AI App Graveyard | Hacker News Reader

AI App Graveyard

dang.ai

144 pointsbealuga72 comments

There are a ton of companies that are basically a wrapper around GPT-4 with some minimal amount of application code. These folks can create impressive demos that wow minimally informed investors, but the reality is that if it took a few weeks to make there's no defensibility.

I see the profits in the current AI hype cycle going to the leading foundational model company (why pay for the 2nd best?) and the companies that already own customer relationships and integrate AI into their existing products (Microsoft, Adobe, Autodesk, etc).

That’s a compelling story. But that doesn’t make it accurate. We are early on and it’s hard to determine how large or small the ecosystem and value that will be created on top. Some went big, like personal computers, the internet, databases, Java, electricity, and so on. Others did not (yet), web3 (maybe), other databases, low code platform, website builders, workstations, many old personal computing systems, etc.

Yes, it’s easier for incumbents to capture value because they own customer relationships. However, if that was always the case open ai wouldn’t exist. So some do breakthrough.

Early on could people see the future and know what Ms dos, Oracle, or google would become? No because it’s new and it’s the future. It’s only obvious in hindsight. Yes, all of these ai companies on top of chatgpt could become nothing. On the flip side the complexity and depth of chat gpt and other models will continue to expand, creating more possibilities for potential value creation. Or the whole thing can turn into an overvalued version of Clippy. It’s hard to see how it will play out.

I used to think I wouldn’t rationalize a losing position while I was invested, but after a hedge fund I was in divested from a large position, I was able to see the other way so clearly

This is quite funny. If it weren't for tax (and maybe liquidity in certain situations), this suggests a quarterly "sell everything" day might make sense. You'd sell everything on a friday perhaps, and come monday buy again after having the weekend to freshen your eyes.

alternatively you could take unbalanced bearish positions, like too many at the money put options, everyone can start thinking about the ways that becomes profitable by noticing the bear thesis and rooting for that for a little while.

then people could see which thesis is stronger and more probable, the bullish or the bearish ones.

Good points. Premature optimization and over engineering when one hasn’t been part of either not having any esoteric or unfair knowledge is like shooting in the dark.

YC’s premise to start small, serve the problems and solving them and they will light a path has merit to it especially since they took on a B2B focus.

> Early on could people see the future and know what Ms dos, Oracle, or google would become? No...

In the case of Oracle, yes, because Oracle was created directly to compete with DB2 (which was already a success) but as a product that could run on all the popular platforms of the day. So success of their early RDBMS-based-business was predictable, assuming they could execute.

Good points here.

I certainly see the opportunity for start-ups to break through here. I just don't have much faith in ones where GPT-4 is their core tech.

On the other hand, companies going after the entire vertical where AI is a feature and not the product, or well-funded companies with innovative models that outperform OpenAI is totally a possibility.

I'm not convinced of the alternative either though. If you think of the AI as an intelligence akin to an employee.. at some level it becomes a commodity and then it becomes what is the AI doing.. what is it harnessed into?

Except PCs, Internet, etc were new things or in case of Java, improvements

These "AI Startups" were just 2 lines of code wrapping a call to OpenAI (or 10 lines if js with langchain - which already makes it easier for devs to use features like "string templates" or such /s)

> if that was always the case open ai wouldn’t exist

Because there were no incumbents offering a ChatGPT similar product

There is value created, but the argument was that it is the big ones with existing customer relationships that are going to benefit, not the 100th startup that offers an AI assistant to schedule appointments via voice commands. I think all of that second group of thin GPT wrappers will be eaten by the entities developing and running the foundational models like OpenAI.

In general, AI is data hungry and college kids in their dorm room will always be at a disadvantage in that regard compared to large companies (many of which locked down scraping on their properties, even if "their" content is mainly generated by users, i.e. non-employees).

> In general, AI is data hungry and college kids in their dorm room will always be at a disadvantage in that regard compared to large companies (many of which locked down scraping on their properties, even if "their" content is mainly generated by users, i.e. non-employees).

It's a two-way street too. The big players have more data to start with and they're already the "place" that you go to add more data.

Google's ML/AI stuff (the behind the scenes stuff, not the consumer facing chatbot type stuff) in gmail/calendar/etc is already useful because of their vertical integration. They "see" everything and can add new records in any part of their productivity suite, then make correlations / recommendations across the entirety of their offerings in a way that ChatGPT wrappers outside of their walled garden will never be able to replicate.

Now with OpenAI, MS has the same opportunity. Issues on github? Code? Emails? Teams conversations? Calendar appointments? Bing search history? It's all just part of the same bundle to them and it's all read/write.

Many mobile and web apps are database wrappers too.

Replicability isn’t the only part of value.

Solving a valuable problem is. What about the tools quietly moving mountains and not seeking the spotlight?

Most customers of software are not in the software development space.

I think that those tools not seeking the spotlight might also be at risk. I'm fairly sure some of these tools have a 'twin' that has found success by securing early adopters and has become the de-facto tool for 'X' job, largely due to marketing.

Very plausible.

Still it feels like there’s way more problems that software hasn’t quite solved yet that LLMs may only go near.

What risk? Most of those tools are created by inexperienced people that will only notice how bad it was in the future (and they will fail to achieve the same success with much better products later)

yes the HN bubble is real. A no-coder developing a successful GPT wrapper won't care about moat

There are still many use-cases where further control offered by open-source models (i.e. fully supporting all constrained text generation techniques) is superior. Stable Diffusion XL fine-tunes with controlnet, regional prompting, and the further extension ecosystem is still better than DALL-E-3 in the hands of skilled users.

But yes, the distance between the leading foundation models and the leading open source foundation models for LLMs seems to be getting farther, not closer.

This is a prediction that there will be zero surprises. An obvious prediction to make, but probably wrong.

> I see the profits in the current AI hype cycle going to the leading foundational model company (why pay for the 2nd best?)

Because it's a race to the bottom. Look at crowded spaces like TTS. Eleven Labs looks like hot shit, but in actuality they have over a dozen well-funded direct competitors. Including OpenAI.

There won't be a "Twilio of [X] Model Inference", nor will there be a "Best Foundational Model for [Y]". These are features, not moats.

This is sad. As technologists we should celebrate folks who tried to build new services and applications. It would be good to document these and explain why they didn't work.

Agree to disagree?

This is a satire of how our current incentive system disproportionately allocates resources in a fad fashion, not unlike how the waves sloshed around the fish tank you tried to deliver to your girlfriend, only to discover 2/3s of the water was spilled all over the back seat and the fish with PTSD are now staring askance at you.

If this were a post titled "Open Source Operating Systems Graveyard" or some such, where it was demonstrable that the pursuits were those primarily of creativity, rather than something closer akin to carpetbagging, then I might agree with your expressed regret.

> not unlike how the waves sloshed around the fish tank you tried to deliver to your girlfriend, only to discover 2/3s of the water was spilled all over the back seat and the fish with PTSD are now staring askance at you

Is this comparison out of creativity or experience? :)

>not unlike how the waves sloshed around the fish tank you tried to deliver to your girlfriend, only to discover 2/3s of the water was spilled all over the back seat and the fish with PTSD are now staring askance at you

Oddly specific ...

How many of these startups are building new models, datasets and algorithms? Or are they all just prefixing a few lines to a prompt before passing it on to a 3rd party API?

If these companies actually had something worth celebrating, would they really be out of the game this early? Most dead AI companies right now are muppets that built the quickest, shittiest thing they could to try and be the first in the door in a hype cycle.

There are many of these startups you described and there are also many companies with years of work joining the graveyard. It’s not black and white.

Theres this weird bitter smugness around a segment of the AI periphery, "haha your job's obsolete because of this prompt/tool" "haha your chat to PDF tool is obsolete because OpenAI launched X,Y and Z".

It's pretty unpleasant and has the same vibes as the "Enjoy staying poor" crypto crowd. Might even be the same bunch of people.

> Might even be the same bunch of people.

it is the same people. these people, here. you're talking to them.

literally the kinds of people who post on, and regularly read, HackerNews.

It seems someone just automatically scraped all chatgpt-related apps. For example GPT4All is also there, which is very much alive and kicking: https://github.com/nomic-ai/gpt4all.

Site appears to be toast.

Belongs in the ought to exist site titled "Hackernews Hug of Death Scrapyard".

lol

Hope this site was around for Halloween at least

Man, cloudflare is like a few minutes.

Maybe their domain registrar features need to be better known.

Many other CDNs are also just few minutes. Or S3+cloudfront (if you've ever done it once before). Or github pages.

I agree with the direction, but wanted to give some ideas different than CF.

Great point about other CDNs. Just was thinking of a point and click one for the most part.

No, it is not. For a hobbyist it is overkill, for a professional it might require filling out some TPS reports.

I dunno.

The free cloudflare is such low hanging fruit to make any shared vps Wordpress hosting much better for next to nothing.

Could just be me.

Ironically, I think their domain registrar features are too well known — I've moved all of my domains off of cloudflare after reading a thread on HN. The one where a person had their account blocked without explanation, and CF refused to transfer, effectively stealing a domain name from a paying customer (which must be a great business model).

Good to know. My thought was more cloudflare or similar built in from the start.

But do keep complaining about how centralization is killing the internet!

There are other caching layers too.

"You are building a feature not a product" : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HiKHnsvquP8&list=LL&index=6

https://farez.medium.com/the-danger-of-building-a-business-a...

Am I missing here, or this site lists GPT4ALL as dead/discontinued while GPT4ALL's website seems to have the project alive and well on all levels?

After today's announcement, this list is about to get a whole lot bigger!!

Sorry, could you elaborate? Was it the annoucement from OpenAI?

Yes. He's referring to OpenAI releasing custom GPTs. They're clearly starting to move up the stack.

I see, thanks! Just gonna link it here for brevity.

https://openai.com/blog/introducing-gpts

why is the tech advisor a capybara?

Seems like broadening their reach to non developers that they were clear about.

Natural language is a new programming language so anyone who can explain what they’re after well enough will eventually be able to get more of what they want.

Neeva is in there lol

https://dang.ai/tool/ai-search-engine-neeva

Web page archive 7th nov 2023: https://archive.is/fqnz3

I don’t know about that, since when it’s needed to be the hard-core tech supplier to succeed with customers?

The ones that will die will die regardless if openAI introduce the feature.

Just because OpenAI provided a method to do something doesn’t mean that they provided the best user experience.

IMHO there would be another land grab where the customers wouldn’t care if something is run by OpenAI and if they could have done the same through the ChatGPT.

Those who actually created a product that customers are willing to pay might actually end up just switching LLM suppliers.

Site is timing out unfortunately. HN hug? Unrelated but this sort of thing really shines a light on just how few people click a link before upvoting based purely on the headline.

Maybe, it was quite slow when I went to it prior to me posting it

The HN hug of death

You can still read it on https://web.archive.org/web/20231107035016/https://dang.ai/a...

You could probalby build a dot com bubble graveyard, an app store graveyard, and a web3 graveyard. Hype cycles all look the same and only very few winners come out of it.

These companies are not designed to last forever. Many wrappers can make decent amounts of money for their creators for months and then die. Under these conditions a company can close down and still be considered a big success.

Dot com bubble was done - a very entertaining site at the time started by https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=pud

90% of startups fail in the first year, I wouldn't expect AI startups to be an exception.

I typically scan the domain before even reading the title.

Turns out this is not some AI effort by @dang!

@dang is an AI, confirmed

twitter for a scroll through on video if you can't access: https://twitter.com/coderbea/status/1721748059145880024

URL literally made me lol

Wrappers gotta go

Time to create an awesome list of graveyards.

You can add dang.ai to the list ;) I get 504.

Luckily, my MeatGPT is immune to this.

As they say - this escalated quickly.

this is like a museum of sam altman's KDA in this industry.

do you mean that altman's companies have killed these companies, or just his association to these companies?

this link does nothing? 505 gateway timed out.

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