When we apply to YC with an idea, not knowing how many people usually are working on the same concept, and not finding anyway to know how many are actually working on it. This is the definition of a pure waste of resources.
Especially with Ai, there are a lot of ideas that seem good but maybe are pure waste of time. I am surprised that YC doesn't offer a tool that tells us which Ai startups keeps applying with the same idea.
For example, Justin Kan's initial idea for JustinTV was strapping cameras to himself and streaming over the internet. I think YC bet on this because they thought the founding team might be able to make that happen despite the technical hurdles and ramen funding.
My advice is to optimize for your users, not for your YC application. It's not a college application and there is not a set of right answers that gets you in. YC bets on execution. Good luck.
https://www.ycombinator.com/library/Ij-tarpit-ideas-what-are...
The title of that post is (emphasis mine) “what are tarpit ideas & how to avoid them”. OP’s point seems to simply be “YC has data on which ideas are tarpit ideas and tells you to avoid them, so why don’t they help you identify them?”