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Comment by skepticATX | Hacker News Reader

The problem is that companies are throwing tons of garbage at the wall to see what sticks. And somehow, investors are rewarding them for this.

Undoubtedly LLMs can be used to create useful features, but first companies will need to realize that

1) It will take more effort than throwing up a LLM front end for your product.

2) It's probably not going to be a flashy, "disruptive" feature. Something that makes user experience just 5% easier/more efficient is huge, but AI influencers won't breathlessly shill your feature if that's "all" that it does.

3) You have to think about problems to solve before thinking about solutions.

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> The problem is that companies are throwing tons of garbage at the wall to see what sticks. And somehow, investors are rewarding them for this.

I'd turn that around. Investors are throwing tons of money at AI to see what sticks, and journalists are throwing tons of attention at AI to see what sticks. Companies are realizing how easy it is to get in on the action.

I just had a talk with the head engineering at a startup that just came out of stealth mode. We talked for over an hour about the work they're doing, the market they're addressing, their technical challenges, and how their technical teams are structured, and AI didn't come up a single time. But if you go to their web site, it's all about "using advanced AI to supercharge your _____."

For companies, this thinking, chase the trend and make it profitable later, only works for a few. They do win big.

For founders, just getting lots of investment and burning through the venture capital can 'work'.

For employees, that can also be fun. Just make sure you get paid in real money, not in startup equity.

> For founders, just getting lots of investment and burning through the venture capital can 'work'

Not really in the long run.

>For employees, that can also be fun. Just make sure you get paid in real money, not in startup equity.

Please work for the founder above.

> Not really in the long run.

Why not? It worked for Adam Neumann. He set fire to tens of billions of investor money, and walked away with a few billions for himself. On a smaller scale, you can repeat this.

> Please work for the founder above.

Not sure what you mean?

It depends on how much it warps your business. As far as I could tell, the company I talked to had a couple of prominent front-end features that were AI-driven, nothing more.

But isnt the whole startup model is throwing the garbage at the wall and seeing what sticks? It's about quick testing. Even the word venture in venture capital is fitting?

I don't see any other way that it can work tbh. Do you?

Sure, but it's not just startups.

How many Fortune 500 companies have started mentioning AI on earnings calls because it's what Wall Street wants to hear?

How many companies are having internal "AI" hackathons that put the solution over the problem? (Am I the only one who has had to suffer through this?)

Optimising for dumb money trading on earnings call transcripts.

I think there is a difference between "do people want a different kind of search engine" and "I'll wrap some marketing fluff around a prompt box like 500,000 other startups"

I don't think that's fair because people have to start somewhere.

To me a couple of useful features and all the sudden something becomes a useful niche product.

Another AI writer probably not so great, let it integrate to wordpress or some other CMS maybe people will pay for it.

There's probably alot of niches around some set of integrations and user interaction that save a lot of copy and pasting.

Yeah, there's no problem with that. I mean, being able to throw a bunch of garbage at the wall to see what sticks is arguably the reason why capitalism tends to economically outperform feudal and planned economies.

But that creates a sort of "caveat emptor" situation. A lot of everyday consumers benefit from being constantly reminded that this is how things work, because humans are very susceptible to some bad heuristics. A very, very common line of reasoning that one sees in discussions about tech, even on HN, is effectively, "A is a piece of garbage that someone threw at the wall, and it stuck. B is also a piece of garbage. Therefore, when we throw B at the wall it will stick."

I don't think that capitalism inherently implies "throw a bunch of garbage around". It's true that it may not be a priori possible to decide which way is the best - that's why competition is important - but that doesn't mean that everyone should purposefully run into a garbage direction just because of garbage trends and because the same few investors are funding all big companies.

It effectively turns the problem of finding good solutions to whatever problem (and often there's not even a problem that anyone can point to) into a brute-force search. I don't think that's efficient.

> I don't think that's efficient.

Uh oh, sounds like someone wants a command economy!

No, honestly that's exactly what you're saying "You shouldn't do X because I don't think it will have a potential payoff". Now in some particular cases where there are particular social or environmental harms we may pass laws to limit said behavior. After that point businesses and individuals have the right to waste money on whatever they like.

Note, this is why it's also important to have government funded research on things that may not be profitable. While industry is screwing around trying to squeeze and extra penny out of a dime, research projects, while risky can find hidden quarters.

> Uh oh, sounds like someone wants a command economy!

Is it possible to get your point across without accusing me of things I've never implied?

I didn't say that we should pass laws to prevent people from throwing shit at the wall. But I think that we live in a collective delusion if we think that that's the right way to make progress.

I don't think they were wrong about you implying it, though.

If you don't want people to assume you're proposing some form of command economy, then it's on you to concretely articulate how you envision avoiding the chaos of capitalism without resorting to the authoritarianism of a command economy.

If in your opinion, the only way to effect societal change is to pass laws, then that's on you.

I didn't really imply any sort of teleological character to what I was saying.

I do think that there's a tendency for this kind of thing to happen at a much larger scale in capitalist economies, but I don't think that's intentional. It's just an inevitable consequence of actual humans operating in such a system. That also doesn't mean that any one person consciously believes what they're doing is garbage - I'm sure they're all confident in their idea.

But it's really, really difficult for me to perceive a practical distinction between millions of people all operating under widely varying and often mutually contradictory beliefs, and simple randomness. Maybe that's my statistical training affecting how I view the world, though.

I thought we were out of the Dumb Money stage and in the Profitability and Frugality one.

I guess there is more money to torch. Oookay.

The one thing the world will never be short of is dumb, trend-chasing money.

If there's a gold mine, and everyone is scrambling to claim a share of it, how can I predict who will achieve the greatest success? The reality is that I can't. Since the outcome is uncertain, the strategy is to invest in anyone actively engaged at the gold mine.

This approach is obviously simplistic and loosely-speaking. In practice the network effect would be precedent where I would favor investing in individuals I'm acquainted with, who possess a track record of experiences and competence in generating wealth.

So the point is, there is nothing wrong with actively engaging at the goldmine and be rewarded for it by investors. These are motivated by clear rationales.

We need to mine for the limited amount of gold so we can be wealthy, have higher purchasing power over other people and to get our hands on limited resources... wait, what problem are we trying to solve again? Isn't the problem with limited food, shelter and basic necessities?

> The problem is that companies are throwing tons of garbage at the wall to see what sticks. And somehow, investors are rewarding them for this.

Happens in all hype cycles. See metaverses a year or so ago, a couple of rounds of crypto nonsense before that, and before _that_, why it's our old friend AI again (there was a brief period when everything was pretending to be an AI chatbot to get the VC moneys; that last AI bubble more or less died with the release of Microsoft Tay).

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