Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying they are useless, but most of them are the same recipe cooked over and over and just presented in different way.
Is this the norm now, a question from an amateur me to my fellow expert Hackers?
Also a lot of the VC money just ends up going back to the big players that have monopolized the channels to reach customers and the systems to run those ‘businesses’.
Here’s a good overview of the scaling difficulties with AI: ‘Most AI systems today aren’t quite software, in the traditional sense. And AI businesses, as a result, don’t look exactly like software businesses. They involve ongoing human support and material variable costs. These traits make AI feel, to an extent, like a services business’ https://a16z.com/the-new-business-of-ai-and-how-its-differen...
True, but this can easily take decades - vide Uber.
A company that raises millions or billions? With tech, you can just fire everyone, shut down almost every server, and still keep running. Maybe that's what a lot of them are doing now. Some have laid off almost everyone but the people who know which server to shut down.
It's often literally the same people who were riding the last hype cycle, too. The guys behind the Rabbit R1 AI wearable were NFT metaverse grifters before they became AI grifters, for example. All the annoying tech influencers who wanted you to subscribe to their blockchain newsletter are now suddenly AI experts.
Because the value is in what the wrapper helps your specific customer base do. Whether that's through prompt engineering or RAG, or some other technique, the value is in someone else spending the time to think of a UX that helps accomplish a specific job.
If you know what you want and how to do it, then likely fiddling around with prompts can get you pretty close, but people are busy and don't have time to test asking chatGPT 500 different prompts to get one that works well, or hunt around for examples to feed into context or into a RAG index.
There's an asymmetry of information and effort developing the pipeline/context/prompt construction involved.
And this is what add's value.
Not simply a chat window and passing whatever the user types in, to openAI's API.
Even if they were doing the same thing as the others but developing their own model with a better cost structure that would be innovative.
To that they have to get some money together somehow, probably from investors. Two steps up from a pitch deck is a pitch deck and a prototype that got some customers. So there you go.
If I were trying to pitch to a VC though I would be thinking of a plan that is going to make a lot more money, that could justify an enterprise value of $50M at the very least based on conservative multiples. So they have to have something better than “dominate some small area” such as being able to replicate that success for a large number of small areas.
A flashy platform with crafty prompt injection to hopefully net a few thousand in low effort recurring revenue.
AI is great but this is a side effect of it. It's the new Bitcoin/Blockchain gold rush (is that fad over yet). Everyone wants a piece of it and it will continue to bring out the hustlers to make quick money.
Like you said, not all are useless and there is obviously a market right now. So people are cashing in until it lasts.
I’d personally like to see a good wrapper for autonomous LLM coding. Nothing we have yet quite fits the bill, IMO.
It's nuts, the absolute dumbest-sounding ideas (to me at least), with "ai" slapped into the description somewhere, just totally flush with cash for no other reason than they are riding the hype train. Do the folks writing the checks even look into these things?
The AI trend is luring in a wide range of non-tech businesses that aren't VC backed (ex. car dealerships). This is the golden goose for tech companies in a tough macro climate.
To be clear I think it's not adding real value for these buyers, but there's a tremendous amount of FOMO. The media has been complicit in selling AI as a panacea for small businesses in a tough climate, and the ultimate beneficiaries will be people grifting off AI hype.
In short, it was a series of disasters.
It adds value -- OpenAI isn't going to bother making special AI chatbots for car dealerships or whatever. These companies aren't going to hire coders since that's not their main line of businesses. So someone has to come in and middleman.
Maybe calling it a pump & dump is unfair, but there's no denying that the core technology is not in the hands of these startups. These small companies get decimated once the big companies see enough $ in their niche (which is what happened in the early days of the net, too). Fortunes will be made and lost. It's the American dream.
All aboard the hype train..