YC offers early interviews for AI companies

https://www.ycombinator.com/blog/early-interviews-for-ai-companies

by craftsquick • 3 years ago

49 78 3 years ago

ycombinator.com

spacebanana72• 3 years ago

I thought YC backed individual founders and ideas rather than general technologies or sectors.

marcopicentini3• 3 years ago

It’s common during a bubble to lose fundamental principles.

dang6• 3 years ago

YC has a long tradition of soliciting applications in particular areas—see the links below. Of course, founders with other ideas are entirely welcome to apply.

Startup Ideas We'd Like to Fund - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=250704 - July 2008 (380 comments)

A New Experiment: The RFS - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=766703 - Aug 2009 (57 comments)

YCRFS 1: The Future of Journalism - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=766796 - Aug 2009 (56 comments)

YCRFS 2: New Paths Through Product Space - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=768425 - Aug 2009 (21 comments)

YCRFS 3: Things Built on Twitter - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=904193 - Oct 2009 (67 comments)

YCRFS 4: New Ways to Use Live Video - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=904195 - Oct 2009 (19 comments)

RFS 5: Development on Handhelds - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=950781 - Nov 2009 (44 comments)

YCRFS 6: iPad Applications - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1160140 - March 2010 (106 comments)

YCRFS 7: Applications of Facebook Instant Personalization - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1638004 - Aug 2010 (29 comments)

Request for Startups: Kill Hollywood. - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3491542 - Jan 2012 (664 comments)

New Requests for Startups - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8308666 - Sept 2014 (390 comments)

Requests for Startups Refreshed - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12592619 - Sept 2016 (124 comments)

Request for Startups: Water - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13311257 - Jan 2017 (224 comments)

yellow_lead2• 3 years ago

A lot of these links in the original submissions are broken. Would be nice if they could be fixed or archived. I.e:

https://www.ycombinator.com/rfs5.html

spacebanana72• 3 years ago

Thanks for the links, some of product ideas in the 08-10 threads make for interesting reads.

znpy• 3 years ago

Early? The sector is quite mature by now, they’re basically late to the game.

ignoramous4• 3 years ago

YC.org literally backed OpenAI in 2015, Cruise a year before that, and ScaleAI a year after that.

Per YC's publicly available records, the earliest they funded a ML/AI business was in 2008. They aren't late, but this AI specific Early Decision may be in reaction to funds like AIGrant.org, SouthParkCommons, Neo et al.

https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/?tags=AI&tags=Machine%...

jacquesm7• 3 years ago

Exactly, the chances of getting funding for AI companies are up considerably and if YC doesn't fund them someone else will. To get a seat at the table they need to move faster compared to their normal schedule.

haunter• 3 years ago

Early by YC schedule

early interview slots for the YC W24 batch

The general deadline for W24 is September 11

But this early round for AI companies is available until July 17

marcopicentini3• 3 years ago

I develop a few interesting features using OpenAI in an existing product.

After a wow-effects of the first days, few users are still using it. If I talk to users they say features are awesome but they are not actually using it. Really funny.

Do you have experience of OpenAI API-based product that has high retention ?

ignoramous4• 3 years ago

Do you have experience of OpenAI API-based product that has high retention?

perplexity.ai comes to mind. I introduced it to my students at uni a few weeks ago and they now use it extensively over Bard/ChatGPT. There are others too, like copy-writing tools (jasper.ai, copy.ai) who seem to be doing well. Besides, from experience, GitHub Copilot is so good, I can barely program without it.

weird-eye-issue5• 3 years ago

Yes I developed a SaaS and the functionality is solely based on output from OpenAI. We have several thousand paying users already with ARR above $1.5M

opdahl2• 3 years ago

May I ask what your profit margins are? Why can't someone just use ChatGPT instead?

emptysongglass• 3 years ago

What's the service?

marcopicentini3• 3 years ago

Making $900k in the first 3 week it means monetize on the wow-effects.

Is it https://prompthero.com/ ?

jaggederest• 3 years ago

companies building AI developer tools.

There it is, that's where you want to be - selling shovels during the gold rush.

stagger87• 3 years ago

The only one selling shovels is nvidia.

jerrygenser• 3 years ago

They are selling wood and metal to make shovels, which is substrate.

There are shovel sellers which are making tools.

Then there are application makers that end users see that are made with shovels.

lemper• 3 years ago

I can't wait to see this bubble bursting spectacularly.

rvz7• 3 years ago

A great opportunity to sell then during the rush in capital from the VCs throwing money at any company filled with AI buzzwords before it all collapses.

detourdog• 3 years ago

I have been working on the same idea since the 90's. I find humorous that I could describe the idea I have been working on, using the buzzwords of every funding excitement of wave.

joos3• 3 years ago

Big mistake imo to hop on trendy grifts. Please focus on the founders as before.

jacquesm7• 3 years ago

They will still do that, but within the context of having an application that takes advantage of recent developments in AI. Whether that's smart or not is an open question, time will tell. But, given that YC is a seed level investor (with some follow on capacity) it makes sense because the 'downstream' VCs are handing out money like candy to start-ups that can plausibly claim to be AI startups. The idea is that some of these will go on to corner their respective markets and that by getting in early you guarantee yourself a place at the table later on.

Whether that is smart is also an open question.

ilaksh3• 3 years ago

When you say handing out money like candy, it makes me think I should try to apply to something. I am spending most of my time doing low-paying contracts that integrate generative AI for other companies or startups. And then I use that money to build out my own project for a few weeks before I run out of money and have to get another contract.

If it's actually easy to get money? How would I find a VC who would be impressed by my actual technical ability as opposed to something like marketing or networking prowess? I tend to not spend a lot of time on making slick web pages and promoting myself but focus on implementing features.

Right now my own thing is a ChatGPT plugin that generates web pages including appropriate images using a template and stable diffusion. I am working on building in a CRUD system that GPT-4 will have concise docs for, as well as a user login system and an API proxy and secrets management. This way the system should be able to create fully functional websites.

The previous version integrates GPT-4 with fly.io VMs so that it directly executes commands in a loop to accomplish tasks.

But the plugin is on hold to work for some other startup so I can make rent and stuff. I am building out a simple generative fill inpainting/outpainting editor inspired by Playground.ai. Previously for this other startup I created a Dreambooth tool and a live editing scribble image generation thing with Controlnet.

And before that I was working on a Slack bot where you can ask it questions about PDF or other documents, and another that used GPT to write SQL for querying a specific table and optionally creating charts on the fly.

I guess I am just suspecting that maybe working on all of these other startups to pay the bills isn't necessary if I ask the right person for money. Which I never really seriously considered as an option.

ToJans• 3 years ago

Unless VCs hope to get their profits from the "bigger fool"?

jacquesm7• 3 years ago

The AI feeding frenzy in VC land is reminiscent of the early days of the public access internet aka the .com boom. That corrected itself sharply but eventually most of those .com boom dreams came out, just a bit later and lots of VCs lost lots of money because they got the timing wrong.

Every time there is a major shift in tech you see this pattern repeat but I don't recall seeing it on that scale again since ~2000, even though lots of stuff has happened since then (for instance: the mobile revolution).

Investing in AI for the sake of companies using AI because it increases their chances of funding is the hallmark of a bubble, and that will probably end the same way it did before. But if you manage to pick the winners early it will pay off in spades. The big question to me is whether or not those winners will be part of the first wave or the second, usually it takes a while before a new technology really comes into its strength.

Until then there is a pretty big risk that what looks to be an early winner will be displaced by a party from the second wave which is better positioned to take advantage of later, more mature versions of that technology, which by then may well be able to displace those 'early winners' by a couple of guys with an open source package.

Not an easy time to be an investor.

ethbr05• 3 years ago

Total addressable market and value proposition are key.

A specific technology doesn't really change either of these.

"I am going to sell pet supplies to people who need pet supplies"

Okay, how many people need pet supplies and why would they use you instead of the store down the street (in the 90s)?

"I am going to sell books to people who need books"

Is obviously a better proposition, even before we get into the fact that it's "online" or uses any specific technology!

asterix_pano• 3 years ago

Why is the second one a better proposition?

ENGNR• 3 years ago

That whole internet bubble, and where's the internet now, pfft

jacquesm7• 3 years ago

Timing is everything in investing. You can get it right in principle but wrong timingwise and still end up losing your shirt.

glenngillen• 3 years ago

Isn’t this the same logic the crypto bulls said during their mania?

CPLX• 3 years ago

The difference is crypto is useless and AI is useful.

That’s a pretty important difference.

rvz7• 3 years ago

The difference is crypto is useless and AI is useful.

Is that why Stripe, TicketMaster, Moneygram, Checkout.com, TransferGo, VISA, etc and many other companies continue to use it?

That’s a pretty important difference.

Nope. The important difference is that crypto has energy efficient alternative methods of consensus available today such as proof-of-stake, byzantine fault tolerance (BFT), etc and even a former PoW blockchain (Ethereum) cut their emissions by 99.99% [0] by switching to a proof-of-stake consensus method. For crypto it is possible to switch to greener methods.

AI (Deep Learning) continues to destroy the planet since it has no efficient alternative methods available for training, fine-tuning and inference. This means their methods waste tons of resources, water and electricity. [1] [2]

It is a serious issue in the field after decades of its existence all to produce unexplainable black-box AI models which cannot reason and have to be retrained, fine-tuned again once it gets confused by a single pixel or regurgitates nonsense output.

The AI hype is another grift that the VCs are taking advantage of just like they did with thousands of crypto companies. The reality is, 90% of these AI / crypto companies will fail and the remaining 10% will still be around that are useful.

[0] https://consensys.net/blog/press-release/ethereum-blockchain...

[1] https://gizmodo.com/chatgpt-ai-water-185000-gallons-training...

[2] https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/chatgpt-data-centre-water...

dang6• 3 years ago

Please don't take HN threads further into repetitive flamewar hell. Nothing interesting is going to come out of repeating this argument for the n-thousandth time. Worse, when discussions cease to be interesting, they turn nasty.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

dang6• 3 years ago

"Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36734710.

schizo89• 3 years ago

I'm curious whether AI aligns with startups. IMHO it does not well. It aligns with academia where time flow differently.

Business then takes what an academia produces -- i.e. papers / methods / algorithms and implements it to generate value for customers.

It doesn't align with startups as well in case if you have a method and require a lot of compute to produce a model -- you need capital for compute and that's not a typical garage startup.

I'm really curious whether there is any opportunity left for YC-sized startups in AI.

I lot of really cool developments happen on github -- but again that's open source, not ventures to generate money.

supergirl• 3 years ago

the new generation LLM are just better Siri/Alexa. why such hype about them

schappim• 3 years ago

Anyone had any interview offers?

YC offers early interviews for AI companies

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