How the AI bubble ate Y Combinator
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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.
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.
Also when any public content started being gulped up by scrapers and resold as AI.
I could subscribe and cancel but that's a lot of friction to just read one article.
the boss is nowhere
"An LLM might be able to explain something to you, but it can never understand it for you."
And then something like this [0] will happen, creating a weird wasteful meta-game about the model(s) used by each company.
It makes intuitive sense: If you outsourced "generate awesome assertions" to a contractor, then someone else hired the same contractor to "judge the awesomeness of these assertions", they are more likely to get lots of "awesome" results—whether they're warranted or not. The difference might even come down to quirks of word-choice and formatting which a careful human inspector would judge irrelevant.
[0] https://www.theregister.com/2025/09/03/ai_hiring_biased/
As anyone in the US healthcare insurance claims-adjacent spaces can tell you: yes, in about 2 years.
HN thread on the apology: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41701265
Speaking of which, apparently PearAI deleted their apology in the intervening year.
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.
So, "sorry not sorry" and then back to the grind. Ethics be damned.
A real shame. I went though a mandatory software ethics class and my FOSS exposure made me think a lot of the concepts were simply common sense. Read and respect licenses, don't endanger client data, don't do illegal shit. College me would have no idea how many people really needed to take that course.
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.
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 ...
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.
Maybe Open source is just on mind a lot these recent days.
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.
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?
I'm not the person you responded to, but I'm certain that way less than half the population knows about or considers open source, that's one of those living in a bubble illusions.
Ultimately those people aren't here and have no interest in being here.
I would say that it is the issue of lack of knowledge if anything.
Yes, there is an infinite amount of knowledge available on the internet regarding open source and that's honestly where I learnt about stuff but its overwhelming at first and required something to kickstart the whole process/ be a catalyst of sorts.
Realizing using linux that privacy matters a lot and then realizing that I can just search open source alternative to X really helped me in the beggining/still sometimes does and there are a lot of low hanging fruits that can just be told for people to follow (like use signal instead of whatsapp) so there's definitely that.
I definitely am thinking about doing something about it tbh the more I think about it but I think that partially why people don't go around doing this is because of how AI seemingly sells and open source fundamentally doesn't sell
I don't know how you shift that, but getting people interested would be the first step. They need to have a reason to want to learn.
Supposedly evveryone's mad over paywalls and enshittification and slop, but no one wants to take the time find geuine, curious content anymore.
As far as I'm concerned, the frog it cooked already. immediate dopamine trumps over the idea of ever owning anything in life.
A very small portion of the population, yes.
The percentage of the population that is going to run things on their own is comparatively tiny. Mass adoption isn't going to happen because convenience and support is what most people want. Again, these things have been discussed for decades, and yet we keep seeing tighter and tighter centralization of data and services. In phones it's pretty much dead. You have apple (totally locked) and Google (on their way to totally locked).
Yet I still feel like things like grapheneos are really valid nowadays and there are definitely some de-facto low hanging fruits of open source where you still get the same-ish level of convenience and support and the only reason I can't think of the same thing happening is knowledge.
my country is literally filled with everyone owning whatsapp, when I ask people why not signal... they don't even know what signal is.
Everyone has always been doing chats on whatsapp and now there is this weird lock-in but all it takes is for masses to use signal and spread the word as an example for a small victory towards a path of good. I will try to do my part I suppose, we can all be pessimist but atleast I feel deep down that we can create a system of convenience and support for other open source projects too if we can donate to these projects too and have a reasonable assessment of that too.
Too many people think of open source as free and yes its free but I also think that its the responsibility of us as a whole as a society to fund open source if we want support otherwise we should stop thinking about it.
Regarding google locking down, what can I say except that I think that this decision should be fought against with as much scrutiny by the people advocating for freedom as possible.
There is a way to do things with adb but still, it is a shame that google went down this path and we should definitely fight against this too of sorts but I have hope in grapheneos + f-droid too tho. I definitely need to enlighten myself more if the google's thing is gonna cause an issue for things like grapheneos too as that would be a real deal breaker / cause even more severe issues as from what I know grapheneos is one of the safest os roms/ most privacy friendly android rom for mobile and gives a lot of security advantages that are definitely something to look at and admire.
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.
I am not sure about the accuracy of it as I was there after the AI era and I have only seen the slow but steady creep of it.
> This place used to make stories, not just Digg them
This does give me goosebumps.
Honestly, I like this place because it has a lot of nice people and we are more alike and different and it's just that this seems to be the place I have decided to call a home to all of my ramblings/thoughts on essentially everything.
The only other social media that I operate is maybe discord and a very small dose of reddit.
it does seem to me that somewhere along the internet, we might have lost it, or atleast its hidden, waiting to be discovered.
I can't help but share things like julia evan's zines and how he inspired one day when I messaged him on mail about being worried about AI when he shared me somebody who had created a better UI for the man pages and so many other interesting pages which really reflected personality that I didn't know exist.
I don't really think that we can do over hackernews but there is certainly a possibility of atleast having niche discussions like erlang and discussing them could lead to more people exposure's to it... which can benefit them or the community!
I can maybe think of that we might need to use something like matrix to atleast create a public community with better moderation if that's the issue.
I think the HN mods are also trying their best but if we want opinions, the best way I right now could think of to fixing this as an issue might be to creating a hackernews but not for AI which I had actually suggested once but everybody just said to me to block posts about AI or to create a tracker which removes all AI references at most, the post is definitely lost in my comments but I definitely remember it.
I can understand where you are coming from and I think that this place isn't a substitute for a place like that and we still might need a place like that too if we become too pessimistic of y-combinator.
Never give up hope I suppose :)
With the quality of modern AI this really isn't possible. Or as someone else said "There is considerable overlap between the intelligence of the smartest bears and the dumbest tourists"
On the internet a community is almost always growing or dying, there is no real inbetween. Communities that make the news do so because those sites are accessible. The problem is being accessible to humans ensures that bots will show up and cause problems, so now you have the added responsibility of moderation and spam control which involves politics at the end of the day.
In earlier times, Slashdot used to make stories.
Moreso the internet evolved into something we don't like. In the early days it wasn't that hard to have an energetic conversation because you were having conversations with real people at their digression. Yes, there were some number of trolls you had to deal with, but over time they went from being the exception to being the rule. Any and every site you create now, the moment you collect a worthwhile market will be flooded with those attempting to market their wares to the point that actual conversation can no longer exist. The walled-gardens and verified signatures are a side effect of the infection that the internet has become.
The world you lived in aged and died and now a brave new world screams for your attention 24/7 without care for your health or sanity. The days where a large portion of people were into programming because they enjoyed it are long past. People need paychecks to support the ever spiraling costs of basic needs. Consolidation and monopolies aren't just a thing in websites and computer hardware, it's a thing everywhere with everything especially in the US. The power scaling laws of technology have come home to roost. The cyberpunk dystopia we were warned of is already here and the masses invited it with open arms.
The FOSS utopianist need to realize they lost, and it's human laziness and apathy that was the killing blow. If you can come to terms with that, maybe a rebirth of FOSS that targets our base instincts can arise.
> If you can come to terms with that, maybe a rebirth of FOSS that targets our base instincts can arise.
> The cyberpunk dystopia we were warned of is already here and the masses invited it with open arms.
Mature conversations need to accept reality to move forward. I disagree with the implication in your comment that we are in uniquely lost times. I think FOSS was under much, much more threat in the Microsoft and proprietary software times than it is now. Remember when encryption was locked by the NSA? I just think the community on this site has locked itself into a local minimum of getting frustrated and sad over the state of things they don't like. Once any upvote-based site gets locked into one of these local minima it becomes really hard to escape as the incentive structure of voting continues to reward tapping into the same emotions.
It's not unique, but it the situation is much more dire.
>I think FOSS was under much, much more threat in the Microsoft and proprietary software times than it is now.
I disagree. FOSS's appeal is exactly in how it's there for everyone. no proprietary software can change that. And we've seen over the decades that throwing billions at the problem doesn't make something billions of times better.
Today? You share info and your content might be scraped into submission. You get bombarded by spam and bad faith actors to a point where moderation is now a forefront of how to approach a release, and not just a little thing to do a few minutes a day. Finding a commuity to share your project with is harder than ever as everyone is trying to push their own (often paid) idea out with much more vigor. And of course, less peopel can even afford to contribute to begin with.
These aren't just "vibes". It's genuinely more difficult to navigate this space these days. Unless you submit to some centralized serviceto take care of that for you.
>Mature conversations need to accept reality to move forward.
Mature conversations also realize there is no "single" reality. But a variety of perspectives, viewpoints, and opinions. Sure, some people are genuinely better off abandoning FOSS and sustaiing themselves on selling software. That doesn't necessarily justify everyone abandoning FOSS, though.
I think that a very solid (energetic) discussion can take place on that too and its just a pleasure that even now, to me, this is full of energy and maybe mimics a sense of spirit of that energy the parent comment was referring to.
I actually wanted to share that energy and I really read this comment and recorded myself a video of reading this whole text from start just to reach your post which I know isn't going to get anywhere but I just wanted this message to be beyond this thread. It definitely gave me some new insights and was a fun exercise in making me less shy around the camera. I want to create memes like burialgoods/anything to really spread this message in sorts and other messages too regarding open source. There is so much to be done :)
But I also want to do it in a hopeful way, we can come with terms on things, we should and try to advocate for the rebirth of Foss as you say.
It genuinely makes one feel a bit hopeless but I think that the approach of looking at the uncomfortable and then still wanting a rebirth/fighting for it is something worth looking for in our lifetimes.
doesn't soud like an environment worth rebirthing if we need to surrender to the very dark arts FOSS rejected. If something is free but still trying to stroke "base instinctincts", it's basically propoganda. When you're not winning dollars, you're winning mindshare.
I just wanted to make video games, man. And maybe help others make even better video games. I'm not trying to start a cult.
> This place used to make stories, not just Digg them.
I've started to dread most conversations about FOSS on this site because they just turn into the same tired old high-energy, low-quality conversation repeated over and over again. There's little incentive for anyone of influence or expertise to contribute because, well, all of these conversations end up the same way.
I guess I disagree on your view of the moderation of this site. While it's true that pg used to do a lot of guidance and tastemaking on HN, the scale of the site was small enough where he could. At this point the site is massive and only growing and this new userbase expects a Digg or Reddit like norm, not one that drives tastemaking. I think the site would require a fundamental rehaul to offer an individual or a group the tastemaking that pg could do when the site was a fraction of the size.
I also think, for better or for worse, that HN has "accepted" not being the tastemaker anymore and becoming another tech news aggregator. It's because the eyeballs of folks new to these issues doesn't really fall onto this site anymore. For a while that had been Twitter but now that Twitter is under Musk, it's lost that distinction and now tech discussions don't seem to have a good home.
I concur, there's clearly been a generational shift away from the idea of making a cool thing and sharing it. Part of it is economic: even programmers can struggle with bills these days, and the last thing someone paycheck to paycheck (or laid off) can do it take time to volunteer their talents to FOSS.
And the lack of investment seems to be creeping up slowly: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42849640
I had thought about bringing attention to it but now I am not even sure what it would mean.
I doubt that I could be a person who can advocate for open source full time while someone pays me, that's the main issue. I am okay with just enough to satisfy and I am even satisfied with less but to me, atleast right now, Advocacy for open source does seem to be part time unless I want to take a massive gamble of my life which I thought of but I am just not comfortable right now, its definitely complicated and I am not sure
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.
we're entering juicero levels of delusion
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.
# 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)
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.
It is interesting that you have an opinion on what a real AI startup is and either (1) don’t know what foundation models are, or (2) do know what foundation models are but think that a company whose core focus is on developing them for a particular field is just a startup that uses AI but not one one whose core business is AI.
It might sound like I'm splitting hairs here but I'm trying to illustrate the problem of defining a startup as an "AI startup" simply due to the presence of AI somewhere in its product. It would be like calling early-days Facebook (the actual website, not the diversified conglomerate that Meta has become) an "internet startup" instead of a "social media startup." Sure, the former is technically true but it's a near-meaningless description, because every company in the 21st century is an "internet company" in some respect.
Guess what, you aren't getting into YC as a CAD company and you aren't raising further rounds either.
I think you need to expand a bit more this. I does sound to me that if you are using AI in the main product you are an AI startup.
It is similar with if you are offering a web version of your app you are an internet company. And if you are offering a mobile version you are a mobile company.
and a company can be more than one: An internet AI mobile company :)
Or put another way, their competency relies completely on people not associated with the company.
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.
a bunch of PHP scripts :-D
It may be that there are such projects which can be monetized or need better marketing.
Innovative it is not, however.
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.
Startups that typically end up in incubators etc are not about new fundamental systems (languages, frameworks, theoretical methodologies etc), but rather about new products.
Almost nobody is making things that are so unlike everything that previously existed that LLMs can't help.
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.
well that's the different. It is the final product, now. In many cases, you're selling the prototype itself, becuse that's what investors like seeing. User engagement be damned.
And people still seem to doubt that we're in a massive bubble.
Nobody really wants any of this shit as a product.
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
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.
Like, I definitely understand the desperation but I can't help but blame the system which lead us to where we are but I don't really know man, maybe blaming the system wouldn't help either and there is definitely some pessimism in the air.
We can change so much things but to me it just seems as if __people don't care__ And I can understand if people are busy in their lives but now we are just gonna have this churn keep on going and going and this bubble is going to burst which is suddenly gonna impact people's wallets but then everybody is going to forget just as they forgot the web bubble.
But that's sadly not happening here. Every story about the true problems get flagged because HN seems to have this strong sense of staying apolitical in a time of absolutely rampant destruction happening in real time most recent example of the US government shutting down: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45434146
There's a lot of Apathy but what really worries me is the almost forced ignorance from people who should be able to rise beyond that. I guess it's just a reflection on how Silicon Valley also sold out when push came to shove. Whatever makes more money, morality, ethics, and long term preservation be damned.
To be fair, the investor never cared about the product to begin with. It's a shame that that apathy spread all down the totem pole. But I guess taht's what happens when the consumer is no longer the audience of consumer products.
Only around 10% of them will succeed at best.
If a massive crash happens then it would be 2% at best.
But hey, mention the word union here and you'll still get beat with a stick.
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.
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.
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?
if that's how they market themselves, yes.
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?
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.
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.
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.
Also, oddly, a few for Mulvad of all things.
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.
In particular, I've noticed the topic of AI is eating up corporate meetings, turning them into a kind of human slop.
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.
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.
"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.
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
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.
I am sure then you will talk about screwdrivers...
Screwdriver wrappers probably lol /s
(This was a joke of sorts and replace screwdriver with AI/AI wrappers and these websites owned by AI wrappers)
you just need some perspective.
The culture definiely changed over the years, not just the community.
well HN is also burying the collapse of the country many of community resides in, so I guess that's off the table.
Heck, even the layoff news seems to have been normalized these days. There's this oddly sterile feeling here lately. As if we need to pretend we are still in good times, when clearly many of us are struggling.
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).
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."
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...
"alexander grahm beLLM invented a new greeting for the telephone during the telephone bubble: heLLMo! to you too!"
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.
The clever people are still doing good work, they're just doing so quietly.
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.
Even without AI the software industry is not in a good state for a range of reasons. The big tech companies barely sell software - it's custom software operated to perform some other much stickier function, but the value is not in the software per se beyond it enabling selling the other thing.
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
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.
Why do I need a lawyer if I can just get the AI to do it all for me? Filings, briefs, legal arguments etc. are all just output generated from specific inputs after all.
Why do I need to go to a doctor if I can just have AI diagnose, and eventually even run tests and then operate?
Why would I need artists / marketers for whatever my product, the magical AI can just do it all.
It could be we're headed down this road, but I don't see how software is somehow special in that its the only thing AI can do competently
I do know many funds and people working to build community and startups that actually help people but it’s an uphill battle because it’s not as sexy and the returns aren’t as immediate.
I just took a look at yclist.com, which ends in 2019. Noticed only a few that I've ever heard of and none that I use. Possibly there are some since then but I sort of doubt it.
There are a couple of things that started later than say, 2015 that I actually use but none that come immediately to mind came out of the "startup community."
There are some others, like Stripe, from which I probably benefit somewhat indirectly, but even that dates back to 2010.
So yeah, for me, the SV "startup community" has been a wasteland for a long time. There are probably a few things that I'm not thinking of at the moment, but the fact that they don't come to mind suggests that they just aren't very important.
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.
Not all though but to me, I okay, I am mentioning this a lot nowadays but I am in high school and this is relevant.
When I first lets say wanted to do a startup, my idea was that people would invest in me for me to grow and then I can sell it really later after 15 years of working or sorts to have financial freedom.
I wanted to build things that could make profit for 15 years and be something that could've needed capital to expand the growth just like any other business.
Just because it is in coding/tech and its spicy right now doesn't make the principles of sound business go away.
Yet, the more time I invested in here / seeing YC, it seems that the story is about hype/growth/operating at a loss knowing things aren't sustainable/building wrappers.
Only to sell them at insane profits to somebody later on while the company never made a single profit or something while hiring many people...
What can I say, its just something that I can understand if someone is doing and there might be companies that have this fundamental but untill I find something like that, I am pretty sure not gonna just go and paste AI sticker in somethings as some other people are doing right now...
Its a matter of moral backbone. I can't charge my investor wrong knowing that my project doesn't have potential or sorts and its an hype thing... ,Idk. There are a lot of systemic issues in the whole world that we have to think through to discover how we got here.
> And the genuine hackers I know of are wasting life away working on pointless projects.
Man this is something that I grapple with a lott, we must do something to survive and so most of us work a dead end job even though we can be really passionate about something and so there's definitely that which I resonate with a lot.
We'll it's nice to see usage of crypto(semi anonymous payments) for it's original purpose at least somewhere.
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.
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.
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
All else is a combination of luck, skill, and grit, because for every rock star, star athlete, and successful influencer, there are tens or hundreds of thousands who aren't famous because they didn't win that game.
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.