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Comment by threeseed | Hacker News Reader

There’s an AI Backlash happening now in the enterprise in particular. Many vendors have promised big results and not delivering, especially in automation. Promising to automate 50% of your contact center with AI, of your interactions with AI, etc. No one is hitting it. The genie isn’t going back in the bottle, customers are committed to the goal. But vendors have way over promised across the board.

https://x.com/jasonlk/status/1780822118403621269

Has been shocking to see YC double down on LLMs so much in the last two batches.

Going to be a brutal reckoning coming for many startups.

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> Has been shocking to see YC double down on LLMs so much in the last two batches.

They also doubled down on blockchain sufficiently late in the game that it was obvious to most that there was zero value in all of it.

Either they’re really getting high on their own supply, or there’s some kind of model where you hedge against missing out on a unicorn, even if all indicators point to the fact it’s vaporware.

Probably some of each.

To me I see a lot of similarities to cloud computing early on (broadly defined). There were a lot of twists and turns in the road and a lot of things didn't tuen out as many predicted--and it was, naturally, much messier than earlier visions. But companies that decided to sit back and see how things played out mostly paid for it while the winners--so far--have mostly been companies that made bets and course-corrected.

I worked in Enterprise Cloud teams during those early days. It was instantly loved because it allowed development teams from across the company to bypass central IT and provision their own infrastructure. And because it was such high quality e.g. secure, highly available it could be trusted for Production workloads.

There is no comparison at all to AI which is fundamentally untrustworthy and may remain so for a while/ever.

It’s interesting that the last few hypes have been all about trust (NFTs, AI)

Don’t know if that is accidental or the trajectory we are on.

> Going to be a brutal reckoning coming for many startups.

Isn't that like asserting water is going to be wet? The great majority of startups fail, in any field.

It's more the fact that many of those startups are seeing traction because everyone is interested in seeing what AI can offer. If there is a reckoning and we see the rug pulled then it would be far worse than if your startup never had any traction to begin with.

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