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Comment by koochi10 | Hacker News Reader

I know this crowd / silicon valley is accustom to these kinds of stories. But we should remember that this is a college kid, who saw an opportunity and took initiative to build a business. The comments here are WAY too critical. We should celebrate these kinds of stories, instead of nitpicking.

Additionally these 'A.I apps are just gold rush' comments are too dismissive about the potential. It may be that there are some low hanging fruit that will get picked first, but I personally think that the vast majority of opportunity requires some level innovation, creative thinking, and grit to utilize.

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A ton of HN'ers seem woefully butthurt over AI. I'm not saying that the current generation of AI is "smart" or "AGI", but every thread mentioning AI has a disproportionate amount of naysayers who think LLMs are either totally useless or that anything involving AI is "the next bitcoin."

When people knee-jerk react negatively to these kinds of stories, I can only picture envy and an insecurity of not truly knowing where AI will take the software field, despite the amount of certainty displayed by many.

I think the hype around AI is more like the dotcom boom. Like the internet (and mostly unlike cryptocurrency), AI is a genuinely useful technology and likely to be transformative over the long term. On the other hand, (and also like the internet) it's currently being peddled as the answer to absolutely everything, much of which is pretty ridiculous.

The number of ads on YouTube that peddle an "AI-powered X" is a clear tell. Just last night, I saw an ad for an "AI golf swing aid"!

Probably a shoddy product in reality, but that concept sounds awesome in principle.

Imagine an AI that's an LLM, TTS engine, computer vision, a specialized neural net, and various sensors tied together that can help teach you a motor skill any time and anywhere. Even better if it could somehow provide haptic feedback. I think there's something to this, but perhaps it will truly develop out of novel therapies rather than some dudebro startup.

That's a good point. And a bit of a chilling revelation given how the words "recession" and "this year" keep getting thrown around. Hopefully the gap between the boom of AI and the bubble popping is at least as long as the one between the boom of the Web and the Dotcom bubble.

I love this analogy.

Tiny nitpick: technology being pedaled makes me think of e-bikes. Which are awesome. But you probably meant peddled!

The crowd here just wants to ensure their high paying mega tech jobs stay safe. Can’t blame them, kinda in the same camp

I can't blame them either, though I guess I skipped right ahead to the "acceptance" stage of grief.

I've been on HN almost since its inception and anecdotally over half of the comments on posts like this are from cranks with nothing productive to offer beyond mean-spirited and tone-deaf criticism. There have been posts of projects by young teens that have elicited unusually harsh feedback. Very few people here are willing to charitably acknowledge the effort and vision of a fellow hacker and to provide supportive guidance. They are the epitome of the "akshually" meme.

I think this is the biggest misconception that VC world has created, the notion that you need to innovate, have an original idea or build something new on top of a new technology trend.

If you look around you still have companies making millions with shitty SAP like ERP software from the 90s.

The problem is that when you live in your bubble, you don't tend to notice the problems other people have.

For a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

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