In 2025, venture capital can't pretend everything is fine any more
248 comments
·May 11, 2025A_D_E_P_T
ctoth
Here's a thing you can do right now, today.
- Go down to your local Ray-Ban store.
- Ask to play with a pear of the Meta glasses.
- Activate "Live AI mode"
- Have a real time video conversation with an AI which can see what you see, translate between languages, read text, recognize objects, and interact with the real world.
Contrary to your (potentially misremembered?) history, nothing at all like this was possible in 2019. I remember finetuning an early GPT-2 (before they even released the 2B model!) on a large corpus of Star Wars novels and being impressed that it would mention "Luke" when I ran the produced model! Now I wear it on my head and read restaurant menus with it. Use it to find my Uber (what kind of car is that?) Today I am building my raised garden beds out back and reading the various soil amendments I purchased, talking about how much bloodmeal to put over the hugelkultur layer, having it do math, and generally having a pair of eyeballs. I'm blind. The amount of utility I get out of these things is ... very hard to overstate.
If this's "moribund," sign me up for more decay.
bolobo
> - Have a real time video conversation with an AI which can see what you see, translate between languages, read text, recognize objects, and interact with the real world.
Maybe it's me having an extremely low imagination, but that stuff existed for a while in the shape of google lens and the various vision flavor of LLMs, and I must have used them.... 3 times in years, and not once did I think "Gosh I wish I could just ask a question aloud while walking in the street about this building and wait for the answer". It's either important enough that I want to see the wikipedia page straight from google maps and read the whole lot or not.
> an AI which can read text, recognize objects, and interact with the real world.
I can already do that pretty well with my eyeballs, and I don't need to worry about hallucinations, privacy, bad phone signal or my bad english accent. I get that is certainly an amazing tools for people with vision impairments, but that is not the market Meta/OpenAI are aiming for and forcefully trying to shove it into.
So yes, mayyybe if I am in a foreign country I could see a use but I usually want to get _away_ from technology on vacation. So I really don't see the point, but it seems that they believe I am the target audience?
ctoth
> I can already do that pretty well with my eyeballs, and I don't need to worry about hallucinations
I see. Perhaps your eyeballs missed the part where I said I'm blind?
The entire purpose of my comment was to push back against this idea that AI is stuck in 2022. It's weird and nonsensical and seems disingenuous, especially when I say "here are things I can do now that I couldn't do before" and the general response is "but I don't need to do those things!"
lisper
> Ask to play with a pear [sic] of the Meta glasses.
Ironically, this typo is very likely a result of AI dictation making a mistake. There are a lot of common misspellings in English, like "their" and "there", but I've never seen a human confuse "pair" and "pear".
So yeah, there are cool demos you can do that you couldn't five years ago. But whether any of those cool demos actually translate into something useful in day-to-day life where the benefits outweigh the costs and risks is far from clear.
ctoth
Actually dictation would be more-likely to get this right! This was my typical human failure. Vastly more attributable to me reading with speech rather than Braille.
globnomulous
Am I mistaken in thinking that much of what you're describing would be considered computer vision, and that computer vision was already largely capable of these things in 2019 and before? I vividly remember a live demonstration of an on-device AR-and-object-recognition program at the 2014 Facebook developer conference.
msteffen
For a long time I held a sentiment similar to the parent comment, and then my brother sat me down, took out his phone, put chatGPT into conversation mode, and chatted with it for about five minutes. That was the second time I was truly amazed by chatGPT (after my first conversation, where I got it to tell me a fair bit about how Postgres works). Its ability to hold a natural, context-aware conversation has gotten really amazing.
I somehow agree with the op, that I don’t think I’m much closer to hiring chatGPT for a real job in 2025 than I was in 2022, but also you that there has been meaningful progress. And in particular, products that are transformative for disabled people are usually big improvements to the status quo for abled people too (oxo good grips being the classic example—transformative for people with arthritis, and generally just better for everybody else)
fennecbutt
I use it instead of Google searching now but even I double and triple check the hell out of it. It just bullshits the fuck out of semi complex or unique questions.
Like "can a ps2 game use the ps1 hardware" it gave a noncommital, hallucinated answer. Then when asked to list sources it "searched the Internet" where all the links were from searches like "reddit ps2" etc.
nine_k
ChatGPT and its kin is already being hired massively as first-line customer support. Voice synthesis and recognition is really good now, too, so it's both online chat bots and phone support bots.
dingnuts
> after my first conversation, where I got it to tell me a fair bit about how Postgres works
See, I always start with conversations about things I already know about, and they bullshit me enough that I'm wary of Gell-Mann Amnesia when asking them about things I don't know about. They output a lot of things that seem plausible but the way they blend fact and fiction with no regard for the truth keeps me extremely distrusting of them.
That is to say: after your conversation, did you ask for citations and go read the primary sources? Because if you did not, the model likely mislead you about Postgres in subtle ways.
42lux
And we had these toys with higher latency in 22 with gpt3. The better tooling and integration hides the extremely slowed down pace of innovation in base models all while throwing mountains of compute at it.
api
One thing that’s fascinating to me is that these straight out of sci-fi things are novelties or demos, and don’t seem all that popular. Most people just aren’t interested.
It’s the “boring” stuff that’s interesting: automating drudgery work, a better way to research, etc.
I’ve been predicting for years that glasses — whether AR or VR — are and will remain niche. I don’t think most people want them.
afavour
> Most people just aren’t interested.
Which makes sense, really. Buying an expensive pair of glasses so that I can point at an object and say “what is that” is a cool parlour trick but I can imagine very few scenarios where I’ve wished I had that functionality.
Realtime translation… absolutely a feature I’d use. For a week a year, max. IMO the killer, everyday application just isn’t there yet. I’m still not sure what it would be.
Bjartr
These statements were true of the Internet too. Until it wasn't. It'll be a slow burn and then one day you turn around and notice it's everywhere.
Even post dotcom bust there was still this generally shared understanding that you probably shouldn't meet people you met on the Internet and you shouldn't get in strangers cars. Today we use the Internet for the purpose of summoning strangers to us for the purpose of getting in their cars, and it's completely banal to do so.
These shifts take time and in the early-adopter stage the applications look half-baked, or solutions looking for a problem. That's because most of them are. The few that aren't will accrete over time until there's a solid base.
fennecbutt
People were resistant to cell phones, too. To computers, to the Internet, to online articles and news replacing newspapers and TV programs.
Thid I'd why it sucks that glass was shot down when that technology will soar in a few decades.
People need to be more forward looking and open to change imo. It affects society in very negative ways. Imagine if people had planned for social media when it was first becoming a thing. We'd have safety nets, and an actual fucking plan.
amazingamazing
Hasn’t Google lens been doing that for almost a decade now?
acchow
Like how Google Translate has been translating between languages for a decade+ now...?
There's been a stepwise jump in the capabilities of AI that's changed "products" from mostly fun to actually useful
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surgical_fire
This is sort of why I say that the hype is ultimately detrimental to the healthy development of tech.
Generative AI was a sort of paradigm shift, and can be developed into interesting tools that boost human productivity. But those things take time, sometimes decades to reach maturity.
That is not good for the get rich quick machine of Venture Capital and Hustle Culture, where quick exits require a bunch of bag holders.
You gotta have suckers, and for that Gen AI cannot be an "interesting technology" with good potential. It needs to be "the future", that will disrupt everything and everyone.
Nauxuron
> 4.5/o3 doesn't seem hugely more intelligent then 3.0 -- it hallucinates less [...]
This is not entirely true, or at least the trend is not necessarily less hallucination. See section 3.3 in the OpenAI o3 and o4-mini System Card[1], which shows that o3 and o4-mini both hallucinate more than o1. See also [2] for more data on hallucinations.
brundolf
Agreed. It's become a pretty useful tool for individual people to use for individual tasks. But to hyper-scale to a point where it justifies crazy valuations - even short of super-intelligence - it has to scale beyond users. It has to no longer require human oversight from one step to the next.
I think that's the key threshold all these companies have been running up against, and crossing it would be the paradigm shift we keep hearing about. But they've been trying for years, and haven't done it yet, and seem to be plateauing
And then in OpenAI's case specifically- this tech has become commoditized really quickly. They have several direct competitors, including a few that are open, and their only real moat is their brand and Sam's fundraising ability. Their UX is one of the best right now, but that isn't really a moat
wouldbecouldbe
But that’s normally how innovation goes. There is a big jump, and then a lot of margin work.
People are expecting it to get exponentially better, but these kind of innovations are more a inversed power law.
asadotzler
The global broadband network that is the physical internet took about 10 years and $1T to build, mostly between 1998 and 2008 and it made the internet massively better every year of the build-out. That's also precisely as much time and money as has been put into this generative AI bubble.
The internet was adding a trillion dollars to the global economy by 2008 and the end of that rapid expansion, where AI is still sucking hundreds of billions a year into a black hole with no killer use cases that could possibly pay off its investment, much less begin adding trillions to the global economy.
And a decade before the web and internet explosion, PCs were similar, with a massive build out and immediate massive returns.
This excuse making for AI is getting old. It needs to put up or shut up because so far it's a joke compared to real advances like the PC and the Internet, all while being hyped by VC collecting companies as the arrival of a literal God.
pier25
Most technology doesn't get exponentially better.
We look at CPUs or the transmission of digital data and these seem to have improved exponentially but these are rather exceptions and are composed of multiple technologies at different stages. Like how we went from internet through phone lines, to dedicated copper lines for data, to optic fiber straight into to people's homes.
Eg: look how the efficiency of solar cells has progressed over the last 50 years
TuringTest
True, but the religion of the Singularity that fueled this round of financing was premised on this improvement growing exponentially fast, thanks to the support provided by the current version of AI tools. There's no sign this will happen anytime soon.
betterThanTexas
I think you mean "invention". Innovation describes how products change over time and doesn't necessarily imply insight or value-adds. Sometimes it just means the packaging gets updated.
exitb
Which would be fine if the market wouldn’t already price in the exponential growth.
drob518
Yea it hallucinates less, but it still hallucinates a lot. I think we’re proving that intelligence is not just a language model, even an obscenely large one.
asadotzler
It's actually hallucinating more. The more they mess with these now mature models, models which no longer scale with training corpus size, the more they push and prod at the models to do better with chain of thought and other techniques, the more they hallucinate. It's getting worse because the magic of LLM scaling is over and the techniques we have to make them better actually make the hallucinations worse.
forgetfreeman
I'm waiting impatiently for someone to connect the obvious dots and roll out an AI assistant intentionally patterned after Hunter S Thompson. The hallucinations are now a feature.
thatguy0900
I mean, if you look up the data around eye witness testimony being extremely unreliable even for people who directly witnessed things, it's not out of the realm that humans regularly hallucinate as well
gcanyon
> ChatGPT 4.5 today is still the same as it was with GPT-3/GPT-4 in 2022. 4.5/o3 doesn't seem hugely more intelligent then 3.0
I think you're misremembering how 3.0 worked. Granted, the slope from 2.0 to 3.0 was very steep, but a ton of progress has happened in the past few years.
averageRoyalty
Agreed, and as someone who's used it for work most days since 3.0 launch, it's likely way more efficient in outcomes - maybe 30-40%. But as the GP said, there's no paradigm shift. All the new features feel very gimicky, and OpenAI lost their first mover advantage quite a while ago.
stavros
Have you guys seen Deep Research? I'm completely blown away that I can have the thing make entire trip itineraries for me, something I just could not do before without paying a human lots of money.
tossandthrow
I would attribute most of that to alignment.
Ie. better datasets.
IlikeKitties
I must say I do feel the newest GPT Versions are vastly better than the old ones. I found GPT-3 Stuff to be an interesting toy but too often it was too wrong and too stubborn to be useful. I use the 4.0+ Version regularly know.
Just recently I took a screenshot from a jira Burndown chart to write a description of the sprint progress for our stakeholders. Did it in one shot from a screenshot and got it right.
drdrek
I've got AI fatigue as the next guy, but this is over correcting.
VC money is in a constant state of FOMO, this is nothing new. Companies dress up as AI, or web3 or web2, or fintech or what ever to more easily attract capital. If 57.9% of dollars went to AI startups this year is not because everything is AI, I would bet 25% are just companies that tacked AI on to an unrelated business model and its skewing the statistics. I'll promise you that 10 years from now 57.9% of VC funding is going to be in some other buzzword and its not going to be AI.
rco8786
Can confirm. I’m at a startup in a pretty boring space and we’re having lots of success just by bringing modern software into the industry, but we’re gearing up for a series A and we absolutely must include AI in our pitch deck. So for the last 6-8 months we’ve just been scrambling to find some sort of reasonable use cases for AI in our product, but in reality it’s not a differentiator for us at all.
ta988
Maybe your sales pitch is that this can't be disrupted by AI yet...
rco8786
I take it you haven’t been chatting with many VCs lately :-P. No such thing as something that AI won’t disrupt.
n_ary
If you can find nothing else, you can add a little irritating floating chatbot icon on your product(I am making huge assumptions that it has somekind of UI whether native or web or touch screen or something), which you can converse with to may be RAG stuff from some panel/tab and respond to questions.
I have seen way too many products suddenly becoming ProductX to now ProductX-AI by simply adding a RAG powered document conversation popup.
rco8786
Yea that’s the thing we really don’t want to do. We’ve found a couple legitimate use cases, in all honesty. But they’re like marginal improvement type features not industry disrupting features.
kevinventullo
Have you tried asking AI how to plausibly include some slides or bullets about AI in the existing pitch?
When you need a dash of convincing b******t, they are excellent generators.
econ
Have it monitor the entire operation in real time. Me and my way with words :)
bo1024
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drdrek
Market are efficient-ish which is probably as good as it gets, if your framework cant account for dishonesty its not a very useful tool to analyze human endeavors
rco8786
I mean. It’s just reality lol. We need money. We tailor our deck to what investors want to hear.
echelon
It's not dishonest. It's opportunity cost.
hluska
A truly efficient market would be one where all public and private information is incorporated into price. There’s no room to beat the market in an efficient market.
Venture capital is definitely not an efficient market. But I’m not sure what your point is.
throwaway314155
User describes dishonest ecosystem. Gets upvotes. Another user expresses empathy that they're trapped in said dishonest ecosystem (which is inarguably dishonest)? Downvotes.
Don't change HN.
486sx33
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jbmsf
Ditto.
ghaff
In fairness, as a company, you pretty much have to jump on the next bandwagon a lot of the time even if you have doubts whether it's there yet or is going to be a splash in the pan.
My story is that OpenStack didn't really work out but, if you were serious about the cloud thing, you sort of had to hop aboard even if, in general, the landscape ended up playing out differently with containers.
esseph
OpenStack probably has more users right this minute than it ever did before.
Broadcom is to thank for that.
ghaff
It’s definitely pretty big in telco but the original vision was probably bigger relative to how containers played out than it was originally seen to be.
And yeah probably a sizable way from VMware but not ready for containers momentum which is ironically not a small part of initial VMware momentum from physical servers.
ericmcer
Yeah this article is dumb, it is asserting that: Interest rates will never come back down, and AI is the last VC funded tech craze that will happen.
There is no way both of those are even remotely true.
oli5679
It’s really easy to be cynical.
There is a big upside potential for high growth companies taking advantage of technology trends.
Today, Google’s revenue is £263.66 Billion. This is nearly 300x the revenue Google generated in 2003 ($961.9 million). The company went public on August 19, 2004, at $85 per share, valuing the company at $23 billion. After the IPO, Google reported $1.47 billion in revenue for fiscal year 2003, with a profit of $105.6 million.
matthewdgreen
But let’s ask a different question: aside from re-allocating the economy’s marketing and advertising budget into Google (from, presumably, local newspapers and TV before Google existed) how much of that revenue comes from actual tangible new wealth creation?
To put some context on this, 78% of Google’s revenue is advertising. Overall US ad spending has been increasing at about 1.6% per year since 2001, with no obvious indication of an acceleration (beyond some bumps around 2007/8.) So is there actually a success story beyond market capture here? And if all we’re doing is concentrating existing business into new channels, is this something we should be excited about?
econ
You simply pay more for a product to find you. The more overpriced ones find you first. Googles business model is to make it as hard as possible for products to find you while simultaneously pretending to be the go-to place for precisely the opposite. A truly magical accomplishment.
Wealth creation?
pzo
Google created android - the most popular OS. Sure maybe samsung or nokia would be used instead but definitely the helped expend ad business with android. Same like Meta/ByteDance expanded Ad business with Intagram/Tiktok. Even if ad spending grew 1.6% per year it's not sure if it grew as much if android didn't exist. Also need to take into account probably reduced cost of advertising - this product just got cheaper. That the ad market grew 50% in 25 years doesn't mean we have only 50% ads served same like 50% grow (in $) in smartphone market doesn't have to mean you have only 50% more smartphones if they got cheaper.
piva00
Technically, Andy Rubin and Chris White weren't at Google when creating Android. In usual big tech fashion, Google did a good acquisition but didn't actually "create" Android, they bought it.
nottorp
The antitrust people in various governments should definitely get excited about it :) And they apparently are indeed.
jayd16
Online commerce is a huge innovation and Google is part of that.
matthewdgreen
But is a Google with 78% market share actually important to this? Could we have a network of companies doing this job, perhaps less efficiently, and the world would be just about as decent?
hluska
This is an interesting topic and I’m not sure it has an answer. In 1995 advertising was really spray and pray. Testing ads was a really difficult proposition so we saw things like bearer coupons (mention this ad or bring in this coupon for 20% off!). The dominant advice out of radio was to play an ad constantly. That advice worked well for traditional media but not so well for advertisers. That model worked so well for advertisers that thirty years later, people around my age in my city can all sing the same five advertising jingles.
Google provided a toolkit to test ads and figure out which are most effective. Now the other side of that argument is that in industry, a massive of percentage of qualified people still spray and pray. The advertising industry as a whole is far from data driven.
At one point, there was an argument this was good for the planet. My newspapers are much thinner than they were 30 years ago when I could collect a metre of newsprint a month if I subscribed to the Globe and Mail plus a local. But I don’t think anyone can claim now that data centres are environmental miracles. This has also decimated local journalism to such a point that people are less aware of environmental catastrophes in their own relative backyards.
It’s possible the net effect was positive and advertising is more efficient. It’s more accurate to say advertisers have a toolkit to analyze effectiveness but many don’t or aren’t capable.
Edit - I’m going to give a very specific example of a radio jingle. If anyone is around forty or older and from a major city in Saskatchewan, they will be able to finish this.
“I said no no no no don’t pay anymore, no GST and no money down.”
matthewdgreen
Maybe another way to say this is: do targeted ads materially advance society? Is there an argument that better ad-targeting has increased GDP, or improved overall economic growth in some other way? Would a less-efficient online advertising system produce dramatically worse outcomes? And did we get more or less back from the older system (TV+local journalism) than we get from Google?
toomuchtodo
Is that because of innovation? Or is that because of Google’s antitrust activity the US government is currently busting? Safari default search engine deal, etc.
bobxmax
"Antitrust" is just lawyer-talk for winning strategies that we later arbitrarily decide is not good for capitalism.
They weren't a bunch of gremlins in a cave conspiring to commit "anti-trust violations" in 2005. They were smart as hell and invested in the right areas.
Microsoft would get hit with the same anti-trust Google is being hit with if Bing and Windows Phone were successful - they're getting away with it because they're terrible.
intended
Anti Trust is not lawyer speak for winning strategies. It’s a specific term, and theres a time and place to use it. Anti trust is what people, especially programmers, have been saying from time immemorial when these firms became this big.
Inefficient markets are bad for humans and are bad markets. The allocate resources inefficiently. The google graveyard is (arguably) a case in point.
The reason Khan reached the FTC was because her thesis at college, made the case that amazon’s actions reduced customer welfare. A fact that was covered here, on HN. This isn’t something a community notices unless it matters to them.
tossandthrow
> They weren't a bunch of gremlins in a cave conspiring to commit "anti-trust violations" in 2005. They were smart as hell and invested in the right areas.
You still killed the man regardless of intention.
wavemode
You seem to possess the (very common) misconception that monopolies are illegal. They are not. Rather, it is illegal to intentionally use one's monopolistic position to make it difficult or impossible for others to compete.
nottorp
> winning strategies
Winning for who? Not for society as a whole, that's certain.
To put it in money terms so even you can understand it, how much time has been wasted globally because Google is peddling ads and spam sites instead of pointing people to useful results?
Is that free? We should substract it from the GDP calculations if you ask me...
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toomuchtodo
> "Antitrust" is just lawyer-talk for winning strategies that we later arbitrarily decide is not good for capitalism.
“I don’t like the law and its application” isn’t an argument.
snowstormsun
Don't confuse cynical with realistic, though.
AbstractH24
It’s literally a matter of perspective
yeeshh
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asdf6969
Google search, google maps, gmail, YouTube, and Chrome have all been good functional products for over a decade. I genuinely don’t know what they’ve been doing since then other than milking us and getting new customers. Maybe 10% of this growth leads to a real improvement in human lives.
TrapLord_Rhodo
I agree with the article in faith, but i think they've gotten the cause wrong.
The problem is, scaling was ALWAYS the hard part. at a certain level, you don't have to worry about sharding and replicating databases, moving over to NoSQL, async race conditions, etc. etc. Why bet the house on one business idea, when you can have 10 "Micro-SaaS's" that are all bootstrapped but might make 10-20k in MRR.
In the day and age where the average business person has like 20-30 subscriptions for random tools, emails, websites, marketing, email lists, automations, SaaS products, freelancers, etc. it very much lends itself to the micro model.
The 'VC' business model is starting to break down. Just by looking around youtube and Indie Hackers, most of the successful businesses now adays are bootstrapped where the founder has some kind of community where they blog, youtube, have a patreon, X, etc.. They become the brand and they have no use for VC's. As soon as they launch a new app idea, they have 200K people on twitter, 150k people on youtube that will atleast give the app a look.
wslh
I agree that today's focus is more on integration than relying on a single "corporate" system. However, I believe a major issue with micro-SaaS in general is security. While even FAANG companies face security challenges, relying on many smaller SaaS providers introduce weak points into your system, and security is a challenging factor for small company budgets.
benoau
This isn't exclusively or particularly solved by VC-funded or giant tech companies - Dropbox once deployed a bad build that accepted any password, Apple accidentally had a blank root password, I'm sure there are many more embarrassing tales like this.
https://techcrunch.com/2011/06/20/dropbox-security-bug-made-...
https://www.macrumors.com/how-to/temporarily-fix-macos-high-...
wslh
Not saying that big companies don't have security issues. Expressing it differently: having multiple heterogeneous dependencies increases the effectiveness of supply chain attacks.
TrapLord_Rhodo
I don't really understand this comment.
You are the exact people that i am trying to avoid with this model. I'm not trying to make big deals with big companies who can be impacted by security. The Micro-SaaS model requires that when i get a client asking me those kind of questions, i run from them and tell them my tools probably not for you. Any app that requires sensitive data transfering shouldn't be done on the micro-saas model.
Micro-Saas requires small, simple tools that may be low-hanging fruit. Sometimes they aren't micro-Saas's, but just random tools that make money for you by creating a glorified Open AI wrapper and a bunch of integrations. Honestly, alot of the tools I see that make money for people are made on Make or replit. No code even required but definitly not going after the "we need sensitive info or PII" market.
All payments just go through their respective provider so not really a risk there too.
enahs-sf
The article somehow misses the mark on how VC firms actually make money apart from carry, its management fees. Thus, a16z raising a 20b fund on 3% management fee and 30% carry effectively guarantees them 600M even if the fund goes to zero and they have many such funds.
Sure, they would prefer to make money through carry, but the management fee is a nice downside protection.
alephnerd
Funds like A16Z can demand a high management fee because they have shown that they can deliver reasonable exits.
Most funds have management fees in the 1-2% range and a carry at around 20%. VC is a power curve, where a couple of large funds have an outsized impact.
And if a fund or VC (from associate to partner) cannot deliver, your career in the space is basically over.
999900000999
Is it too late for me to pitch my AI driven startup that just takes a very common application ( task management) and adds some API calls to LLMs ?
Can I apply for YC again and get my annual rejection? So I can cry upper middle class tears.
I really need a business partner to keep me focused on features people actually want.
But my main business friend is focused on much more important things ( raising a new family) now.
Thinking about what's more important right now, making some games I know will make no money.
Creating a B2B startup that will also make no money.
jparishy
IMO the best innovations tend to happen when someone has their hands bound and has no other choices but to figure out a new way or die. Now seems like an incredible time for new models and startup paradigms.
To me I think VC's figured out a way to market a very specific way to build companies and convinced a lot of people it's the only way for 20-ish years. Then there was this sort of shift to selling to enterprise, I think because B2C got harder and easy money was the goal. By then a lot of enterprise design makers were probably in the networks of the people selling. There's a meme about YC-of-late being mostly companies that sell shovels to each other.
But when you optimize for enterprise, I think you end up losing a lot of diversity of opinion in where the value comes from, which leads to top-heavy companies.
My main issue is that after the ZIRP era I don't believe the money is gone or unavailable. It just seems to be hoarded for some reason. There is astronomical wealth out there that could be used for trying new economic models that compete with the last generation of VCs. But it isn't happening.
Maybe the next era of VC decision makers, the ones who themselves were funded on big bets, just don't have the same appetite for risk? Or maybe the era of "developing your brand" has made them not want to share their success? I'm not sure but it's weird to me.
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sonicgear1
I can't wait for the downfall of AI. It has become like a plague at this point.
AbstractH24
Sounds like something folks would have said in the lead up to dot com bubble bursting
culebron21
I've noticed AI evangelists -- those 2nd tier experts, who're not on every show and youtube channel, but do consulting and once in a while appear here and there -- jumped on the hype wagon 1.5-2 years ago.
They'd pedal FOMO and would promise eldorado to everyone who joins. "AI will do everything for you, you'll be fired."
Now I see them change the tone. It's like: "c'mon, it's a special tool, you need to use it properly, and give it what it needs."
They sell quickly made courses. Same guys who in '12 would advertize "Mobile strategies" consulting (remember that thing here on HN?), then AR with Google glass in '14, then crypto in '17, then web3, and so on.
shubb
I think there is something like a pyramid scheme of people who sell classes, and people who sell classes about how to sell classes. The top level slowly pull the whole chain to the next fad and then the next. Drop shipping, ghost writing books for kindle unlimited, various flavors of wellness... you can watch them flow into a space and usually destroy it.
I'm curious how centralized the operation is. Individually it's a bunch of hustlers running their own little personal branding operation, but if each of them is in a masterclass, and the masterclass leaders are in a masterclass, has a small group of mega-influencers formed, and who are they?
culebron21
5 hours later: Klarna changes its AI tune and again recruits humans for customer service https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43955374
"of course, AI is just another tool, and has its niche" :D
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jmclnx
I guess it is time to do your homework and invest in real tangible products instead of trying to make a quick buck and get out before the company fails.
mistrial9
I can work for a year and produce something worth a few thousand dollars in profits.. meanwhile the financial grind generated that in a portion of a day. Those are the same dollars used to buy a house or save for retirement.
see Thomas Piketty .. this will get worse before it gets better
cadamsdotcom
What’re your thoughts on how it’ll get worse, and how it’ll get better?
> Here is the state of venture capital in early 2025: Venture capital is moribund except AI. AI is moribund except OpenAI. OpenAI is a weird scam that wants to burn money so fast it summons AI God. Nobody can cash out.
The interesting thing, to me, is how speculative OpenAI's bet is.
IIRC it was 2019 when I tinkered with the versions of GPT 2.0 that had web interfaces, and they were interesting toys. Then I began using ChatGPT since its launch, which was around Dec 2022, and that was a profound paradigm shift. It showed real emergent behavior and it was capable of very interesting things.
2019 - 2022 was three years. No hype, no trillions of dollars invested, but tremendous progress.
Now, there has been progress in the part ~three years in synthetic benchmarks, but the feeling with ChatGPT 4.5 today is still the same as it was with GPT-3/GPT-4 in 2022. 4.5/o3 doesn't seem hugely more intelligent then 3.0 -- it hallucinates less, and it's capable of running web searches and doing directed research -- but it's no paradigm shift. If things keep progressing the way they're going, we'll get better interfaces and more tools, but it's far from clear that superintelligence (more-than-human insight, skill, and inventiveness,) is even possible with LLMs.