We will see more and more AI startups running out of money soon. I know of a handful of similar 100m+ raised companies that have no product to speak of and are just cruising towards their end.
It just requires lateral thought.
Pay the completely untrained gig-workers peanuts to review AI written code to create a universal blockchain "bank without borders". I mean what could possibly go wrong?
So I reject the notion of throwing the baby out with the bath water as much as the hype bubble around them.
What we do need, as with any novel technology, is oversight and regulation. Which is difficult this time around when the grifters are also the ones in power.
I never mentioned throwing them out; I specifically mentioned that they are niche - they have useful applications in very specific domains.
That use isn't dependent on hype, because they don't need a bunch of investment dollars to somehow find a use-case and create artificial demand.
As an example, someone proposed a while ago that banks could use a blockchain to facilitate near instant foreign exchanges; for the sake of argument let's say that's a feasible thing for them to use it for, and is an improvement over their existing system for them.
The customer doesn't need to know and likely doesn't care that it uses a blockchain to facilitate the transfer. They care that the transfer was much quicker.
Eh, your entire comment was dismissive about the "technologies", and not unlike countless similar reactions about the topic. So any serious points you wanted to make were easy to miss within the sarcasm.
I do agree with your point that valid use cases don't need to rely on hype, but at the same time, the technology that powers it doesn't need to be invisible to users. Some amount of marketing around it shouldn't be an issue. The thing is that we've been flooded with it for the past decade+, and the critical thinking public has become desensitized to the bullshit. But this doesn't mean that underneath that there is zero legitimate value, as some people vocally claim.
Where are blockchains widely used nowadays, pray tell?
That's all I can think of, though.
It's the same thing with LLMs, they are basically an extremely sophisticated autocomplete, but I'll be damned if I don't see 1911 articles per day that claim they are sentient, and Sam the perv needs just a couple more billion dollars to reach AGI, just behind the corner. The average pundit's critical thinking is just so disappointing.
Try asking an LLM. I'm not going to regurgitate what can be easily found elsewhere, or just deduced with a bit of thinking.
The constant groupthink negativity around this topic on HN is exhausting. It's just as bad as the hype.
Also, the benefits of crypto as a currency aren't all that. We already have instant money transfers that everyone uses day-to-day without any hitch. Crypto can do it too, sure. Keyword too.
There can be other benefits like transparency or anonymity but:
1. We can already achieve transparency through regulation and largely have.
2. Anonymity for currencies is pretty much bad. We tried that in the past, turns out lots of organized crime.
False.
> We don't need more securities, sorry.
That's your opinion.
> We already have instant money transfers that everyone uses day-to-day without any hitch.
We do? Please let me know of an instant way to send money to any country on Earth, without exorbitant fees or trusting a single corporation.
> Anonymity for currencies is pretty much bad. We tried that in the past, turns out lots of organized crime.
Ah, yes. Let's abolish cash as well.
It's easy to strawman the case that all cryptocurrencies have no practical value. Groupthink is promoted on forums like this. What takes a bit of maturity and honesty is acknowledging that beyond the negative things cryptocurrencies have been used for, the technology is fulfilling the promise of evolving our financial systems. While you continue to scream and shout that it's a scam, millions of people will continue to benefit from it every day.
Okay, but most people aren't using bitcoin as currency.
> That's your opinion.
Okay, and most people's opinion. Yeah we don't need more securities, especially scammy ones. Sorry you're in the minority.
> We do? Please let me know of an instant way to send money to any country on Earth, without exorbitant fees or trusting a single corporation.
I don't pay for my fucking coffee in Venezuela. 99.99% of transfers don't go across countries.
And, if you need that, that's what credit cards are for. They're fast and I'm not going to get kidnapped and have my fingers stolen because I have an Amex blue card.
> It's easy to strawman
Really? You don't think appealing to usecases like "inter-country transfers" isn't strawmanning?
The reality is crypto-currency has exceedingly small usecases that aren't already covered by other technologies. And then, of those that are covered, the alternatives are proven, faster, cheaper, and safer.
> Ah, yes. Let's abolish cash as well.
Nobody ever said this, but we do put limits on cash to prevent laundering.
And it's saved a lot of lives. Sorry, I don't think letting organized crime flourish is worth for some principle of privacy you have. I don't care about you or your principles, I care about real outcomes, in the real world. And, fortunately, legislatures in pretty much every country agree with me.
I mean, most modern financial instruments are fairly similar, albeit slightly more regulated, so what do I know. In a short span, we have witnessed speculative buying of GPUs, crypto mining (aka using shit ton of electricity and hardware to produce NOTHING of value), dropshipping, and my favorite: the tremendous value that NFTs and all other web3 trash brought to society, I can't help but wonder why people are tired of the crypto fads, especially since crypto delivered NOTHING of its promises:
- you can buy limited amount of stuff with it and you often need to convert it to "real" money
- its unstable and unregulated, so it's just a breeding ground for scammers and snake oil salesmen
- It fails hard on its privacy/anonymity promise, as it's LITERALLY the most traceable thing in the world, especially considering wallet scramblers are outlawed in many places
So much negativity for no reason, all web3 so far has been super successful and extremely useful for society! /s
Seems to be covered already!
You're right. It would be a prime time to launch ZombAI
Never gonna happen.
> easier to use than a smartphone app
Google is pushing their Gemini to Android phones pretty hard. I upgraded my phone yesterday and Gemini wanted to take over my power button (no way). What's going to be easier than that?
There are objectively situations where other widgets (and other ways to interact) can be helpful, e.g. if my hands are full of stuff, or when I am lying on my bed and too lazy to pick up my phone. But those situations are very limited. Amazon has learned the hard lesson that people don't really use Alexa other than a smart timer, after billions of dollars of investment. I don't see how that changes any time soon.
Google, apple, Microsoft...
VR and AR headsets on the other hand have several good usecases, they just aren't for everyone.
Social VR, more fun exercise and the media watching experience is quite nice, especially on planes and in general nice on the Apple Vision Pro.
> TikTok (business model: "Uber for Vine") is more popular than Facebook (business model: "Uber for Sino-Soviet Propaganda"), presumably because it bypasses the middleman and delivers the content straight from the source. Hackernews debates whether it's just a matter of time before it turns out to be evil, or whether a social-media application targeted at children and operated by a government full of genocidal monsters is and shall remain "fun." Other Hackernews point out that the app, which is operated by a company in which the murderous, barbaric Chinese government has an ownership stake, is mean to fat people.
> Github (business model: "Uber for README.MD") directs its employees to eat its own dog food. Because of Github's acquisition by Microsoft (business model: "Uber for customer abuse"), it turns out that what Github engineers are eating came out of the dog to begin with. Hackernews tries to figure out whether they, as customers of Microsoft's latest desperate attempt to get anyone to use Azure, have any control over their information, or whether they'd be better off remaining with their existing workstation-as-a-service provider, Apple (business model: "Uber for garden walls").
By all accounts it looked like another web dev sweatshop and it just used AI as bait.
Decided to just step back from it all. Most AI startups are all talk and no action. Long hours and weekends with nothing to show for it.
My genuine question--outside of programming-related use-cases (which are remarkable), what has come out of the generative AI "boom" that's a profitable product, or has a viable path to profitability?
What "business transformation" has happened in the private sector as a result of "agents" or whatever? What companies look promising (don't say another VSC fork)?
Even if there are use cases, all of them are operating at extreme losses. As someone else said, maybe throw away video content? But I suspect that the providers are burning piles of cash to maintain users which is true for all AI driven products.
I mean, I'm a software developer and we have AI tools that we use, maybe not customer facing, but we have internal tools that provide lots of value.
Random example #1: we regularly scrape our competitors for their prices and offers, but it's insane to maintain all of that because our competitors update their pages/dom frequently so this doesn't scale over dozens of competitors and thousands of products. We replaced thousands of Playwright scraping code with few hundreds of lines of instructions for an LLM to find the information on the pages itself (it can figure out where/what is).
Random example #2: we sell some products that require lots of customer care and instructions as we're in the home maintenance business and sometimes there are questions about products and their installations that are extremely specific and we do have a chat and call center for our customers to assist them. What our customer care reps do is that they need to find and combine information often from multiple hundreds-page long PDFs. Thus we built an OCR+Rag pipeline to assist our customer care reps. This has provided tremendous value and cut our costs by a lot. It also has the potential to replace them completely and move them to other tasks, but it's gonna be a long time before we can really trust an LLM for that. The risks of giving incorrect or wrong information is too great right now. But internally customer care reps can double check the information as the LLM points out the original pdf sources (up to the specific line).
On top of that I'd say that there's also other tools that both make money and help us, such as AI in creative software like Adobe tools. Some of our graphic experts said that this speeds them up a lot, we need to produce or edit tons of images, illustrations, etc for our products.
And those are just few random examples of how AI definitely can speed up and improve margins of our company, while making cloud and saas vendors money too.
Seems like the above scenarios save a lot of time, aka money.
Maybe not as much as the AI leaders hyped up.
The other example also improved a lot customer satisfaction when dealing with our reps as they are much faster now, can often answer questions without putting them on hold.
I guess my examples weren't exciting (billion dollar) enough.
I'm not into this space, but I also assume that translation work is moving from a writing to an editing job, since an LLM can do that pretty well. I just had an LLM correcting my German mistakes for an email I had to send today.
I'm also not sure that profitability is relevant just yet, as inference costs keep going down. Programming-related use-cases do encompass a lot of why GenAI is useful, simply because they make anyone able to write their mothertongue a programmer. It's fine if LLM-based products bootstrap with high-margin industries like tech, and move into thinner margin ones as costs go down. Of course I'm also not saying the current valuations and hype are justified (I don't know).