As a solo entrepreneur trying to bootstrap a business, I find this far from the truth.

While some things may be “easier”, all the marketing, sales and biz dev channels are saturated, “pay to play” as I see it, if you want to sell something.

Have a product? Great! Good luck getting visibility over all these zombie (live until money runs out) but funded startups.

I'm not singling out the author or his company, but it's really hard to tell if this article is taking itself seriously, much in the same way that I've seen a group of 19 year old "AI scientists" talk about how everything will be automated in five years.

Let's just take it on its face. OpenAI, the most "powerful" foundation model has a rolling release of every 4-5 months. I've witnessed loss of "reasoning" and outright ignoring of instructions in some cases using the latest models unless you push some things through the functions parameter, which will probably break a lot of prompts, especially the agentic ones. Imagine that, there's no free lunch with a fine tune. You're pretty much at the mercy of a company you're basing your business on not breaking your shit every 5 months. And with how they handled deprecating davinci, it'll keep happening.

In other news, a lot of the VC cash that is flying around right now and is a bit deluded and chasing some vague concept of "AGI" that's coming soon(tm), but given typical Bay Area bullshitting who knows if they are actually a true believer(tm)(c) or they're just throwing around cash looking for your typical unicorn. Strikes me as delusional too. I'm sure you'll have multimodal models any day now that can do everything from pick strawberries to writing and maintaining some bottom of the barrel web app.

So, more delusion and more bullshit. Lately, in general, and it's not a personal thing against the author or his business at all. It's just much in line with the frenzy that I see elsewhere.

You don't need acquired capital for your business because you can rent a VPS and generate social media posts cheaply? Here's your sign.

A startup still needs capital, even in the era of increasingly cheap LLMs. And the bar of innovation is now higher. The playing field has changed; if everyone now has access to increasingly competent AIs, that means the value–and differentiator–lies elsewhere, no?

Not to be too negative, but I'm not sure how this got 7 upvotes in 7 minutes unless Hacker News saw the title and got excited. I read through the blog post and am unconvinced. Venture capital isn't killed because AI reduces costs of certain tasks. The same laws of capitalism exist. This reminds me of the wild "Bitcoin will ..." articles we used to get that never panned out.

Unfortunately, many so-called AI 'ChatGPT' startups are going to constantly need VC money to keep afloat. The low hanging fruit are competing for the scraps in the race to zero against the sea of AI wrappers unable to make money to cover the costs against the free and open-source apps available.

There is a reason why they cannot afford to do free accounts or an unlimited free product to try it out first (even when the low-hanging fruit of ChatGPT wrappers have no moat.)

Open source AI apps that are able to get the same work done for free either as an app or a plugin, wins the race to zero.