Ask HN: Anyone else roll eyes at startups that went from "X" to "AI-powered X"? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Anyone else roll eyes at startups that went from "X" to "AI-powered X"?

72 pointsronbenton49 comments

This feels like the original idea wasn't good enough to work on its own and so jamming AI into the idea might get some VC capital to sustain a failed idea. Or am I thinking of this wrong?

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My favorite example is watching the company “C3” evolve over time in it’s NPR ads:

> Originally the "C" in the company's name was a reference to "carbon" and the "3" was a reference to "measure, mitigate and monetize" because the company's original goal was to help manage corporate carbon footprints.[3] For some time in 2016 the company was named C3IoT and before that was briefly named C3 Energy

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/C3.ai

And yes, now they are C3.ai

The AI hype cycle will only be complete when they change their name.

I'm so glad someone else has noticed this as well. They get a healthy eye roll every time. "Brought to you by...C3 dot AI"

My favorite is Long Blockchain Corp., formerly Long Island Iced Tea Corp.

Has about as much value as "X rewritten in Rust". Which is to say, Rust and AI are both impressive technologies (though very different obviously) and marketing people hope to elevate X by mere word association. Unfortunately, this is an effective scam.

I don't have any problem with labeling yourself an AI business if you're actually objectively working to build AI tech. But if you're vibe coding an app with ChatGPT, you're not building AI-powered technology, you're just consuming it. Might as well talk about "Apple-powered X" if your team is using Macbooks. You don't list the rest of your operating expenses as part of your product, doing so with AI makes you look rather foolish.

This is really frustrating to those of us that work in ML.

Everyone seems to think they are an AI expert because they designed a prompt. What we need in the world is more machine learning and less prompt warrior nonsense.

Unfortunately the latter seems to get most of the praise, including on HN

You are more than correct. Lots of these companies struggling for VC money end up having to rebrand and scream about being 'AI-powered' as the last chance for survival.

Somehow they are also believe they are 'AI companies' contributing to AI research all of a sudden, but are just an API call away to someone else's AI model.

Like previously when everyone was an 'internet company' then a 'technology company', then 'robotics company' now an 'AI company' and soon a 'quantum computing company', then they really are confused on what they actually do.

Went to a summit recently where all of the sponsors that had "AI enhanced yada yada" looked all the same. If I didn't know what the company was doing, then there was no differentiator at all.

Bland.

At this point, anything that even so much as _mentions_ AI, as a major selling point or not, is an immediate turn off and a reason for me to never use or stop using something. I don’t care about any arguments towards “well sometimes it can be helpful, as long as it’s done right” I am just So. Unbelievably. Burnt. Out. I don’t want to hear those two letters next to each other again for the rest of my life.

The complete oversaturation is driving me insane, honestly I preferred when everyone was desperately screaming about web3 and nfts and the metaverse, that was _significantly_ more tolerable than this AI barrage.

Sam with me but with job postings. If your posting is for a company with the words AI in the name, I'm not interested.

three panel soul in 2018 and 2023

http://www.threepanelsoul.com/comic/new-paradigms http://www.threepanelsoul.com/comic/newer-paradigms

I think you're just looking at this wrong.

The specific words don't matter, so the "AI-powered" may as well be "puppy-powered". The real issue is that while it's fairly easy for SaaS to appeal to an engineering need, it's another matter that they have to convince their non-technical bosses to put down thousands of dollars a month on it.

In this demi-decade, it just happens to be AI-powered that sparkles just the right way to capture the eyes of middle management.

It used to be "no-code" / "low-code". At some point it was "Java-based". In networking, you'll find a lot of "Edge".

So I just judged an international business plan competition. These were high school or college age applicants. 6 out of the 10 companies in my session were "AI powered." 5 years ago they would have been blockchain powered. 10 years ago it was mobile apps. None of the businesses actually required "AI". They were robotics, medicine, call center software, business intelligence, agricultural. At most, they needed some ML. I think people just get excited about what feels up and coming, whether it actually matters to the business or not.

Raising money is sales. Better to sell what everyone is buying

I mean, it's not much different as from "X" to "mobile X", or from "X" to "cloud X".

Most of them, like most startups overall, will be bad.

A few lucky ones will come to dominate the new space, executing well on a first-mover advantage.

Think what Tinder did by reimagining online dating for mobile with swiping. Or what Google Docs did by reimagining the office suite in the cloud.

There are going to be some HUGE winners in the AI space. But most startups will be losers, like it's always been. And the investors who can tell the difference will be the ones who make money. Again, like it's always been.

(This isn't like "blockchain-powered X" where it really was a buzzword only. AI is actually delivering meaningful benefits, and it's probably only just starting.)

It was a great excuse for pivoting and layoffs

1. eyerolls and judgment can be a trap in that it makes you feel superior without actually having walked their walk and having skin in the game. value of a player >> value of a critic. they're in the arena doing their thing. if you're so good, show it in your own work before passing judgment on others.

2. it may not just be VC. if it works on "cringe" boomers or Fortune 500 execs to get their attention and money, then they truly do not have to give a flying fck about how much your eyes roll while they laugh their way to the bank. VC is in its ideal form an effect, not a cause.

Honestly? You're thinking about it wrong. AI can make most products more useful. That doesn't mean it's going to always be implemented well.

Think about all the companies that were selling boxed desktop software in the 90s. The ones that survived almost universally found some way to incorporate networking/internet into their product. At the time, there was plenty of skepticism, and you could have said they were chasing a fad. But to early adopters of the internet, the value was plainly obvious.

Of course, many tried to adapt but executed poorly, so they still didn't make it through the paradigm shift. That doesn't mean ignoring the shift was a better plan.

> AI can make most products more useful

That's what the people shoving it down our throats keep saying but the reality is the vast majority of products don't need AI and are often made worse by it.

> are often made worse by it

No disagreement on this, but it's an execution problem.

When the execution problem is as ubiquitous as it is, you just call it a problem.

I've been hearing that about communism for a long time too

That's true though. Just as democratic as the DPRK, as united as the USA and as green as Greenland...

This is the fallacy that LLM-boosters are spreading: "AI can never fail, it can only be failed". But when the fail ratio is so high, it cannot be only an execution problem. It is proof that the LLM technology is over-hyped way over the small niche where it's cost/benefit ratio can be positive.

https://edition.cnn.com/2025/03/27/tech/apple-ai-artificial-...

Many hard things have a high rate of execution failure.

Shouldn't you have added a disclaimer, Mr. Founder of Plandex: an open source AI coding agent?

What should my disclaimer be? That I'm building something which is open source and consistent with my beliefs?

I was actually thinking about something like this:

"disclaimer: I'm the founder of Plandex: an open source AI coding agent"

Note that I wouldn't personally add "open source", I don't think it adds to the discussion, but it's what I would have expected to see.

Is it relevant? This is not a post about AI coding, and Plandex is not a startup that "went from X to AI-powered X". It also has very little to do with adding AI features to a product... it's a general purpose coding agent, not a tool for building AI features specifically.

I mean, I discuss AI a lot on HN. Do I need to include a disclaimer on every comment?

I think perhaps more important is wether or not you've accepted funding from venture capital, as this would substantially reduce the moral argument made by claiming you're making something open source (as OSS essentially the playbook for developing initial growth in VC land).

I've raised a small amount of funding yes. The project wouldn't exist otherwise. I have a family to feed.

But the open source project is free, full-featured, MIT licensed, and will stay that way.

It also has paying customers via cloud-hosting options, and the economics are working out well so far, fwiw. Lots of work to do, but it's on track to be both a sustainable open source project and a sustainable business.

I'm sorry if that still doesn't meet your lofty moral standards—all I can really say is I'm trying my best to get the balance right.

Fair enough, I am fairly cynical on this subject in particular so my biases got the best of me. Thanks for open sourcing your project (MIT in particular).

Future AI possibly, but what’s currently available needs to actually be fit for purpose or it’s just a waste of resources.

Many 90’s games added video elements because that’s ‘something new we can do’ without actually improving the gameplay. It’s that kind of low effort tacking on of cool features that you really need to avoid.

There is also the caveat that some companies tried things that work now, but didn't work back then. I don't remember the specific company, but something like Uber was tried back then. and it just didn't work. "Internet is available" is not the same as "internet is ubiquitous" and some ideas require the ubiquity for it to work out, even if the execution was otherwise fine. "LLMs are pretty neat" is not the same as "AGI is ubiquitous." So there are some AI products that people will try, that will fail horrendously, and it won't be because it's a bad idea or executed poorly, but it's because the AI behind the idea isn't ready yet.

Yeah that's true, but I would still categorize it as an execution problem. If your product (or your AI feature) doesn't work because the models aren't ready yet, it means you failed at design and implementation imho. It doesn't mean there's no plausible AI integration that would make the product more valuable.

It's like if you choose the wrong database and it makes your product slow. It probably doesn't imply you shouldn't be using any database; you just need a different one.

I don't think the GP meant to say that AI doesn't make products more useful.

I read it as them being frustrated with the over-use of "AI-powered X" -- when everything is AI powered, is anything AI powered? Favorite quote from Garry Tan: If everything is bold, nothing is bold!

"AI-powered" as a descriptor is incredibly overused to the point where it no longer elicits the same excitement that it used to 1-2 years ago.

I think everyone agrees that AI incorporated into a product can definitely make the product more useful. But let's stop describing our products as "AI-powered" and replace it with a descriptor that actually communicates the value the product is providing.

Marketing for AI products would be more successful IMO if they stop using the words "AI-powered" and "LLM" and "agents" and "tokens", etc... users are overwhelmed with AI overload. Throw away the buzz words and use messaging that communicates the specific value that the AI adds.

I think the days of consumers seeking out "AI" for the sake of AI is coming to an end. Consumers want to know what the AI will do for them. They don't care that it's AI-powered.

That’s fair. I think the OP put it in a much more dismissive way than you did though.

If you’re building a product and it’s not working, pivoting in the direction of AI could definitely be rational—not because of the hype, or at least not only because of that (it doesn’t hurt). But because it could give you a better chance of building a more useful and differentiated product.

Implying that any entrepreneur who does this is just following the herd is pretty uncharitable imo. Again, it would be like saying that about people pivoting to web in the early 2000s or mobile in the 2010s. Not every trend is fake.

I roll my eyes at all kinds of marketing, while assuming it works.

It's an example of the evergreen strategy, find people who are throwing money at a trend and get their money. Reminds me of the VR arc on the show Silicon Valley

As I get older, I just accept that this is the way the game is played. Tech is one of the top blackjack tables of the investment world. Unless you're bootstrapping and/or building a lifestyle business, you need some promise of potential big returns. Jumping on a trending investment target like AI makes that easier, even if it is partly (or mostly) bullshit.

your thinking is good, but there is a linguistic sublty, in that AI is not bieng used as a noun, but rather as an adjective, or part of a string of adjectives.....extra super power and just to see if you have any eye roll left.... I took one and a half tractors, and built a whole machine combining parts from both, one was a Fordson Super Major, the other an earlier Fordson Major, so I call it the major super major, but I suppose I could get some sort of device involved and it could be the AI power major super major, as there was actualy a "power major" as well. The modern company JCB got it's start doing mad mods to fordsons, and no doubt are getting ready to roll out some sort of AI gimrackery for heavy equipment, I have zero interest in looking, dont want to know, but accept that knowledge is inevitable, hallucinating heavy equipment here we come, maybe we should just go for it and train AI on gaudi,and dali, and give it heavy equipment and monster sized 3d printers

It doesn't matter if we roll our eyes. Adding the AI-powered to your pitch deck multiplies your valuation by infinity, because without AI you get zero investor interest, with AI you might find some funding.

Pretty much every fund I'm on talking terms with is focusing their portfolio on AI, and their LPs won't put cash into a non-AI play

Right now AI is a selling point—not of the product to consumers, but of the company to VCs. Startups are much more about selling the company to investors than about selling product to consumers, and their branding naturally reflects this.

Of course. I’m technical, and not a capitalist desperately seeking alpha. I’m not the target audience.

Strongly suspect that’s common here.

Nope. I’m starting things up and doing the same. Because AI is powering some of what I’m building

Don't forget about the startup that went from "Twitter" to "X" to "AI-powered X"

xAI is a separate company.

https://x.ai/colossus

not anymore. xai bought x for $33 billion

xAI / AI = x

Makes sense mathematically XD

Twitter, a “Startup”???

It was founded in 2006, went IPO in 2013.

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