15 ms·

How the AI bubble ate Y Combinator

206 points by davidw 1y ago

tipiirai 1y ago
90% (154/170) of the latest HN summer batch are AI startups. I was expecting a lot, but not this much.
- koolba 1y ago
  I would love to see the same stat for submissions as a whole. I bet it’s even higher.
  - TuxSH 1y ago
    shownew is flooded with those
- schlauerfox 1y ago
  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?
  - SoftTalker 1y ago
    Just like every existing SaaS and Enterprise platform is. It's just a new checkbox that you must have.
    - Imustaskforhelp 1y ago
      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.
      - ryandrake 1y ago
        I don't think anyone anywhere on the totem pole: from the junior engineer, to the engineering manager, to the founder, to the VC, to the investors, cares if it's actually AI. They just want to see the word there. Someone got it into their head that "AI is the thing now" and now the junior engineer isn't going to get hired unless he says AI. The Eng manager is not going to get promoted unless he talks about managing AI. The Founder is not going to be funded unless he says the company relates to AI. The VC is not going to line up investors unless he says AI. And investors have no clue what to do with their money, but heard somewhere that "AI is the thing now" and that's where they want to flush their money. Nobody really wants any of this shit as a product.
        Imustaskforhelp 1y ago
        Why sell shit that you don't want yourself/ aren't passionate about?? That is just exploitative of sorts on preying people who don't have enough knowledge about AI let's say... And this behaviour shouldn't be condoned though > And investors have no clue what to do with their money, but heard somewhere that "AI is the thing now" and that's where they want to flush their money. This is where the system needs to change, People need to realize this that maybe AI is in a bit of bubble right now and not try to invest in such things... But profits.... Shush, profits can come another day if business has good solid financials otherwise welp, that isn't investing, that's just speculating in the AI bubble
        johnnyanmac 1y ago
        >Why sell shit that you don't want yourself/ aren't passionate about?? Best interpreation: you need to pay bills and this startup is your last hope after sending out 500 apps and getting 3 interviews back (2 interviews ghosted you after the first round and the 3rd said "overqualified" despite it being a senior role) Worst interpretation: we're in a gold rush, and a lot of people will sell fool's gold if they can.
        Imustaskforhelp 1y ago
  - insane_dreamer 1y ago
    Literally every tech startup company out there is spinning itself as AI. I’m familiar with some of them well enough to know that the AI is bullshit. You could be running an SVM on some data and you’re now “powered by AI”. I’m not joking.
- rvz 1y ago
  "AI startups." Only around 10% of them will succeed at best. If a massive crash happens then it would be 2% at best.
  - dheera 1y ago
    The real AI startups are those who are using AI to make profits on day 0. They will outlive a crash. They don't need Y Combinator.
  - pixl97 1y ago
    So like internet startups in the 90s. Like .com in the late 90s. Like social media startups in the late 2000s/2010s. It's all cycles. Every bubble is talked about on HN (and similar sites) because that's the purpose of sites like this.
    - skeeter2020 1y ago
      maybe a big difference is those hype cycles were net-positive for developers. This is the first one in a while that has VCs and upper management salivating with the idea of cutting all the devs lose. Who do YOU think this is likely to replace first, technical developers or administrators?
      - xcf_seetan 1y ago
        It worries me a lot what are those devs without jobs now, will do next? Do they change to the dark side and start battling AI startups and technologies?
      - pixl97 1y ago
        "Developers surprised automation takes them out after decades of taking other people out with automation" But hey, mention the word union here and you'll still get beat with a stick.
        johnnyanmac 1y ago
        That's the stupid part. Nothing is actually automated yet. AI is just a smokescreen for the recession we're clearly in but no one wants to say out loud. And I sense a reckoning on the horizon. There's a reason the 10's were filled with billionaire (now trillionaire) tech companies poaching any potential talent that can rise against them. That knowledge is still there and rife to disrupt. >mention the word union here and you'll still get beat with a stick. I'm in the games industry. It's slow but people are starting to wake up here. Only took decades of abuse, instability, and rampant layoffs in an industry alreaady known for regular layoffs. But you know the quote about Churchill and Americans.
- pton_xd 1y ago
  I've also noticed many startups from prior YC batches that haven't found traction yet have pivoted to AI-related offerings. It's been kind of amusing to watch them become absorbed into the hype cycle, one by one.
  - brazukadev 1y ago
    And still fail
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
devin 1y ago
“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.
- hobs 1y ago
  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.
  - badsectoracula 1y ago
    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.
    - Imustaskforhelp 1y ago
      I do think that another topic on how AI is eating everything could be nice given how nobody is still believing it and somebody had shared the list of YC companies with AI and you had to see how long the list was and how unimaginative it was, to me it felt Like X but AI, Y but AI.... You yourself say that AI is overhyped and that overhype has formed into a bubble of sorts which has eaten Y combinator. Also I probably don't understand how your point is relevant to the parent comment if I am honest or maybe I am not finding the relevance in which case feel free to explain it so that I learn something new
- kordlessagain 1y ago
  Yup. They couldn't devops/mlops their way out of a paper bag if they had to.
frameset 1y ago
It's certainly eating up a lot of the threads on HN.
- CaptainOfCoit 1y ago
  [flagged]
- Imustaskforhelp 1y ago
  Exactly my thoughts. Couldn't agree more really, there is so much to discuss on this short time that we have on earth but a lot of that energy is going into talking about AI and AI again it seems. I have nothing against the tech but c'mon I would argue that open source itself overall is more valuable than AI but that isn't an apples to orange comparison but still, I see far fewer discussions of open source as compared to AI. Maybe Open source is just on mind a lot these recent days.
  - pixl97 1y ago
    >I see far fewer discussions of open source as compared to AI. Because the big discussions of open source were decades ago now. If you add up all the discussions of open source in the past I'd assume they'd out number the AI discussions now. Also, there is very little novel to discuss about open source. Now novel and 'important' are different things, but novel is what tends to write articles and get eyeballs.
    - Imustaskforhelp 1y ago
      I don't really know man half the population doesn't know what open source means or cares whereas a lot of people seemingly have lots of opinions about AI. One can liberate people from big tech and the other ties them to it in sorts. And there are very very more conversations about the latter than the former. The point of discussion is to bring change. There has been a real change in how usable Linux has been lets say compared to past but now its really about user adoption I suppose. I genuinely think that we might need to reopen that discussion window as a lot of people are getting interested in linux/homelabbing /realizing that they can degoogle and what not to really get privacy. Those discussions brought a change into how open source software is written today (git) etc. but now we probably might need discussions about the awareness of these open source products to the general public if we truly want mass adoption I suppose. What are your thoughts?
heinrich5991 1y ago
https://archive.is/lMpbi https://archive.is/lMpbi
- conartist6 1y ago
  lol even that is paywalled
  - bArray 1y ago
    None of the usual suspects bypass it either, seems like it only delivers that reduced section of page in the HTML response.
j2kun 1y ago
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.
- altairprime 1y ago
  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.
cs702 1y ago
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.
- ghaff 1y ago
  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.
  - skeeter2020 1y ago
    I've been exhausted by this for at least a year, so much so that (for a big part) I left my good job in August. The past 7 weeks have been amazing!
    - ghaff 1y ago
      I'm not sure I'm exhausted but, given a bunch of other things going on (that have been exhausting), I've been less inclined to keep as involved in tech as I would otherwise have done. Probably do a reboot after the holidays and decide what I want to do (or not).
- jsheard 1y ago
  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.
  - Imustaskforhelp 1y ago
    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...
claudiug 1y ago
looks a little bit as in the bitcoin/nft/crypto/web3 time :)
- hsuduebc2 1y ago
  To be fair, AI can actually be useful. Crypto projects at one point were tokenizing every random idea, and unsurprisingly most of it turned into scams. Is there any relevant crypto product that truly works differently than just being a tool to buy other coins, apart from Polymarket?
  - SJC_Hacker 1y ago
    Some sites, especially international, accept crypto in lieu of other payments like credit card. Useful especially if you aren't 100% on the site. You just pay them and don't worry about overcharging or having to dispute payments, etc.
    - hsuduebc2 1y ago
      You are right. I actually know people that pay for "fake" streaming accounts through some coins so they can watch Netflix or HBO. Usual cards get blocked there. We'll it's nice to see usage of crypto(semi anonymous payments) for it's original purpose at least somewhere.
- mcrk 1y ago
  Every consulting business was adding "blockchain" expertiese on their homepage. Now it's replaced by AI. What's next..
bobse 1y ago
[dead]
whatever1 1y ago
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.
- ta12653421 1y ago
  think about the early days of Facebook, when it was called TheFacebook.com a bunch of PHP scripts :-D
- tobias3 1y ago
  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.
  - ctxc 1y ago
    I don't understand this position. LLMs are good at prototyping using data across _all_ similar projects that exist. It is not a 1-1 copy. Most frontend is a dozen components. Most backend again is a handful of architectures when it comes to DB/business logic, CRUD. It goes to say that if you can guide the LLM to build something innovative you can think of, it will put those components together in a reasonable way - good enough to start off with.
    - whatever1 1y ago
      Exactly. One could build the new video platform with revolutionary customer facing features. The tech stack will likely be the same. Some frontend, some backend maybe some calls to an endpoint that happens to be an LLM. Startups that typically end up in incubators etc are not about new fundamental systems (languages, frameworks, theoretical methodologies etc), but rather about new products.
  - 1y ago
narmiouh 1y ago
At an individual scale, working on AI makes sense, no one wants to miss out. Though I would love if the people who take care of the forest take more responsibility to shepherd the chaos. In a federated society like ours, I doubt that's possible, for good or bad or extinction.
64d032fe 1y ago
It has eaten Hacker News too. Hello LLMs!
- fsckboy 1y ago
  >Hello LLMs! "alexander grahm beLLM invented a new greeting for the telephone during the telephone bubble: heLLMo! to you too!"
hshshshshsh 1y ago
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 projects. Maybe it's just me not being able to not get out of the daily job schedule and taking the piss out.
- cjs_ac 1y ago
  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.
  - jimbokun 1y ago
    Everyone needs a community, even if it isn't large.
- aaronblohowiak 1y ago
  I feel you. Disconnect for a while, touch grass, be the change you want to see, maybe explore parts of the internet that are less “startup” focused and more hacker focused?
- ta12653421 1y ago
  it is because during from 2004/2005 on, it was seen a way to get rich quick to "just found something" and try it to sell: the "early days" where driven by engineers, tech people, technicians - then the MBA crowd joined and funding became a "pipeline processed thing" to get tons of money quickly.
- kordlessagain 1y ago
  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. But search was an enhancement—it made existing software better. AI is a solvent. It dissolves the economic moat that justified building the software in the first place. YC's entire thesis rests on startups capturing value during the window between "this problem is painful" and "an incumbent solves it." But what happens when that window collapses to zero? When any reasonably clever person can get Claude or GPT to generate a bespoke solution to their specific problem in 20 minutes? I'm watching food service managers—people who optimize labor, inventory, and customer flow in real-time—get told they can't build software. That's a lie we told ourselves to justify $150k engineer salaries and $10M seed rounds. Those managers have exactly the cognitive toolkit needed. They just didn't know C++. In three years, they won't need to. The SaaS model assumes friction. It assumes most people can't build the thing themselves, so they'll pay you $50/month forever. Coding AI doesn't make software easier to build—it makes the *act of building* indistinguishable from the *act of using*. You don't need a project management tool with 600 features. You need to tell your computer what you're trying to coordinate. You don't need Photoshop's menus. You need to describe what you want the image to convey. Every software company selling picks and shovels to the AI gold rush is missing that they're about to get disintermediated by the prospectors themselves. The cloud was never about technical superiority—it was about control and recurring revenue. What happens when capable models run locally and people can spin up exactly what they need? VCs are investing in moats that evaporate the moment non-engineers realize they don't need us anymore. Network effects, switching costs, proprietary data—all predicated on software remaining expensive to create. It's not. The actual bubble is venture capital itself. You can't invest in defensibility that doesn't exist. And you can't charge rent on the gap between intention and execution when that gap is closing. We're not in an AI bubble. We're watching the software bubble pop in slow motion.
wigster 1y ago
what a terrible site
Analemma_ 1y ago
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 unappetizing and unreliable slop. It's total insanity; comparisons to tulip mania no longer even apply now that people are tossing around numbers like $500 billion when talking about their capex buildouts.
- saltcured 1y ago
  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.
  - Zorbanator 1y ago
    There is one on 101 that says "My boss really wants you to know Redis is an AI company". Blows my mind how that marketing team is still employed.
  - HillRat 1y ago
    It’s basically sifting through ore; 99% of the people who see it aren’t the target, it’s the 1% of viewers who are buyers or funders who you otherwise couldn’t directly advertise to. Same reason you see defense contractors putting up ads for weapons systems in the DC metro.
  - BobaFloutist 1y ago
    > I assumed billboards were for mass consumer marketing. My hunch is that billboards on I-80 through San Francisco are a vanity product. Their actual purpose isn't marketing, but to flatter the egos of the CEOs that own the service - they get to dominate the sky, the eyes, and the brains for thousands of tech commuters twice a day. The one thing I'm not sure about is whether or not the people paying for the billboards actually think that their sales are going to materially benefit, but I'm pretty sure the sellers are clear that they absolutely will not - and either way, I'm sure people see it as a mark of prestige to have an ad there.
empath75 1y ago
Every company is an AI company and you should probably be less interested in building an AI and more interested in how you can apply AI to solve business needs that are not directly AI-related.
- skeeter2020 1y ago
  Is this my CTO posting on HN? I've heard this EXACT statement repeatedly over the past 18 months. It's one of those that sounds smart but when you pull it apart there's nothing of value here.
Mistletoe 1y ago
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.
- ChrisMarshallNY 1y ago
  I wouldn't say that. "AI" (quotes deliberate) is the biggest story in tech, right now, for better or for worse. HN is a news site, so it's fairly logical that "AI" would dominate. It wasn't that long ago, that you couldn't find a pitch deck, anywhere, that was missing the word "Blockchain." I'm finding it interesting. It's definitely a bubble, but unlike crypto, there's some real utility here. I do think that we'll be seeing some excellent stuff (and some awful crap) down the road.
  - Imustaskforhelp 1y ago
    Brother go to something like r/cryptocurrency to see people trying to justify the real utility... I am not a crypto advocate but there are definitely a lot of similarities. The only One thing I can respect Sam Altman for is the line that he said about bubbles and "When bubbles happen, smart people get overexcited about a kernel of truth,” This is the similarity... Both had some use cases, one might have more and the other but we are being so overexcited, I think being forced to be overexcited about this tech
    - ChrisMarshallNY 1y ago
      Oh, there’s going to be some heavy-duty snake oil, but I can say that I’ve already found it quite useful, in its current, larval state. I just haven’t found it to be a “game changer,” for me, yet. That said, I am not really an industrial-scale user.
    - Terr_ 1y ago
      > see people trying to justify Tangential pet-peeve: "That's fixed with private blockchain", which is the equivalent of "That's fixed with Segways that have a second set of wheels and the self-balancing is disabled." There's a bunch of people busy reinventing decades-old old tech/accounting, either because they never bothered to learn what was actually new about "blockchain", or because they can't bear to admit that the new stuff wasn't really good/necessary. ________ [Edit] To digress into specifics, the characteristic that sets "Blockchain" apart from what we already had (distributed databases, Merkle trees etc.) is fulfilling a product requirement: That node-membership is distributed and uncontrollable. That's what causes a cascade of anti-abuse features. But outside of wild-west cryptocurrency, that usually isn't necessary, nor even desirable when you consider the rest of the cycle-burning baggage and complexity that comes with it.
bilekas 1y ago
"How paid subscriptions ate the spread of information" I can't subscribe to another site and seems the archive link is not working for me either. Would love to read it though because while YCombinator just follows where they see the money being, AI has really seen the majority of investment recently. https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/industry/investing https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/industry/investing Just doing a search for "AI" its clear there is a preference. Maybe for good reason though. If I could read the article that is.
- nh23423fefe 1y ago
  pretty entitled take. why use the phrasing about subscriptions preventing spread of information instead of something like "stingy readers preventing authors from eating"
  - bilekas 1y ago
    > "stingy readers preventing authors from eating" Because as I just counted for you I'm subscribed already to 6 others.. at different rates. Some of them crossing over with articles. To you I sound "entitled" but there's a limit to my miscellaneous spending.
- claudiulodro 1y ago
  > "How paid subscriptions ate the spread of information" The "irony" here is that news organizations are moving to gate their content precisely because that's the only effective technique for preventing AI crawlers from ingesting it all ...
  - bilekas 1y ago
    So we as the real people have to pay because the AI might consume it ? If you believe the AI isn't consuming those paywalled articles also, I have a bridge to sell you.
    - johnnyanmac 1y ago
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
samtheprogram 1y ago
I wonder how much of this is perverse incentives. If all the AI startups are using Anthropic and OpenAI, does this investment in AI startups continue to be the norm until the Anthropic and OpenAI investors see a return?
rappatic 1y ago
> 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 foundation models for CAD optimization." Just because the company uses AI doesn't make it an "AI startup." AI is rapidly proving itself to be an extremely useful and workflow-changing tool, and many companies now have adopted it somewhere in their product without suddenly becoming AI companies.
- hackernewds 1y ago
  The perverse incentive is that if you mention the word AI, you get a multiplier. we're entering juicero levels of delusion
- em-bee 1y ago
  i disagree. if your product or business model are tied to the use of AI so much that you put AI in your description, then you are an AI company.
  - atonse 1y ago
    By that metric, every single software company is now an AI company. I can't think of a SINGLE company (except ours maybe, only because we haven't updated our website yet, not because we don't want to) that doesn't vomit AI terms _everywhere_ in their product messaging. I don't know whether consumers/buyers are demanding that, or what. But it seems everywhere and in every discipline. It's in research grant applications, it's in legal tech, everywhere. AI is the new "we use the internet" - it will just get taken for granted.
    - skeeter2020 1y ago
      I agree with the GP and you - every company IS desperate to be an AI company today. They've been told three things: 1. this time it's different, 2. AI is disrupting everything, 3. if you don't disrupt yourself someone else will. # 1 has been said repeatedly before every previous AI winter. #2 is a lie from people trying to sell you something and the FOMOs parroting the same line. #3 someone is going to disrupt you regardless, and it's impossible to disrupt yourself (unless you're prepared to stop doing everything that made you successful in the first place)
rambojohnson 1y ago
how gpt-wrappers ate y combinator.
Hilift 1y ago
I'm predicting there will be a startup to focus on large scale forensic identification of archived samples of various things. Particularly items that may have been important enough to save in a freezer for 70 or 80 years. The refinement and availability of devices to measure microscopic amounts, and AI to process and sift through mundane results. From my experience with science, laboratory procedures before the 1980's were generally inconsistent and inadequate. Contamination was not uncommon, something biological investigators had to deal with when investigating early HIV cases. Wouldn't be surprised for an "empty the freezers" order from the FDA or CDC. Probably located underground in a BSL 4/5 facility in Arizona or Utah.
- the__alchemist 1y ago
  BSL-5 is a thing? I think BSL-4 is exclusively hemorrhagic fevers.
bix6 1y ago
I’m a few chapters into Empire of AI and finding it a fascinating chronicling of how we got into this AI mess.
ashwindharne 1y ago
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).
- alephnerd 1y ago
  [flagged]
- biophysboy 1y ago
  The hate boner comes from HN's love for technology - software and hardware - and AI is so dominant in tech news. Once you learn the basics of LLMs and agents, which are really not that complicated, it gets sort of dull to hear about again and again and again.
- Terr_ 1y ago
  Off-putting? I think skepticism over marketing-hype from workers in a field is how things are supposed to work, especially for a group that spends lots of time plotting things out looking for edge-cases and ways for it to fail. I'd be far more disturbed by the opposite, where everybody on HN is expected to gush over the thing-du-jour. As aptly-put for a prior hype-cycle: > Tech Enthusiasts: "Everything in my house is wired to the Internet of Things! I control it all from my smartphone! My smart-house is bluetooth enabled and I can give it voice commands via Alexa! I love the future!" > Programmers/Engineers: "The most recent piece of technology I own is a printer from 2004 and I keep a loaded gun ready to shoot it if it ever makes an unexpected noise."
- insane_dreamer 1y ago
  It’s because this is a tech forum that we actually put our thinking caps on rather than just accept whatever BS comes out in corporate press releases.
Timsky 1y ago
YC remains a great source of creative inspiration for me. However, I tend to skip most AI-related content on HN, as the topic does more harm than good to me in my daily life. Some people around me delegate more and more decisions to the chat, and that frightens. Especially if you are somehow dependent on them or your work gets evaluated by some creepy AI-driven bossware. We should admit that AI, particularly LLMs, is not just eating: it is destroying society, human communications, the education system, and the scientific community. This enumeration is merely the sides that I personally faced.
- gjgtcbkj 1y ago
  I welcome the bossware. Bye bye bosses.
  - BlueUmarell 1y ago
    Bossware, where the boss is nowhere
  - jollyllama 1y ago
    Better the devil that you know...
- yummypaint 1y ago
  I work with some undergrads and see this delegation increasing year over year. Unfortunately it's also happening at the expense of reading books, using library search tools to find proper sources, and information gathering in general. "An LLM might be able to explain something to you, but it can never understand it for you."
- randycupertino 1y ago
  I was recently in a work AI training where we were encouraged to have AI review all our vendor and contractor budgets and find holes and create rebuttals to line items. Was wondering what if the vendor has ai review our rebuttals and create counter-points to our ai-created arguments. At some point it will just be AI talking against itself to another AI chatbot.
vonneumannstan 1y ago
YC has been an anti signal for a while but now its basically a guarantee of a company putting out pure AI slop.
j45 1y ago
Not entirely sure it's a bubble. LLM's have applicable tech in the world today, where it's usable where software prior hasn't been able to, I don't see it going away. Where folks are trying to apply it to replace deterministic software..? Mileage may vary.
- skeeter2020 1y ago
  A bubble doesn't mean there's no value whatsoever, but that we've surpassed rational thought and validation. Example: we ask good developers to evaluate tools and options; not jumping in blindly to the next big thing is what makes them good in the first place. With AI, executives are literally saying if you're not all-in you have no future here. THAT is a bubble.
jacquesm 1y ago
I was at a meeting of a bunch of VCs a while ago (a couple of months). The principal partner of one of the larger funds said that they will now only consider investments that are AI related. Just to give you a data point, I'm not saying that that is a trend. But if that's a market representative you can't fault the supply side for adapting to it.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- skeeter2020 1y ago
  until recently I worked in learning management systems (LMS) including the content creation, libraries and delivery. At a recent event with many VCs they all considered the learning space dead because AI was going to do it all. Don't hold your breath!
  - jacquesm 1y ago
    The one field that I have seen impacted more than just on the periphery is translation services. What was worth 20 cts (or even more, for niche stuff) per word not that long ago is now essentially free.
    - layer8 1y ago
      That impact is very real, but you aren’t getting the same thing for free that you were getting with 20¢/word.
      - jacquesm 1y ago
        Yes, fully agreed.
- layer8 1y ago
  It’s why it’s called “stupid money”.
- hackable_sand 1y ago
SubiculumCode 1y ago
AI is the pinnacle of everything that came before it on HN. It is the logical conclusion to all our efforts before it to build machines that do work for us; every idea pursued to get computers to do more for us, in every possible way, in every possible location, ALL at once and in synchrony, faster, better, stronger. Artificial intelligence IS HN. Resistance to that truth, is resistance to a coming singularity that already always was.
- SketchySeaBeast 1y ago
  Have we had any articles about people vibe coding Doom onto a toaster yet? If not, I'd say you're likely incorrect.
minimaxir 1y ago
It's funny because it's causing a tragedy of the commons where there are so many AI startups that YC is funding companies that compete with each other. Case in point, the the PearAI incident a year ago where a YC company forked and rebranded an open source repo from another YC company against its license: https://unfashionable.blog/p/yc/ https://unfashionable.blog/p/yc/ HN thread on the apology: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41701265 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41701265 Speaking of which, apparently PearAI deleted their apology in the intervening year.
- Macha 1y ago
  Is placing bets on competing companies that against YC's business model? Like I'd assume the best case for YC's business model is to pick a winner, fund them, sell off at the company's peak, then find a competitor likely to unseat them and fund that competitor so they can enjoy the profits of capturing the same market again.
  - bix6 1y ago
    Is it fair for someone with privileged information to back a direct competitor? I say no but YC clearly thinks otherwise.
    - roncesvalles 1y ago
      Yeah, to me that’s always been the obvious most "expensive" part about doing YC. It’s not the chunk of equity, it's that they now know everything about your company, your road map or ideas, and the way you think and operate. And that's a pretty good deal for whatever little money they're spending on you. The whole thing has a "frenemies" vibe.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - jacquesm 1y ago
    For many investors that's a bridge they will not cross because it will always lead to conflicts of interest.
tedggh 1y ago
The article starts by assuming there’s an AI bubble. Then it goes to label all these startups as AI companies. This is how they are categorized (2025 batch only): AI Agents (15%) Productivity/Ops Tools (11.4%) AI Infrastructure (10%) Healthcare (10%) Consumer Apps (9.3%). We cannot argue that AI infrastructure is AI, but what about say back office automation and healthcare? Are these AI companies? Or are they automation/healthtech that happen to use LLMs? Many Fintech and e-commerce companies use ML, are they ML companies?
- ragall 1y ago
  If a company's supposed advantage is predicated on using LLMs, it's an AI company. Of course, if that strategy fails, it could pivot to a non-AI approach which would make it cease to be an AI company.
- johnnyanmac 1y ago
  >Many Fintech and e-commerce companies use ML, are they ML companies? if that's how they market themselves, yes.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
yomismoaqui 1y ago
https://archive.is/cucZu https://archive.is/cucZu
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
bablu71 1y ago
[flagged]
qustrolabe 1y ago
Paywalled articles ate Internet
- johnnyanmac 1y ago
  It was inevitable when ads were no longer enough to sustain websites, I suppose. It is a shame how critical news may be paywalled out from the public, though. Tragic, but fitting.
  - joquarky 1y ago
    It feels like a self-imposed trap though. Just loading the one article results in: 335 requests 7.9 MB transferred 23.6 MB resources Hosting would be less expensive if they didn't bloat up what could be a simple static document.
    - progbits 1y ago
      I doubt their hosting costs matter compared to other expenses. Journalists still gotta get paid.
    - johnnyanmac 1y ago
      The hosting is terribly inefficient, but ultimately peanuts in cost. It's labor to worry about, as usual. That's exactly why this AI hype is a capitalists wet dream. Even if the overall cost doesn't go down, it's the potential to produce products without any uppity employees demanding raises, or pushing back on your clearly brilliant idea that you totally didn't need experts for. With workers who work 24/7 who will never threaten to leave, and no pesky labor laws to worry about.
  - palmotea 1y ago
    > It was inevitable when ads were no longer enough to sustain websites, I suppose. It is a shame how critical news may be paywalled out from the public, though. Tragic, but fitting. Also when any public content started being gulped up by scrapers and resold as AI.
psnosignaluk 1y ago
Captain Obvious chiming in here, but as one of those boring douche canoes whose concerns are data privacy, data locality and generally the ability to understand how AI trains off of and manipulates the data we feed it, I'm resistant to the tech. We're testing the use of AI to aggregate and explain patterns in the data we have, but this is limited to our ticketing systems and Slack. Until our current choice of AI provider can guarantee that our transactional data won't be stored outside of the EU, the people driving this internally and those keen to make the sale externally can take a long walk off of a short pier. I can almost smell the aroma of the coffee machine from the chamber in which an EU subcommittee is working on the Artificial Intelligence Act (AIA) (EU) 2025/xxxx to add to the raft of regulations that financial entities in Europe need to concern themselves with. Maybe they'll be nice and just append it to an existing act. AI might be great. AI might be terrible. I'm not all convinced that most data aggregation features baked into AI and used by most normal companies couldn't be implemented in R or SQL (disclaimer: I couldn't code my way out of a wet paper bag if the tool I was told to use was an axe). It's just wanted so that someone can crawl over data sets to ask simple questions like 'how many merchants exceeded n number of transactions between a and b date' or 'My customer needs an eIDAS certificate. What do I ask them to send us without having to talk to Captain Obvious?'. I mean, we're busting a gut on revamping our developer docs, but given that the spec is already public, I'm pretty sure that developers can already vibe code against that. Going to test that and see how it gets on.
programmertote 1y ago
A tangential note -- these days when I'm casually reading through job postings, a lot of companies mention in their job requirements something along the lines of "Must be familiar/knowledgeable about GenAI technologies (RAG/MCP)" even for roles that are not strictly related to GenAI. When you look deeper into most of these companies, they seem better off using third-party services (like Claude/ChatGPT) instead of building their own GenAI models, MCP servers and whatnot. This is not considering that the domain they are operating in would have no apparent and obvious gain from utilizing GenAI (sure, they can buy ChatGPT/Claude organization subscription and that's all they need). I don't know if this is the indicator of how big this AI bubble is, but it sure is interesting...
- tim333 1y ago
  It seems sensible to want people familiar with the tech of the day like they'd expect most people to be familiar with the internet.
antibull 1y ago
[dead]

206 points by davidw 1y ago

tipiirai 1y ago

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

koolba 1y ago
I would love to see the same stat for submissions as a whole. I bet it’s even higher.
- TuxSH 1y ago
  shownew is flooded with those
schlauerfox 1y ago
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?
- SoftTalker 1y ago
  Just like every existing SaaS and Enterprise platform is. It's just a new checkbox that you must have.
  - Imustaskforhelp 1y ago
    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.
    - ryandrake 1y ago
      I don't think anyone anywhere on the totem pole: from the junior engineer, to the engineering manager, to the founder, to the VC, to the investors, cares if it's actually AI. They just want to see the word there. Someone got it into their head that "AI is the thing now" and now the junior engineer isn't going to get hired unless he says AI. The Eng manager is not going to get promoted unless he talks about managing AI. The Founder is not going to be funded unless he says the company relates to AI. The VC is not going to line up investors unless he says AI. And investors have no clue what to do with their money, but heard somewhere that "AI is the thing now" and that's where they want to flush their money. Nobody really wants any of this shit as a product.
      - Imustaskforhelp 1y ago
        Why sell shit that you don't want yourself/ aren't passionate about?? That is just exploitative of sorts on preying people who don't have enough knowledge about AI let's say... And this behaviour shouldn't be condoned though > And investors have no clue what to do with their money, but heard somewhere that "AI is the thing now" and that's where they want to flush their money. This is where the system needs to change, People need to realize this that maybe AI is in a bit of bubble right now and not try to invest in such things... But profits.... Shush, profits can come another day if business has good solid financials otherwise welp, that isn't investing, that's just speculating in the AI bubble
        johnnyanmac 1y ago
        >Why sell shit that you don't want yourself/ aren't passionate about?? Best interpreation: you need to pay bills and this startup is your last hope after sending out 500 apps and getting 3 interviews back (2 interviews ghosted you after the first round and the 3rd said "overqualified" despite it being a senior role) Worst interpretation: we're in a gold rush, and a lot of people will sell fool's gold if they can.
        Imustaskforhelp 1y ago
- insane_dreamer 1y ago
  Literally every tech startup company out there is spinning itself as AI. I’m familiar with some of them well enough to know that the AI is bullshit. You could be running an SVM on some data and you’re now “powered by AI”. I’m not joking.
rvz 1y ago
"AI startups." Only around 10% of them will succeed at best. If a massive crash happens then it would be 2% at best.
- dheera 1y ago
  The real AI startups are those who are using AI to make profits on day 0. They will outlive a crash. They don't need Y Combinator.
- pixl97 1y ago
  So like internet startups in the 90s. Like .com in the late 90s. Like social media startups in the late 2000s/2010s. It's all cycles. Every bubble is talked about on HN (and similar sites) because that's the purpose of sites like this.
  - skeeter2020 1y ago
    maybe a big difference is those hype cycles were net-positive for developers. This is the first one in a while that has VCs and upper management salivating with the idea of cutting all the devs lose. Who do YOU think this is likely to replace first, technical developers or administrators?
    - xcf_seetan 1y ago
      It worries me a lot what are those devs without jobs now, will do next? Do they change to the dark side and start battling AI startups and technologies?
    - pixl97 1y ago
      "Developers surprised automation takes them out after decades of taking other people out with automation" But hey, mention the word union here and you'll still get beat with a stick.
      - johnnyanmac 1y ago
        That's the stupid part. Nothing is actually automated yet. AI is just a smokescreen for the recession we're clearly in but no one wants to say out loud. And I sense a reckoning on the horizon. There's a reason the 10's were filled with billionaire (now trillionaire) tech companies poaching any potential talent that can rise against them. That knowledge is still there and rife to disrupt. >mention the word union here and you'll still get beat with a stick. I'm in the games industry. It's slow but people are starting to wake up here. Only took decades of abuse, instability, and rampant layoffs in an industry alreaady known for regular layoffs. But you know the quote about Churchill and Americans.
pton_xd 1y ago
I've also noticed many startups from prior YC batches that haven't found traction yet have pivoted to AI-related offerings. It's been kind of amusing to watch them become absorbed into the hype cycle, one by one.
- brazukadev 1y ago
  And still fail

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

devin 1y ago

“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.

hobs 1y ago
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.
- badsectoracula 1y ago
  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.
  - Imustaskforhelp 1y ago
    I do think that another topic on how AI is eating everything could be nice given how nobody is still believing it and somebody had shared the list of YC companies with AI and you had to see how long the list was and how unimaginative it was, to me it felt Like X but AI, Y but AI.... You yourself say that AI is overhyped and that overhype has formed into a bubble of sorts which has eaten Y combinator. Also I probably don't understand how your point is relevant to the parent comment if I am honest or maybe I am not finding the relevance in which case feel free to explain it so that I learn something new
kordlessagain 1y ago
Yup. They couldn't devops/mlops their way out of a paper bag if they had to.

frameset 1y ago

It's certainly eating up a lot of the threads on HN.

CaptainOfCoit 1y ago
[flagged]
Imustaskforhelp 1y ago
Exactly my thoughts. Couldn't agree more really, there is so much to discuss on this short time that we have on earth but a lot of that energy is going into talking about AI and AI again it seems. I have nothing against the tech but c'mon I would argue that open source itself overall is more valuable than AI but that isn't an apples to orange comparison but still, I see far fewer discussions of open source as compared to AI. Maybe Open source is just on mind a lot these recent days.
- pixl97 1y ago
  >I see far fewer discussions of open source as compared to AI. Because the big discussions of open source were decades ago now. If you add up all the discussions of open source in the past I'd assume they'd out number the AI discussions now. Also, there is very little novel to discuss about open source. Now novel and 'important' are different things, but novel is what tends to write articles and get eyeballs.
  - Imustaskforhelp 1y ago
    I don't really know man half the population doesn't know what open source means or cares whereas a lot of people seemingly have lots of opinions about AI. One can liberate people from big tech and the other ties them to it in sorts. And there are very very more conversations about the latter than the former. The point of discussion is to bring change. There has been a real change in how usable Linux has been lets say compared to past but now its really about user adoption I suppose. I genuinely think that we might need to reopen that discussion window as a lot of people are getting interested in linux/homelabbing /realizing that they can degoogle and what not to really get privacy. Those discussions brought a change into how open source software is written today (git) etc. but now we probably might need discussions about the awareness of these open source products to the general public if we truly want mass adoption I suppose. What are your thoughts?

heinrich5991 1y ago

https://archive.is/lMpbi https://archive.is/lMpbi

conartist6 1y ago
lol even that is paywalled
- bArray 1y ago
  None of the usual suspects bypass it either, seems like it only delivers that reduced section of page in the HTML response.

j2kun 1y ago

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.

altairprime 1y ago
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.

cs702 1y ago

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.

ghaff 1y ago
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.
- skeeter2020 1y ago
  I've been exhausted by this for at least a year, so much so that (for a big part) I left my good job in August. The past 7 weeks have been amazing!
  - ghaff 1y ago
    I'm not sure I'm exhausted but, given a bunch of other things going on (that have been exhausting), I've been less inclined to keep as involved in tech as I would otherwise have done. Probably do a reboot after the holidays and decide what I want to do (or not).
jsheard 1y ago
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.
- Imustaskforhelp 1y ago
  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...

claudiug 1y ago

looks a little bit as in the bitcoin/nft/crypto/web3 time :)

hsuduebc2 1y ago
To be fair, AI can actually be useful. Crypto projects at one point were tokenizing every random idea, and unsurprisingly most of it turned into scams. Is there any relevant crypto product that truly works differently than just being a tool to buy other coins, apart from Polymarket?
- SJC_Hacker 1y ago
  Some sites, especially international, accept crypto in lieu of other payments like credit card. Useful especially if you aren't 100% on the site. You just pay them and don't worry about overcharging or having to dispute payments, etc.
  - hsuduebc2 1y ago
    You are right. I actually know people that pay for "fake" streaming accounts through some coins so they can watch Netflix or HBO. Usual cards get blocked there. We'll it's nice to see usage of crypto(semi anonymous payments) for it's original purpose at least somewhere.
mcrk 1y ago
Every consulting business was adding "blockchain" expertiese on their homepage. Now it's replaced by AI. What's next..

bobse 1y ago

[dead]

whatever1 1y ago

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.

ta12653421 1y ago
think about the early days of Facebook, when it was called TheFacebook.com a bunch of PHP scripts :-D
tobias3 1y ago
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.
- ctxc 1y ago
  I don't understand this position. LLMs are good at prototyping using data across _all_ similar projects that exist. It is not a 1-1 copy. Most frontend is a dozen components. Most backend again is a handful of architectures when it comes to DB/business logic, CRUD. It goes to say that if you can guide the LLM to build something innovative you can think of, it will put those components together in a reasonable way - good enough to start off with.
  - whatever1 1y ago
    Exactly. One could build the new video platform with revolutionary customer facing features. The tech stack will likely be the same. Some frontend, some backend maybe some calls to an endpoint that happens to be an LLM. Startups that typically end up in incubators etc are not about new fundamental systems (languages, frameworks, theoretical methodologies etc), but rather about new products.
- 1y ago

narmiouh 1y ago

At an individual scale, working on AI makes sense, no one wants to miss out. Though I would love if the people who take care of the forest take more responsibility to shepherd the chaos. In a federated society like ours, I doubt that's possible, for good or bad or extinction.

64d032fe 1y ago

It has eaten Hacker News too. Hello LLMs!

fsckboy 1y ago
>Hello LLMs! "alexander grahm beLLM invented a new greeting for the telephone during the telephone bubble: heLLMo! to you too!"

hshshshshsh 1y ago

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 projects. Maybe it's just me not being able to not get out of the daily job schedule and taking the piss out.

cjs_ac 1y ago
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.
- jimbokun 1y ago
  Everyone needs a community, even if it isn't large.
aaronblohowiak 1y ago
I feel you. Disconnect for a while, touch grass, be the change you want to see, maybe explore parts of the internet that are less “startup” focused and more hacker focused?
ta12653421 1y ago
it is because during from 2004/2005 on, it was seen a way to get rich quick to "just found something" and try it to sell: the "early days" where driven by engineers, tech people, technicians - then the MBA crowd joined and funding became a "pipeline processed thing" to get tons of money quickly.
kordlessagain 1y ago
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. But search was an enhancement—it made existing software better. AI is a solvent. It dissolves the economic moat that justified building the software in the first place. YC's entire thesis rests on startups capturing value during the window between "this problem is painful" and "an incumbent solves it." But what happens when that window collapses to zero? When any reasonably clever person can get Claude or GPT to generate a bespoke solution to their specific problem in 20 minutes? I'm watching food service managers—people who optimize labor, inventory, and customer flow in real-time—get told they can't build software. That's a lie we told ourselves to justify $150k engineer salaries and $10M seed rounds. Those managers have exactly the cognitive toolkit needed. They just didn't know C++. In three years, they won't need to. The SaaS model assumes friction. It assumes most people can't build the thing themselves, so they'll pay you $50/month forever. Coding AI doesn't make software easier to build—it makes the *act of building* indistinguishable from the *act of using*. You don't need a project management tool with 600 features. You need to tell your computer what you're trying to coordinate. You don't need Photoshop's menus. You need to describe what you want the image to convey. Every software company selling picks and shovels to the AI gold rush is missing that they're about to get disintermediated by the prospectors themselves. The cloud was never about technical superiority—it was about control and recurring revenue. What happens when capable models run locally and people can spin up exactly what they need? VCs are investing in moats that evaporate the moment non-engineers realize they don't need us anymore. Network effects, switching costs, proprietary data—all predicated on software remaining expensive to create. It's not. The actual bubble is venture capital itself. You can't invest in defensibility that doesn't exist. And you can't charge rent on the gap between intention and execution when that gap is closing. We're not in an AI bubble. We're watching the software bubble pop in slow motion.

wigster 1y ago

what a terrible site

Analemma_ 1y ago

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 unappetizing and unreliable slop. It's total insanity; comparisons to tulip mania no longer even apply now that people are tossing around numbers like $500 billion when talking about their capex buildouts.

saltcured 1y ago
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.
- Zorbanator 1y ago
  There is one on 101 that says "My boss really wants you to know Redis is an AI company". Blows my mind how that marketing team is still employed.
- HillRat 1y ago
  It’s basically sifting through ore; 99% of the people who see it aren’t the target, it’s the 1% of viewers who are buyers or funders who you otherwise couldn’t directly advertise to. Same reason you see defense contractors putting up ads for weapons systems in the DC metro.
- BobaFloutist 1y ago
  > I assumed billboards were for mass consumer marketing. My hunch is that billboards on I-80 through San Francisco are a vanity product. Their actual purpose isn't marketing, but to flatter the egos of the CEOs that own the service - they get to dominate the sky, the eyes, and the brains for thousands of tech commuters twice a day. The one thing I'm not sure about is whether or not the people paying for the billboards actually think that their sales are going to materially benefit, but I'm pretty sure the sellers are clear that they absolutely will not - and either way, I'm sure people see it as a mark of prestige to have an ad there.

empath75 1y ago

Every company is an AI company and you should probably be less interested in building an AI and more interested in how you can apply AI to solve business needs that are not directly AI-related.

skeeter2020 1y ago
Is this my CTO posting on HN? I've heard this EXACT statement repeatedly over the past 18 months. It's one of those that sounds smart but when you pull it apart there's nothing of value here.

Mistletoe 1y ago

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.

ChrisMarshallNY 1y ago
I wouldn't say that. "AI" (quotes deliberate) is the biggest story in tech, right now, for better or for worse. HN is a news site, so it's fairly logical that "AI" would dominate. It wasn't that long ago, that you couldn't find a pitch deck, anywhere, that was missing the word "Blockchain." I'm finding it interesting. It's definitely a bubble, but unlike crypto, there's some real utility here. I do think that we'll be seeing some excellent stuff (and some awful crap) down the road.
- Imustaskforhelp 1y ago
  Brother go to something like r/cryptocurrency to see people trying to justify the real utility... I am not a crypto advocate but there are definitely a lot of similarities. The only One thing I can respect Sam Altman for is the line that he said about bubbles and "When bubbles happen, smart people get overexcited about a kernel of truth,” This is the similarity... Both had some use cases, one might have more and the other but we are being so overexcited, I think being forced to be overexcited about this tech
  - ChrisMarshallNY 1y ago
    Oh, there’s going to be some heavy-duty snake oil, but I can say that I’ve already found it quite useful, in its current, larval state. I just haven’t found it to be a “game changer,” for me, yet. That said, I am not really an industrial-scale user.
  - Terr_ 1y ago
    > see people trying to justify Tangential pet-peeve: "That's fixed with private blockchain", which is the equivalent of "That's fixed with Segways that have a second set of wheels and the self-balancing is disabled." There's a bunch of people busy reinventing decades-old old tech/accounting, either because they never bothered to learn what was actually new about "blockchain", or because they can't bear to admit that the new stuff wasn't really good/necessary. ________ [Edit] To digress into specifics, the characteristic that sets "Blockchain" apart from what we already had (distributed databases, Merkle trees etc.) is fulfilling a product requirement: That node-membership is distributed and uncontrollable. That's what causes a cascade of anti-abuse features. But outside of wild-west cryptocurrency, that usually isn't necessary, nor even desirable when you consider the rest of the cycle-burning baggage and complexity that comes with it.

bilekas 1y ago

"How paid subscriptions ate the spread of information" I can't subscribe to another site and seems the archive link is not working for me either. Would love to read it though because while YCombinator just follows where they see the money being, AI has really seen the majority of investment recently. https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/industry/investing https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/industry/investing Just doing a search for "AI" its clear there is a preference. Maybe for good reason though. If I could read the article that is.

nh23423fefe 1y ago
pretty entitled take. why use the phrasing about subscriptions preventing spread of information instead of something like "stingy readers preventing authors from eating"
- bilekas 1y ago
  > "stingy readers preventing authors from eating" Because as I just counted for you I'm subscribed already to 6 others.. at different rates. Some of them crossing over with articles. To you I sound "entitled" but there's a limit to my miscellaneous spending.
claudiulodro 1y ago
> "How paid subscriptions ate the spread of information" The "irony" here is that news organizations are moving to gate their content precisely because that's the only effective technique for preventing AI crawlers from ingesting it all ...
- bilekas 1y ago
  So we as the real people have to pay because the AI might consume it ? If you believe the AI isn't consuming those paywalled articles also, I have a bridge to sell you.
  - johnnyanmac 1y ago

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samtheprogram 1y ago

I wonder how much of this is perverse incentives. If all the AI startups are using Anthropic and OpenAI, does this investment in AI startups continue to be the norm until the Anthropic and OpenAI investors see a return?

rappatic 1y ago

> 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 foundation models for CAD optimization." Just because the company uses AI doesn't make it an "AI startup." AI is rapidly proving itself to be an extremely useful and workflow-changing tool, and many companies now have adopted it somewhere in their product without suddenly becoming AI companies.

hackernewds 1y ago
The perverse incentive is that if you mention the word AI, you get a multiplier. we're entering juicero levels of delusion
em-bee 1y ago
i disagree. if your product or business model are tied to the use of AI so much that you put AI in your description, then you are an AI company.
- atonse 1y ago
  By that metric, every single software company is now an AI company. I can't think of a SINGLE company (except ours maybe, only because we haven't updated our website yet, not because we don't want to) that doesn't vomit AI terms _everywhere_ in their product messaging. I don't know whether consumers/buyers are demanding that, or what. But it seems everywhere and in every discipline. It's in research grant applications, it's in legal tech, everywhere. AI is the new "we use the internet" - it will just get taken for granted.
  - skeeter2020 1y ago
    I agree with the GP and you - every company IS desperate to be an AI company today. They've been told three things: 1. this time it's different, 2. AI is disrupting everything, 3. if you don't disrupt yourself someone else will. # 1 has been said repeatedly before every previous AI winter. #2 is a lie from people trying to sell you something and the FOMOs parroting the same line. #3 someone is going to disrupt you regardless, and it's impossible to disrupt yourself (unless you're prepared to stop doing everything that made you successful in the first place)

rambojohnson 1y ago

how gpt-wrappers ate y combinator.

Hilift 1y ago

I'm predicting there will be a startup to focus on large scale forensic identification of archived samples of various things. Particularly items that may have been important enough to save in a freezer for 70 or 80 years. The refinement and availability of devices to measure microscopic amounts, and AI to process and sift through mundane results. From my experience with science, laboratory procedures before the 1980's were generally inconsistent and inadequate. Contamination was not uncommon, something biological investigators had to deal with when investigating early HIV cases. Wouldn't be surprised for an "empty the freezers" order from the FDA or CDC. Probably located underground in a BSL 4/5 facility in Arizona or Utah.

the__alchemist 1y ago
BSL-5 is a thing? I think BSL-4 is exclusively hemorrhagic fevers.

bix6 1y ago

I’m a few chapters into Empire of AI and finding it a fascinating chronicling of how we got into this AI mess.

ashwindharne 1y ago

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).

alephnerd 1y ago
[flagged]
biophysboy 1y ago
The hate boner comes from HN's love for technology - software and hardware - and AI is so dominant in tech news. Once you learn the basics of LLMs and agents, which are really not that complicated, it gets sort of dull to hear about again and again and again.
Terr_ 1y ago
Off-putting? I think skepticism over marketing-hype from workers in a field is how things are supposed to work, especially for a group that spends lots of time plotting things out looking for edge-cases and ways for it to fail. I'd be far more disturbed by the opposite, where everybody on HN is expected to gush over the thing-du-jour. As aptly-put for a prior hype-cycle: > Tech Enthusiasts: "Everything in my house is wired to the Internet of Things! I control it all from my smartphone! My smart-house is bluetooth enabled and I can give it voice commands via Alexa! I love the future!" > Programmers/Engineers: "The most recent piece of technology I own is a printer from 2004 and I keep a loaded gun ready to shoot it if it ever makes an unexpected noise."
insane_dreamer 1y ago
It’s because this is a tech forum that we actually put our thinking caps on rather than just accept whatever BS comes out in corporate press releases.

Timsky 1y ago

YC remains a great source of creative inspiration for me. However, I tend to skip most AI-related content on HN, as the topic does more harm than good to me in my daily life. Some people around me delegate more and more decisions to the chat, and that frightens. Especially if you are somehow dependent on them or your work gets evaluated by some creepy AI-driven bossware. We should admit that AI, particularly LLMs, is not just eating: it is destroying society, human communications, the education system, and the scientific community. This enumeration is merely the sides that I personally faced.

gjgtcbkj 1y ago
I welcome the bossware. Bye bye bosses.
- BlueUmarell 1y ago
  Bossware, where the boss is nowhere
- jollyllama 1y ago
  Better the devil that you know...
yummypaint 1y ago
I work with some undergrads and see this delegation increasing year over year. Unfortunately it's also happening at the expense of reading books, using library search tools to find proper sources, and information gathering in general. "An LLM might be able to explain something to you, but it can never understand it for you."
randycupertino 1y ago
I was recently in a work AI training where we were encouraged to have AI review all our vendor and contractor budgets and find holes and create rebuttals to line items. Was wondering what if the vendor has ai review our rebuttals and create counter-points to our ai-created arguments. At some point it will just be AI talking against itself to another AI chatbot.

vonneumannstan 1y ago

YC has been an anti signal for a while but now its basically a guarantee of a company putting out pure AI slop.

j45 1y ago

Not entirely sure it's a bubble. LLM's have applicable tech in the world today, where it's usable where software prior hasn't been able to, I don't see it going away. Where folks are trying to apply it to replace deterministic software..? Mileage may vary.

skeeter2020 1y ago
A bubble doesn't mean there's no value whatsoever, but that we've surpassed rational thought and validation. Example: we ask good developers to evaluate tools and options; not jumping in blindly to the next big thing is what makes them good in the first place. With AI, executives are literally saying if you're not all-in you have no future here. THAT is a bubble.

jacquesm 1y ago

I was at a meeting of a bunch of VCs a while ago (a couple of months). The principal partner of one of the larger funds said that they will now only consider investments that are AI related. Just to give you a data point, I'm not saying that that is a trend. But if that's a market representative you can't fault the supply side for adapting to it.

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skeeter2020 1y ago
until recently I worked in learning management systems (LMS) including the content creation, libraries and delivery. At a recent event with many VCs they all considered the learning space dead because AI was going to do it all. Don't hold your breath!
- jacquesm 1y ago
  The one field that I have seen impacted more than just on the periphery is translation services. What was worth 20 cts (or even more, for niche stuff) per word not that long ago is now essentially free.
  - layer8 1y ago
    That impact is very real, but you aren’t getting the same thing for free that you were getting with 20¢/word.
    - jacquesm 1y ago
      Yes, fully agreed.
layer8 1y ago
It’s why it’s called “stupid money”.
hackable_sand 1y ago

SubiculumCode 1y ago

AI is the pinnacle of everything that came before it on HN. It is the logical conclusion to all our efforts before it to build machines that do work for us; every idea pursued to get computers to do more for us, in every possible way, in every possible location, ALL at once and in synchrony, faster, better, stronger. Artificial intelligence IS HN. Resistance to that truth, is resistance to a coming singularity that already always was.

SketchySeaBeast 1y ago
Have we had any articles about people vibe coding Doom onto a toaster yet? If not, I'd say you're likely incorrect.

minimaxir 1y ago

It's funny because it's causing a tragedy of the commons where there are so many AI startups that YC is funding companies that compete with each other. Case in point, the the PearAI incident a year ago where a YC company forked and rebranded an open source repo from another YC company against its license: https://unfashionable.blog/p/yc/ https://unfashionable.blog/p/yc/ HN thread on the apology: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41701265 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41701265 Speaking of which, apparently PearAI deleted their apology in the intervening year.

Macha 1y ago
Is placing bets on competing companies that against YC's business model? Like I'd assume the best case for YC's business model is to pick a winner, fund them, sell off at the company's peak, then find a competitor likely to unseat them and fund that competitor so they can enjoy the profits of capturing the same market again.
- bix6 1y ago
  Is it fair for someone with privileged information to back a direct competitor? I say no but YC clearly thinks otherwise.
  - roncesvalles 1y ago
    Yeah, to me that’s always been the obvious most "expensive" part about doing YC. It’s not the chunk of equity, it's that they now know everything about your company, your road map or ideas, and the way you think and operate. And that's a pretty good deal for whatever little money they're spending on you. The whole thing has a "frenemies" vibe.
- deleted 1y ago
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- jacquesm 1y ago
  For many investors that's a bridge they will not cross because it will always lead to conflicts of interest.

tedggh 1y ago

The article starts by assuming there’s an AI bubble. Then it goes to label all these startups as AI companies. This is how they are categorized (2025 batch only): AI Agents (15%) Productivity/Ops Tools (11.4%) AI Infrastructure (10%) Healthcare (10%) Consumer Apps (9.3%). We cannot argue that AI infrastructure is AI, but what about say back office automation and healthcare? Are these AI companies? Or are they automation/healthtech that happen to use LLMs? Many Fintech and e-commerce companies use ML, are they ML companies?

ragall 1y ago
If a company's supposed advantage is predicated on using LLMs, it's an AI company. Of course, if that strategy fails, it could pivot to a non-AI approach which would make it cease to be an AI company.
johnnyanmac 1y ago
>Many Fintech and e-commerce companies use ML, are they ML companies? if that's how they market themselves, yes.

deleted 1y ago

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yomismoaqui 1y ago

https://archive.is/cucZu https://archive.is/cucZu

deleted 1y ago

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bablu71 1y ago

[flagged]

qustrolabe 1y ago

Paywalled articles ate Internet

johnnyanmac 1y ago
It was inevitable when ads were no longer enough to sustain websites, I suppose. It is a shame how critical news may be paywalled out from the public, though. Tragic, but fitting.
- joquarky 1y ago
  It feels like a self-imposed trap though. Just loading the one article results in: 335 requests 7.9 MB transferred 23.6 MB resources Hosting would be less expensive if they didn't bloat up what could be a simple static document.
  - progbits 1y ago
    I doubt their hosting costs matter compared to other expenses. Journalists still gotta get paid.
  - johnnyanmac 1y ago
    The hosting is terribly inefficient, but ultimately peanuts in cost. It's labor to worry about, as usual. That's exactly why this AI hype is a capitalists wet dream. Even if the overall cost doesn't go down, it's the potential to produce products without any uppity employees demanding raises, or pushing back on your clearly brilliant idea that you totally didn't need experts for. With workers who work 24/7 who will never threaten to leave, and no pesky labor laws to worry about.
- palmotea 1y ago
  > It was inevitable when ads were no longer enough to sustain websites, I suppose. It is a shame how critical news may be paywalled out from the public, though. Tragic, but fitting. Also when any public content started being gulped up by scrapers and resold as AI.

psnosignaluk 1y ago

Captain Obvious chiming in here, but as one of those boring douche canoes whose concerns are data privacy, data locality and generally the ability to understand how AI trains off of and manipulates the data we feed it, I'm resistant to the tech. We're testing the use of AI to aggregate and explain patterns in the data we have, but this is limited to our ticketing systems and Slack. Until our current choice of AI provider can guarantee that our transactional data won't be stored outside of the EU, the people driving this internally and those keen to make the sale externally can take a long walk off of a short pier. I can almost smell the aroma of the coffee machine from the chamber in which an EU subcommittee is working on the Artificial Intelligence Act (AIA) (EU) 2025/xxxx to add to the raft of regulations that financial entities in Europe need to concern themselves with. Maybe they'll be nice and just append it to an existing act. AI might be great. AI might be terrible. I'm not all convinced that most data aggregation features baked into AI and used by most normal companies couldn't be implemented in R or SQL (disclaimer: I couldn't code my way out of a wet paper bag if the tool I was told to use was an axe). It's just wanted so that someone can crawl over data sets to ask simple questions like 'how many merchants exceeded n number of transactions between a and b date' or 'My customer needs an eIDAS certificate. What do I ask them to send us without having to talk to Captain Obvious?'. I mean, we're busting a gut on revamping our developer docs, but given that the spec is already public, I'm pretty sure that developers can already vibe code against that. Going to test that and see how it gets on.

programmertote 1y ago

A tangential note -- these days when I'm casually reading through job postings, a lot of companies mention in their job requirements something along the lines of "Must be familiar/knowledgeable about GenAI technologies (RAG/MCP)" even for roles that are not strictly related to GenAI. When you look deeper into most of these companies, they seem better off using third-party services (like Claude/ChatGPT) instead of building their own GenAI models, MCP servers and whatnot. This is not considering that the domain they are operating in would have no apparent and obvious gain from utilizing GenAI (sure, they can buy ChatGPT/Claude organization subscription and that's all they need). I don't know if this is the indicator of how big this AI bubble is, but it sure is interesting...

tim333 1y ago
It seems sensible to want people familiar with the tech of the day like they'd expect most people to be familiar with the internet.

antibull 1y ago

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