2,668 karma · joined October 6, 2014
The YC application is a sales pitch, and you're not selling your idea, you're primarily selling your charisma and capacity to spin vision and sell. Second, you're selling your chemistry with your cofounders and stability of your relationship. Third, you're selling your capacity to build, at least some usable prototype, but this a low bar.
At no point are you actually selling the concrete idea, unless you're doing something extremely specific that seems valuable and you're one of the few who can build it. For the rest, the idea is a rhetorical vehicle to sell the other things.
- Facial recognition in Photos
- "Memories" in Photos
- iOS keyboard autocomplete using LLMs. I am bilingual and noticed in the latest iOS it now does multi-language autocomplete and you no longer have to manually switch languages.
- Event detection for Calendar
- Depth Fusion in the iOS camera app, using ML to take crisper photos
- Probably others...
The crazy thing is most/all of these run on the device.
https://browse.arxiv.org/html/2312.12451v1
It's cool that it has a dark mode. Didn't see a toggle but renders in the system mode.
Overall will make arXiv a lot more accessible on mobile.
Of course everyone can switch to Signal and this is a moot point, but millions of Apple users use iMessage and aren't likely to switch.
Facebook literally takes your data from their apps and internet, tracks your behavior on the internet, and feeds this data into models of you. These models are so accurate they can sometimes basically predict what you're thinking. Hence the layman jumping to the conclusion that they must be spying though the mic.
A LLM company like OpenAI, and their partners, employs almost literally this exact model. Grabs data from whatever sources to improve their models, to increase the likelihood you'll keep clicking where they want you to click, to monetize you.
There's a spectrum of ideas, from groundbreaking to "dime a dozen". In tech startups, and in almost all of computer science, most ideas are a dime a dozen, and the value is in the execution.
But clearly, some ideas are groundbreaking. Einstein rightfully gets the credit for an on-paper hypothesis that wasn't proved until decades later via a chain of critical discoveries and experimental innovations by other people. It's legit to call it Einstin's relativity, and not Mossbauer/Hay's relativity.