7 ms·

YC offers early interviews for AI companies

49 points by craftsquick 3y ago

joos3 3y ago
Big mistake imo to hop on trendy grifts. Please focus on the founders as before.
- jacquesm 3y ago
  They will still do that, but within the context of having an application that takes advantage of recent developments in AI. Whether that's smart or not is an open question, time will tell. But, given that YC is a seed level investor (with some follow on capacity) it makes sense because the 'downstream' VCs are handing out money like candy to start-ups that can plausibly claim to be AI startups. The idea is that some of these will go on to corner their respective markets and that by getting in early you guarantee yourself a place at the table later on. Whether that is smart is also an open question.
  - ilaksh 3y ago
    When you say handing out money like candy, it makes me think I should try to apply to something. I am spending most of my time doing low-paying contracts that integrate generative AI for other companies or startups. And then I use that money to build out my own project for a few weeks before I run out of money and have to get another contract. If it's actually easy to get money? How would I find a VC who would be impressed by my actual technical ability as opposed to something like marketing or networking prowess? I tend to not spend a lot of time on making slick web pages and promoting myself but focus on implementing features. Right now my own thing is a ChatGPT plugin that generates web pages including appropriate images using a template and stable diffusion. I am working on building in a CRUD system that GPT-4 will have concise docs for, as well as a user login system and an API proxy and secrets management. This way the system should be able to create fully functional websites. The previous version integrates GPT-4 with fly.io VMs so that it directly executes commands in a loop to accomplish tasks. But the plugin is on hold to work for some other startup so I can make rent and stuff. I am building out a simple generative fill inpainting/outpainting editor inspired by Playground.ai. Previously for this other startup I created a Dreambooth tool and a live editing scribble image generation thing with Controlnet. And before that I was working on a Slack bot where you can ask it questions about PDF or other documents, and another that used GPT to write SQL for querying a specific table and optionally creating charts on the fly. I guess I am just suspecting that maybe working on all of these other startups to pay the bills isn't necessary if I ask the right person for money. Which I never really seriously considered as an option.
    - xwdv 3y ago
      You have to be a bit of a charlatan to really get the money. If you’re not willing to do that then maybe it’s not for you.
      - ilaksh 3y ago
        Well.. I guess I have had the impression that people who get investments or grants are often better at convincing people to give them money than actually solving problems. But can you elaborate on why you put it like that, "a bit of a charlatan"?
        xwdv 3y ago
        You have to be willing to tell them what they want to hear and hit the right notes, even if you know it’s not necessarily true or accurate.
        jacquesm 3y ago
        Not necessarily. Not all founders and not all VCs are cut from the same cloth.
    - jacquesm 3y ago
      It's easy, but you have to wonder if it is really what you want. Your chances of seeing it through to the end are probably the same as every other start-up and taking VC money comes with a ton of strings attached. More about this: https://jacquesmattheij.com/three-roads-to-the-top-of-the-mountain/ https://jacquesmattheij.com/three-roads-to-the-top-of-the-mo...
      - ilaksh 3y ago
        Thanks for the link to the article. It's a great article. My interpretation of your response is that you would suggest I do not try to get any investment and rather continue to do the contracts, but otherwise following the specific advice on the "third road" from the article. I think I have been ineffectually following something like the "third road" for ten years already. Although in my case maybe instead of a road up a stately mountain, it's more like getting lost in a ghetto, because I do not seem to progress beyond the low-paying contracts or get any significant interest in my startup attempts. Probably I have just gotten used to them.
- ToJans 3y ago
  Unless VCs hope to get their profits from the "bigger fool"?
voz_ 3y ago
[flagged]
- cbg0 3y ago
  So, business as usual then?
spacebanana7 3y ago
I thought YC backed individual founders and ideas rather than general technologies or sectors.
- marcopicentini 3y ago
  It’s common during a bubble to lose fundamental principles.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- dang 3y ago
  YC has a long tradition of soliciting applications in particular areas—see the links below. Of course, founders with other ideas are entirely welcome to apply. Startup Ideas We'd Like to Fund - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=250704 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=250704 - July 2008 (380 comments) A New Experiment: The RFS - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=766703 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=766703 - Aug 2009 (57 comments) YCRFS 1: The Future of Journalism - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=766796 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=766796 - Aug 2009 (56 comments) YCRFS 2: New Paths Through Product Space - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=768425 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=768425 - Aug 2009 (21 comments) YCRFS 3: Things Built on Twitter - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=904193 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=904193 - Oct 2009 (67 comments) YCRFS 4: New Ways to Use Live Video - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=904195 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=904195 - Oct 2009 (19 comments) RFS 5: Development on Handhelds - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=950781 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=950781 - Nov 2009 (44 comments) YCRFS 6: iPad Applications - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1160140 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1160140 - March 2010 (106 comments) YCRFS 7: Applications of Facebook Instant Personalization - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1638004 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1638004 - Aug 2010 (29 comments) Request for Startups: Kill Hollywood. - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3491542 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3491542 - Jan 2012 (664 comments) New Requests for Startups - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8308666 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8308666 - Sept 2014 (390 comments) Requests for Startups Refreshed - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12592619 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12592619 - Sept 2016 (124 comments) Request for Startups: Water - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13311257 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13311257 - Jan 2017 (224 comments)
znpy 3y ago
Early? The sector is quite mature by now, they’re basically late to the game.
- haunter 3y ago
  Early by YC schedule >early interview slots for the YC W24 batch The general deadline for W24 is September 11 But this early round for AI companies is available until July 17
- ignoramous 3y ago
  YC.org literally backed OpenAI in 2015, Cruise a year before that, and ScaleAI a year after that. Per YC's publicly available records, the earliest they funded a ML/AI business was in 2008. They aren't late, but this AI specific Early Decision may be in reaction to funds like AIGrant.org, SouthParkCommons, Neo et al. https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/?tags=AI&tags=Machine%20Learning&tags=Generative%20AI&tags=Computer%20Vision&tags=NLP&tags=AI-powered%20Drug%20Discovery&tags=AI-Enhanced%20Learning&tags=AI%20Assistant&tags=ML&tags=AR https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/?tags=AI&tags=Machine%...
  - jacquesm 3y ago
    Exactly, the chances of getting funding for AI companies are up considerably and if YC doesn't fund them someone else will. To get a seat at the table they need to move faster compared to their normal schedule.
marcopicentini 3y ago
I develop a few interesting features using OpenAI in an existing product. After a wow-effects of the first days, few users are still using it. If I talk to users they say features are awesome but they are not actually using it. Really funny. Do you have experience of OpenAI API-based product that has high retention ?
- ignoramous 3y ago
  > Do you have experience of OpenAI API-based product that has high retention? perplexity.ai comes to mind. I introduced it to my students at uni a few weeks ago and they now use it extensively over Bard/ChatGPT. There are others too, like copy-writing tools (jasper.ai, copy.ai) who seem to be doing well. Besides, from experience, GitHub Copilot is so good, I can barely program without it.
- weird-eye-issue 3y ago
  Yes I developed a SaaS and the functionality is solely based on output from OpenAI. We have several thousand paying users already with ARR above $1.5M
  - opdahl 3y ago
    May I ask what your profit margins are? Why can't someone just use ChatGPT instead?
    - weird-eye-issue 3y ago
      Around 85% profit. It wouldn't be possible to get the same result from ChatGPT without a ton of prompt engineering and manually retrieving data and inserting that into your prompts. Plus, we don't just do a single API call and call it a day. A single button press in our app can set off a process which calls the OpenAI API over a dozen times plus retrieves data from several other APIs to help with the prompting
      - opdahl 3y ago
jaggederest 3y ago
> companies building AI developer tools. There it is, that's where you want to be - selling shovels during the gold rush.
- stagger87 3y ago
  The only one selling shovels is nvidia.
  - jerrygenser 3y ago
    They are selling wood and metal to make shovels, which is substrate. There are shovel sellers which are making tools. Then there are application makers that end users see that are made with shovels.
lemper 3y ago
I can't wait to see this bubble bursting spectacularly.
- rvz 3y ago
  A great opportunity to sell then during the rush in capital from the VCs throwing money at any company filled with AI buzzwords before it all collapses.
  - detourdog 3y ago
    I have been working on the same idea since the 90's. I find humorous that I could describe the idea I have been working on, using the buzzwords of every funding excitement of wave.
jacquesm 3y ago
The AI feeding frenzy in VC land is reminiscent of the early days of the public access internet aka the .com boom. That corrected itself sharply but eventually most of those .com boom dreams came out, just a bit later and lots of VCs lost lots of money because they got the timing wrong. Every time there is a major shift in tech you see this pattern repeat but I don't recall seeing it on that scale again since ~2000, even though lots of stuff has happened since then (for instance: the mobile revolution). Investing in AI for the sake of companies using AI because it increases their chances of funding is the hallmark of a bubble, and that will probably end the same way it did before. But if you manage to pick the winners early it will pay off in spades. The big question to me is whether or not those winners will be part of the first wave or the second, usually it takes a while before a new technology really comes into its strength. Until then there is a pretty big risk that what looks to be an early winner will be displaced by a party from the second wave which is better positioned to take advantage of later, more mature versions of that technology, which by then may well be able to displace those 'early winners' by a couple of guys with an open source package. Not an easy time to be an investor.
- ethbr0 3y ago
  Total addressable market and value proposition are key. A specific technology doesn't really change either of these. "I am going to sell pet supplies to people who need pet supplies" Okay, how many people need pet supplies and why would they use you instead of the store down the street (in the 90s)? "I am going to sell books to people who need books" Is obviously a better proposition, even before we get into the fact that it's "online" or uses any specific technology!
  - asterix_pano 3y ago
    Why is the second one a better proposition?
    - ethbr0 3y ago
      Because the TAM of people who want books is a lot larger than people who want pet supplies, and there are compelling reasons why people would rather buy books from centralized warehouses than local inventories (namely, that books have a long tail and pet supplies do not).
glenngillen 3y ago
Isn’t this the same logic the crypto bulls said during their mania?
- CPLX 3y ago
  The difference is crypto is useless and AI is useful. That’s a pretty important difference.
  - rvz 3y ago
    > The difference is crypto is useless and AI is useful. Is that why Stripe, TicketMaster, Moneygram, Checkout.com, TransferGo, VISA, etc and many other companies continue to use it? > That’s a pretty important difference. Nope. The important difference is that crypto has energy efficient alternative methods of consensus available today such as proof-of-stake, byzantine fault tolerance (BFT), etc and even a former PoW blockchain (Ethereum) cut their emissions by 99.99% [0] by switching to a proof-of-stake consensus method. For crypto it is possible to switch to greener methods. AI (Deep Learning) continues to destroy the planet since it has no efficient alternative methods available for training, fine-tuning and inference. This means their methods waste tons of resources, water and electricity. [1] [2] It is a serious issue in the field after decades of its existence all to produce unexplainable black-box AI models which cannot reason and have to be retrained, fine-tuned again once it gets confused by a single pixel or regurgitates nonsense output. The AI hype is another grift that the VCs are taking advantage of just like they did with thousands of crypto companies. The reality is, 90% of these AI / crypto companies will fail and the remaining 10% will still be around that are useful. [0] https://consensys.net/blog/press-release/ethereum-blockchain-eliminates-99-99-of-its-carbon-footprint-overnight-after-a-successful-merge-according-to-new-report/ https://consensys.net/blog/press-release/ethereum-blockchain... [1] https://gizmodo.com/chatgpt-ai-water-185000-gallons-training-nuclear-1850324249 https://gizmodo.com/chatgpt-ai-water-185000-gallons-training... [2] https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/chatgpt-data-centre-water-consumption-b2318972.html https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/chatgpt-data-centre-water...
    - JumpCrisscross 3y ago
schizo89 3y ago
I'm curious whether AI aligns with startups. IMHO it does not well. It aligns with academia where time flow differently. Business then takes what an academia produces -- i.e. papers / methods / algorithms and implements it to generate value for customers. It doesn't align with startups as well in case if you have a method and require a lot of compute to produce a model -- you need capital for compute and that's not a typical garage startup. I'm really curious whether there is any opportunity left for YC-sized startups in AI. I lot of really cool developments happen on github -- but again that's open source, not ventures to generate money.
supergirl 3y ago
the new generation LLM are just better Siri/Alexa. why such hype about them
schappim 3y ago
Anyone had any interview offers?

49 points by craftsquick 3y ago

joos3 3y ago

Big mistake imo to hop on trendy grifts. Please focus on the founders as before.

jacquesm 3y ago
They will still do that, but within the context of having an application that takes advantage of recent developments in AI. Whether that's smart or not is an open question, time will tell. But, given that YC is a seed level investor (with some follow on capacity) it makes sense because the 'downstream' VCs are handing out money like candy to start-ups that can plausibly claim to be AI startups. The idea is that some of these will go on to corner their respective markets and that by getting in early you guarantee yourself a place at the table later on. Whether that is smart is also an open question.
- ilaksh 3y ago
  When you say handing out money like candy, it makes me think I should try to apply to something. I am spending most of my time doing low-paying contracts that integrate generative AI for other companies or startups. And then I use that money to build out my own project for a few weeks before I run out of money and have to get another contract. If it's actually easy to get money? How would I find a VC who would be impressed by my actual technical ability as opposed to something like marketing or networking prowess? I tend to not spend a lot of time on making slick web pages and promoting myself but focus on implementing features. Right now my own thing is a ChatGPT plugin that generates web pages including appropriate images using a template and stable diffusion. I am working on building in a CRUD system that GPT-4 will have concise docs for, as well as a user login system and an API proxy and secrets management. This way the system should be able to create fully functional websites. The previous version integrates GPT-4 with fly.io VMs so that it directly executes commands in a loop to accomplish tasks. But the plugin is on hold to work for some other startup so I can make rent and stuff. I am building out a simple generative fill inpainting/outpainting editor inspired by Playground.ai. Previously for this other startup I created a Dreambooth tool and a live editing scribble image generation thing with Controlnet. And before that I was working on a Slack bot where you can ask it questions about PDF or other documents, and another that used GPT to write SQL for querying a specific table and optionally creating charts on the fly. I guess I am just suspecting that maybe working on all of these other startups to pay the bills isn't necessary if I ask the right person for money. Which I never really seriously considered as an option.
  - xwdv 3y ago
    You have to be a bit of a charlatan to really get the money. If you’re not willing to do that then maybe it’s not for you.
    - ilaksh 3y ago
      Well.. I guess I have had the impression that people who get investments or grants are often better at convincing people to give them money than actually solving problems. But can you elaborate on why you put it like that, "a bit of a charlatan"?
      - xwdv 3y ago
        You have to be willing to tell them what they want to hear and hit the right notes, even if you know it’s not necessarily true or accurate.
        jacquesm 3y ago
        Not necessarily. Not all founders and not all VCs are cut from the same cloth.
  - jacquesm 3y ago
    It's easy, but you have to wonder if it is really what you want. Your chances of seeing it through to the end are probably the same as every other start-up and taking VC money comes with a ton of strings attached. More about this: https://jacquesmattheij.com/three-roads-to-the-top-of-the-mountain/ https://jacquesmattheij.com/three-roads-to-the-top-of-the-mo...
    - ilaksh 3y ago
      Thanks for the link to the article. It's a great article. My interpretation of your response is that you would suggest I do not try to get any investment and rather continue to do the contracts, but otherwise following the specific advice on the "third road" from the article. I think I have been ineffectually following something like the "third road" for ten years already. Although in my case maybe instead of a road up a stately mountain, it's more like getting lost in a ghetto, because I do not seem to progress beyond the low-paying contracts or get any significant interest in my startup attempts. Probably I have just gotten used to them.
ToJans 3y ago
Unless VCs hope to get their profits from the "bigger fool"?

voz_ 3y ago

[flagged]

cbg0 3y ago
So, business as usual then?

spacebanana7 3y ago

I thought YC backed individual founders and ideas rather than general technologies or sectors.

marcopicentini 3y ago
It’s common during a bubble to lose fundamental principles.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
dang 3y ago
YC has a long tradition of soliciting applications in particular areas—see the links below. Of course, founders with other ideas are entirely welcome to apply. Startup Ideas We'd Like to Fund - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=250704 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=250704 - July 2008 (380 comments) A New Experiment: The RFS - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=766703 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=766703 - Aug 2009 (57 comments) YCRFS 1: The Future of Journalism - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=766796 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=766796 - Aug 2009 (56 comments) YCRFS 2: New Paths Through Product Space - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=768425 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=768425 - Aug 2009 (21 comments) YCRFS 3: Things Built on Twitter - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=904193 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=904193 - Oct 2009 (67 comments) YCRFS 4: New Ways to Use Live Video - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=904195 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=904195 - Oct 2009 (19 comments) RFS 5: Development on Handhelds - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=950781 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=950781 - Nov 2009 (44 comments) YCRFS 6: iPad Applications - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1160140 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1160140 - March 2010 (106 comments) YCRFS 7: Applications of Facebook Instant Personalization - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1638004 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1638004 - Aug 2010 (29 comments) Request for Startups: Kill Hollywood. - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3491542 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3491542 - Jan 2012 (664 comments) New Requests for Startups - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8308666 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8308666 - Sept 2014 (390 comments) Requests for Startups Refreshed - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12592619 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12592619 - Sept 2016 (124 comments) Request for Startups: Water - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13311257 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13311257 - Jan 2017 (224 comments)

znpy 3y ago

Early? The sector is quite mature by now, they’re basically late to the game.

haunter 3y ago
Early by YC schedule >early interview slots for the YC W24 batch The general deadline for W24 is September 11 But this early round for AI companies is available until July 17
ignoramous 3y ago
YC.org literally backed OpenAI in 2015, Cruise a year before that, and ScaleAI a year after that. Per YC's publicly available records, the earliest they funded a ML/AI business was in 2008. They aren't late, but this AI specific Early Decision may be in reaction to funds like AIGrant.org, SouthParkCommons, Neo et al. https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/?tags=AI&tags=Machine%20Learning&tags=Generative%20AI&tags=Computer%20Vision&tags=NLP&tags=AI-powered%20Drug%20Discovery&tags=AI-Enhanced%20Learning&tags=AI%20Assistant&tags=ML&tags=AR https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/?tags=AI&tags=Machine%...
- jacquesm 3y ago
  Exactly, the chances of getting funding for AI companies are up considerably and if YC doesn't fund them someone else will. To get a seat at the table they need to move faster compared to their normal schedule.

marcopicentini 3y ago

I develop a few interesting features using OpenAI in an existing product. After a wow-effects of the first days, few users are still using it. If I talk to users they say features are awesome but they are not actually using it. Really funny. Do you have experience of OpenAI API-based product that has high retention ?

ignoramous 3y ago
> Do you have experience of OpenAI API-based product that has high retention? perplexity.ai comes to mind. I introduced it to my students at uni a few weeks ago and they now use it extensively over Bard/ChatGPT. There are others too, like copy-writing tools (jasper.ai, copy.ai) who seem to be doing well. Besides, from experience, GitHub Copilot is so good, I can barely program without it.
weird-eye-issue 3y ago
Yes I developed a SaaS and the functionality is solely based on output from OpenAI. We have several thousand paying users already with ARR above $1.5M
- opdahl 3y ago
  May I ask what your profit margins are? Why can't someone just use ChatGPT instead?
  - weird-eye-issue 3y ago
    Around 85% profit. It wouldn't be possible to get the same result from ChatGPT without a ton of prompt engineering and manually retrieving data and inserting that into your prompts. Plus, we don't just do a single API call and call it a day. A single button press in our app can set off a process which calls the OpenAI API over a dozen times plus retrieves data from several other APIs to help with the prompting
    - opdahl 3y ago

jaggederest 3y ago

> companies building AI developer tools. There it is, that's where you want to be - selling shovels during the gold rush.

stagger87 3y ago
The only one selling shovels is nvidia.
- jerrygenser 3y ago
  They are selling wood and metal to make shovels, which is substrate. There are shovel sellers which are making tools. Then there are application makers that end users see that are made with shovels.

lemper 3y ago

I can't wait to see this bubble bursting spectacularly.

rvz 3y ago
A great opportunity to sell then during the rush in capital from the VCs throwing money at any company filled with AI buzzwords before it all collapses.
- detourdog 3y ago
  I have been working on the same idea since the 90's. I find humorous that I could describe the idea I have been working on, using the buzzwords of every funding excitement of wave.

jacquesm 3y ago

The AI feeding frenzy in VC land is reminiscent of the early days of the public access internet aka the .com boom. That corrected itself sharply but eventually most of those .com boom dreams came out, just a bit later and lots of VCs lost lots of money because they got the timing wrong. Every time there is a major shift in tech you see this pattern repeat but I don't recall seeing it on that scale again since ~2000, even though lots of stuff has happened since then (for instance: the mobile revolution). Investing in AI for the sake of companies using AI because it increases their chances of funding is the hallmark of a bubble, and that will probably end the same way it did before. But if you manage to pick the winners early it will pay off in spades. The big question to me is whether or not those winners will be part of the first wave or the second, usually it takes a while before a new technology really comes into its strength. Until then there is a pretty big risk that what looks to be an early winner will be displaced by a party from the second wave which is better positioned to take advantage of later, more mature versions of that technology, which by then may well be able to displace those 'early winners' by a couple of guys with an open source package. Not an easy time to be an investor.

ethbr0 3y ago
Total addressable market and value proposition are key. A specific technology doesn't really change either of these. "I am going to sell pet supplies to people who need pet supplies" Okay, how many people need pet supplies and why would they use you instead of the store down the street (in the 90s)? "I am going to sell books to people who need books" Is obviously a better proposition, even before we get into the fact that it's "online" or uses any specific technology!
- asterix_pano 3y ago
  Why is the second one a better proposition?
  - ethbr0 3y ago
    Because the TAM of people who want books is a lot larger than people who want pet supplies, and there are compelling reasons why people would rather buy books from centralized warehouses than local inventories (namely, that books have a long tail and pet supplies do not).

glenngillen 3y ago

Isn’t this the same logic the crypto bulls said during their mania?

CPLX 3y ago
The difference is crypto is useless and AI is useful. That’s a pretty important difference.
- rvz 3y ago
  > The difference is crypto is useless and AI is useful. Is that why Stripe, TicketMaster, Moneygram, Checkout.com, TransferGo, VISA, etc and many other companies continue to use it? > That’s a pretty important difference. Nope. The important difference is that crypto has energy efficient alternative methods of consensus available today such as proof-of-stake, byzantine fault tolerance (BFT), etc and even a former PoW blockchain (Ethereum) cut their emissions by 99.99% [0] by switching to a proof-of-stake consensus method. For crypto it is possible to switch to greener methods. AI (Deep Learning) continues to destroy the planet since it has no efficient alternative methods available for training, fine-tuning and inference. This means their methods waste tons of resources, water and electricity. [1] [2] It is a serious issue in the field after decades of its existence all to produce unexplainable black-box AI models which cannot reason and have to be retrained, fine-tuned again once it gets confused by a single pixel or regurgitates nonsense output. The AI hype is another grift that the VCs are taking advantage of just like they did with thousands of crypto companies. The reality is, 90% of these AI / crypto companies will fail and the remaining 10% will still be around that are useful. [0] https://consensys.net/blog/press-release/ethereum-blockchain-eliminates-99-99-of-its-carbon-footprint-overnight-after-a-successful-merge-according-to-new-report/ https://consensys.net/blog/press-release/ethereum-blockchain... [1] https://gizmodo.com/chatgpt-ai-water-185000-gallons-training-nuclear-1850324249 https://gizmodo.com/chatgpt-ai-water-185000-gallons-training... [2] https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/chatgpt-data-centre-water-consumption-b2318972.html https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/chatgpt-data-centre-water...
  - JumpCrisscross 3y ago

schizo89 3y ago

I'm curious whether AI aligns with startups. IMHO it does not well. It aligns with academia where time flow differently. Business then takes what an academia produces -- i.e. papers / methods / algorithms and implements it to generate value for customers. It doesn't align with startups as well in case if you have a method and require a lot of compute to produce a model -- you need capital for compute and that's not a typical garage startup. I'm really curious whether there is any opportunity left for YC-sized startups in AI. I lot of really cool developments happen on github -- but again that's open source, not ventures to generate money.

supergirl 3y ago

the new generation LLM are just better Siri/Alexa. why such hype about them

schappim 3y ago

Anyone had any interview offers?