What’s ironic is that Michael Seibel has discussed many times on the YC podcast that you should avoid building whatever’s hot for VCs because their attention tends to change every year but you’ll be stuck building for a decade.

2020 was remote work, 2021 was web3, now we have the big LLM boom.

Honestly it seems there’s a lot of advantages to “riding a wave” and a lot of advantages to being contrarian. But if raising money is your priority I do think you should ride the wave. Being contrarian sounds romantic, but don’t expect funding from people who disagree with you.

The most charitable thing I’d say about YCs AI focus is it’s hard to think of a startup idea that couldn’t benefit from AI in some way.