HN user
https://medium.com/@gp2030
A good example of "founder bias" where big companies are read as not innovating, when in fact their goal is to squeeze as much juice from their user base and strengthen their monopolistic position and pricing power. From the outside it looks like blindness and atrophy but from the inside it's the main bread and butter.
The sighted engineer is also cave adapted, just to a different cave.
The article frames the cost of living issue mainly in terms of demand (...because of OpenAI and Anthropic...), which is an important factor, but has very little to say about supply. San Francisco is a major metropolis that looks like a mining town: there's very few high-rise buildings compared to other major cities. It's due to many factors including strict zoning, growth caps, seismic risks (compared to say Tokyo?) and landlords that don't have much incentive to decrease the value of their skyrocketing assets.
Also some recent setbacks like our leaning Millennium Tower.
It might take a political earthquake to change the status quo given how ossified everything is unfortunately.
Part of the issue is the respective positioning:
- OpenAI wants to be the consumer version of AI, modeled after Google and Meta, with a mostly free universal service powered by ads and e-commerce. They haven't fully shown that model can work. The big problem is the lack of zero marginal costs as each new user requires GPU spend.
- Anthropic positions itself more as enterprise AI, modeled after Microsoft ironically enough, and charges big companies for services. The economics of coding agents work but GPUs get expensive fast and open models are getting good enough for most use cases.
So it's a race between ads and e-commerce offsetting AI spend and open source eating almost everyone's lunch.
Interesting they agreed to sell after their rebrand to Fin a month ago.
There's increasing competition in the customer support AI agent space: Sierra valued at $15.8 billion, Decagon at $4.5 billion. It looks like Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff is trying to compete directly with Sierra, which was started by his ex-Co-CEO Bret Taylor. Also about preventing independent AI support agents from becoming a control point outside the CRM.
I've been using Claude Code regularly since the 4.5 release, and 4.7 was a significant regression: very unreliable, arguing about changes, deciding that fixes weren't needed, etc.
I'm hoping they recreate the magic of 4.5 but it's as much about the quality of harness, the memory and efficiency of the tools than simply the models at this point.
It's a great product. They had the brand, the capital, and the user base to become what Slack, Zoom, or Notion became. Instead, they spent a decade fighting a losing battle over storage pricing with Google and Microsoft. Their lack of a second act is due to a failure of product vision and enterprise execution.
It was both the market and the leadership.
Dropbox failed to find a second act: they struggled to find PMF with their acquisitions and new products: Dropbox Passwords, Dropbox Paper, Carousel etc.
As Steve Jobs warned Drew Houston, Dropbox was "a feature, not a product"
Every generation of builders believed their tools defined their value. Then the tools got easier, faster, automated, and the definition had to change.
But programming didn’t disappear. Writing didn’t disappear. Designing didn’t disappear.
AI flips the equation: when creation becomes cheap, value shifts from how much you can produce to what changes because you showed up. The ability to have a positive impact has actually expanded.
There's still huge gaps in our understanding: quantum gravity, dark matter, what happens before planck time, thermodynamics of life and many others.
Part of the problem is that building bigger colliders, telescopes, and gravitational wave detectors requires huge resources and very powerful computers to store and crunch all the data.
We're cutting research instead of funding it right now and sending our brightest researchers to Europe and China...
Mia was right. Listen to Mia
Here's some context: Tesla, BYD, and Xiaomi Are Playing Different Games https://gilpignol.substack.com/p/tesla-byd-and-xiaomi-are-pl...
Gravity is coming back to Silicon Valley: workers are realizing that the Bell Labs image they were sold was mostly innovation theater and hoarding talent for websites overstuffed with ads designed to manipulate users into buying junk
Distribution, brand, network effects, regulatory positioning, and execution speed all create defensibility; "data helps" doesn't imply "data is everything"
Also as foundation models improve, today's "hard to solve" problems become tomorrow's "easy to solve" problems
It's good for YC to do this and will benefit every startup in the long run. Google has been one of the sources of the AI boom, and provides liquidity by acquiring startups. But as YC argues they've monopolised distribution channels to the point where you need to go through the Google toll booth every time you want to access the market. This tax on founders to reach their audience makes many types of businesses unsustainable and impossible, especially for products where usage != sharing.
The decision can be read in the larger political context. There was some controversy a while back on certain directions the Foundation took like the project on sanitation (aka the toilet challenge) and the backing of charter schools. Regardless of one's opinion of those, he is taking a stand and drawing a line in the sand.
Interesting that some people here are advocating for fewer investments and board seats when angel investing. It's rather the opposite: you need more investments and less time spent on companies.
Angle investors are vital to the startup community as they take a lot of risk and are able to fund ideas that sound too crazy to get regular funding. In this case though given a hit rate of let's say 1% for argument's sake, 54 investments in 15 years is too low. You need hundred of investments to make the math work. Also doing it for fun and to learn is laudable but in the end hitting an Uber or an Airbnb is all that matters. It sounds like the job became full time consulting which is great if you're wealthy and want to give back to the community but can become unsustainable otherwise.
OpenAI has a massive brand advantage because the general public equates their products with AI.
Even if they don't 100% figure out agents they are now big enough that they can acquire those that do.
If the future is mostly about the app layer then they'll be very aggressive in consolidating the same way Facebook did with social media, see for example Windsurf.
AI is changing fast! And to be fair to the model companies, they have been releasing products of (mostly) increasing quality.
It really depends what your use case is. Over the range of all possible use cases this has been the narrative.
I tried Google's model for coding but it kept giving me wrong code. Currently Claude for coding and ChatGPT for more general questions is working for me. The more exotic your use case, the more hit or miss it's going to be.
You sound like you're from the Google team ;)
Rough steps:
1. Monitor keywords
2. Jump in to sway conversation
3. Profit
I'm not saying this is happening. Purely hypothetical.
If you're interested in the functioning of mechanical watches, they're amazing:
https://ciechanow.ski/mechanical-watch/
Previously on HN in 2022: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31261533
This is key: computation is about making things happen. Coding with an LLM adds a level of abstraction but the need for precision and correctness of the "things that happen" doesn't go away. No matter how many cool demos and "coding is dead" pronouncements because AI - and the demos are very cool - the bulk of the work moves to the pre- and post-processing and evals with AI. To the extent that it makes programming more accessible it's a good thing, but can't really replace it.
Part of being scientific is realising that you can't be completely unbiased and impartial, but you can be thorough, systematic, rigorous and informed by evidence rather than soundbites.
Some questions don't have definite answers, it's the sophistication of the analysis that counts.
Welcome to the Bay Area!
The big issue is a lot of people will believe what they want to believe. Most folks are not scientists - they start by assuming their conclusions and will choose the soothing moral and emotional rhetoric over evidence.
Trying to see the world objectively puts you in a category of outliers. The people you become friends with due to proximity in everyday life will not be outliers.
The Russians had some successes in asymmetric warfare, but they can't 'win' outright on the ground, and peace would probably decimate their economy.
From the WSJ a few days ago:
For Russia’s Economy, Peace Poses a Threat
https://www.wsj.com/world/russia/russia-war-economy-ukraine-...
Interesting article. It seems every war post-Cold War has turned into some kind of proxy war. No matter how much US politicians who are isolationist try to spin the Ukraine war as a "territorial dispute" and how well it plays with their domestic base, the US has been intimately involved since the start.
Perhaps the Cold War never really ended and there's been a secret conflict in the background ever since?
Nietzsche and Plato were some of the best fiction writers ever produced.
Storytelling, allegory, dramatic dialogue, compelling narratives, and 'myth making' can have different goals - sometimes it's to teach the glory of science. Other times it's about social relationships and how to be a functional human.
Bluey works so well because the combination of kids' entertainment with adult themes and storylines portraying positive role models feels unforced - some folks may not enjoy it, that's fine.
Good news. I integrated Claude with a scrapper to get info from pages and it was not giving hallucinations 99% of the time. Hope this works out of the box now.
Big fan of Michael's content over the years - will miss his videos with Dalton.
One incredible thing about Michael is behind every sentence you can hear the amount of pain he had to endure to succeed. He's not just giving you startup advice, he's a lone survivor who's come back to tell the tale. The whole startup game is about extreme outliers and he's always been very real about this fact.
Was re-reading his post on How to Pitch Your Company from 2016 (The Seven Questions), it's a great read:
https://www.michaelseibel.com/blog/how-to-pitch-your-company
Data and cloud sovereignty has been a theme in Europe for many years. Most efforts to develop European 'clones' of popular US services have had mixed successes (compared to China for example).
Number of declared meetings with EU officials since 2014: Google (381), Airbus (318), the European Automobile Manufacturers Association (241), and Meta (235)
https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2025/02/24/big-tech-banki...
The documents from Uber released a few years ago revealed a lobbying effort by some EU officials. In that context growing homegrown options will be difficult:
More definitions that don't mention rationality:
AI agents are software systems that use AI to pursue goals and complete tasks on behalf of users. They show reasoning, planning, and memory and have a level of autonomy to make decisions, learn, and adapt (Google)
Agents “can be defined in several ways” including both “fully autonomous systems that operate independently over extended periods” and “prescriptive implementations that follow predefined workflows” (Anthropic)
Agents are “automated systems that can independently accomplish tasks on behalf of users” and “LLMs equipped with instructions and tools” (OpenAI)
Agents are “a type of system that can understand and respond to customer inquiries without human intervention” in different categories, ranging from “simple reflex agents” to “utility-based agents” (Salesforce)
A few days ago in TechCrunch: No one knows what the hell an AI agent is
https://techcrunch.com/2025/03/14/no-one-knows-what-the-hell...