I'm genuinely curious about this. I also get the feeling that many are pivots. ChatGPT hadn't even been released when the deadline for YC W23 was. Sure, GPT-3 was released earlier but it still feels like most companies are reactions to recent trends. If most are pivots, what did they pivot from?

It feels like LLMs can help me more and more each day with the stuff I want to build.

Generally, the hardest part of startups is the "fuzzy" product capabilities. LLM make it practical to codify much of what has previously been either (1) bruteforce/tedium (2) too labor intensive.

Like all startup waves, we'll see a bunch of them fail. However, I think we're going to see a lot of neat stuff come out of this as well.

Kind of reminiscent of the dot com bubble. Most will fail, but the ones that survive could become the biggest companies in the world.

One obvious difference is that in this case the established players are making a serious attempt to develop the technology themselves. They do not intend to go the way of Blockbuster.

To me that speaks of the possibilities for LLMs to solve a lot of big problems