How the AI bubble ate Y Combinator

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

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?

The reason that HN is eaten up by LLMs is because it's eaten by any trendy topic that's in the mainstream news. HN used to be directed by an active and opinionated mind in pg, and it's been left to salaried, caretaking censors whose primary job is to make sure the site doesn't become an embarrassment. This mainly consists of artificially excluding discussions that may lead to energetic debate; debate that usually becomes swamped with low-quality comments by people speaking outside of their expertise, and can make the place look like a cesspool.

But energetic debate is where all of the energy is. The problem isn't those topics, the problem is that those topics also take a lot of energy to moderate the problems out of. We're experiencing an abandoned place, not a place driven by anything internal. It's an old barn that is kept clean just so it doesn't catch on fire.

We don't talk about FOSS because it isn't a general topic that is in the mainstream news, not because it isn't an important topic that is more vital to discuss than ever, in the face of monopoly, walled-gardens, verified signatures and centralization.

A positive editor like pg was aware of this, and treated the site as his personal playground. It partially revolved around what were essentially his journal entries. I only ever ended up on this site because he decided one day to have every front page article be about Erlang, of all things.

edit: and to add to the penultimate paragraph, an energetic discussion of FOSS that lead to productive projects and statements by people of influence would influence the mainstream. This place used to make stories, not just Digg them. The purpose of the site (other than to run something on Arc) seemed to me to be to juice new YC startups in a way that would leak into the general media. It doesn't even seem useful for YC any more.

Summarized by Ed Zitron: The Information recently published some worrying data from venture capitalist Jon Sakoda — that “at today’s clip, the industry would run out of money in six quarters,” adding that the money wouldn’t run out until the end of 2028 if it wasn’t for Anthropic and OpenAI.

We'll it's nice to see usage of crypto(semi anonymous payments) for it's original purpose at least somewhere.

Startups that typically end up in incubators etc are not about new fundamental systems (languages, frameworks, theoretical methodologies etc), but rather about new products.

I recognize that in reality this hasn't always worked out. But I also don't think that the answer is a black box that can churn out questionable boiler-plate.

It's so bad. I was thinking that it would at least replace people whose job is largely to give their worthless opinions, but it won't even do that. Those people's real job is often to add head count, to give your uncle's kid a job or to be fired when things go wrong. AI can't do any of that, it just generates the worthless opinions. Now the idiot won't even have to imitate the verbiage they sort-of heard in college; they're the ones that are using AI the most, to bullshit for them.

It's good for helping you think through stuff you're thinking about by repeating back to you in different words (and getting even that wrong often, forcing you to clarify.) It's horrifically bad at finding or following references, reasoning, or coming up with anything new.

It's not eating software, it's barely even touching software, other than being shoveled into it randomly. The obvious proof that AI is bad is that there are actual geniuses who came up with the algorithms to speed up, parallelize and to bias in a way that makes them seem more productive and creative. LLMs don't seem to be helping amazing minds like that improve AI itself. If LLMs were even going to be fertile, that pairing would be a semi-singularity even if these exceptional humans couldn't be taken out of the loop. My bet is that they don't help at all.

Blender user, or probably any other, would be able to pull that with a mouse click, followed by a few keystrokes. Bam, done.

Now something time consuming like UV-unrolling, sure go ahead and incorporate AI. But I'd bet it would need quite a bit of tweaking for a "pro" job, although of course thats not always necessary

But a lot of the YC companies in particular seem to be making software I don't care about to sell to other companies making other software I don't care about to sell to other companies making other software I don't care about, and so on. The benefit to me of all this activity seems to be so close to zero that the difference doesn't matter.

All that is pretty long ago now and doesn't really have much connection to the SV "startup community" (Google ceased being meaningfully described as a "startup" a long, long time ago).

And anyway, I don't care about self-driving cars. Don't have one, don't particularly want one.

The direct benefits to me of OpenAI are nearly negligible. I use it (and others) now and then for various things but if it disappeared tomorrow, my life and work would not be meaningfully impacted.

That said, I am not really an industrial-scale user.

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.

it's 50/50. Given the NYT lawsuit, I don't think that's something they would do recklessly. I'm sure a subscription has more strict ToS than just browsing a publicly viewable webpage.

Consumers aren't demanding it, investors are.

They see the hype and ridiculous amounts of money being invested into AI startups, and they're afraid of missing out, so they throw their own money in. No time to stop and think about it, there's too much hype and things are moving too fast. Then other investors see even more money being thrown in, and throw more money in themselves - monkey see, monkey do. Repeat ad infinitum and the next thing you know, majority of venture capital is being blindly funneled into anything AI related.

If you're leading some unrelated company and paying attention to where all this money is flowing, the path forward is obvious: simply become an AI company. Doesn't matter if you're actually building something valuable with it or not, because as long as your landing page fulfills a certain quota of AI buzzwords, the investors won't care. They only care about making the line go up, because it's good when the line goes up.

It's a bubble.

# 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)