is not really controversial.
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