Comment by FLeXMurphy | Hacker News Reader

Comment by FLeXMurphy | Hacker News Reader

I'm seeing a lot of surprised people on this thread. Have a look at the more recent YC batches of startups. Count all the non-AI ones, and subtract from total. And don't pretend to not know what the end game of something like YC is here. And YC is not the only one.

One company doesn't need to do everything. But 100-1000 smaller companies, each taking on a piece of every-day work that people are paid to do and replacing it with AI, is definitely doable and can pay very well if deployed at scale. It doesn't have to be perfect all the time either - just cheap, fast, and good enough. As it always has been.

You didn't really think they are training vision models so they can just drive your car around, or that they are training robots to perform physical tasks so they can just use them in factories, did you?

You’re almost right but missing an entire category of startup: “egocentric” data. A lot of the most high revenue startups right now are, essentially, recruitment agencies for frontier labs to get video of skilled workers. OpenAI and others are spending billions per year with the various startups. We aren’t witnessing specialized startups training for specific sectors, we are witnessing training startups trying to hoover as much video as possible.

Personally, I’m not convinced these startups have much life in them. They’re popular right now because they are low effort as there is a huge demand from the frontier labs, but a year from now, there’ll be more than enough data.

There are at least a dozen in YC and probably hundreds in total.

I think a lot of the founders of such companies know that their companies have an expiry date and no viable exit strategy.

Probably the strategy is making as much money as possible while there's demand from the AI labs and then the founder will figure out their next steps with a bit more money in their accounts.

There will not be, they will find that the videos submitted are all of noise quality after the training starts, and then they would need videos of certain, specific actions that were basically not recorded. and it will go on and on for quite a long time.

As always: Outrage != surprise.

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