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Comment by andsoitis | Hacker News Reader

> One thing a few investors I've talked with have mentioned: "It's weird we're not seeing more consumer AI companies. Why is that?"

What would consumer AI company even be? The frontier labs have declared they will eat everything and they have a head start.

Best bet would to be a contrarian and build products and services that people actually want or need. Fine to be AI powered or augmented, but consumer companies do the hard part of understanding specific consumer needs and wants and pursuing that.

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There is a thin line. Lots of AI powered things are just workflows you could implement with claude code and some skills. Or even just a prompt on the web chat. But I think these big technological swings sometimes take a long time to shake out. Society is still adapting to the internet.

I think there is more opportunity for consumer application of AI. Im surprised we dont see more models in game. Small models that do more purpose driven things not "this npc is just a chatbot with a personality in its system prompt." I mean we literally have systems in games called "AI" and we dont think these much more powerful AIs have a place?

I don't know much about game development but given how intensive some AI models can be i feel like adding LLMs to games can have performance issues, whereas in-game AI for computer controlled characters works in-enginer.

The average game dev cycle is about 7 years these days, so expect to wait some more years before you see llms used much in games.

And almost all consumer software has AI now.

> But what if you want to add AI to your product? Well, now you have some real inference costs on every request!

Eventually, these companies just lower their costs by using more efficient models. There were consumer companies built on GPT-3.

> There were consumer companies built on GPT-3.

I don't think anyone is doubting this, but were they any good? Remembering back my first interactions with GPT-3, it was fun, but hardly reliable nor "ready for production", besides making cool demos.

> almost all consumer software has AI now

.. whether you want it or not!

We're at the point where it's becoming a product sticker like "fair trade" or "does not contain nuts" to say a product wasn't made with AI.

Yeah, I think if we reframed it as "why is there no consumer AWS?" It would make more sense.

AI is a utility that can abstract code to such a high level it is indiscernible from natural language.

> What would consumer AI company even be?

Something that helps homeowners build anything on their property, for example https://myhomecat.com

What purpose does AI serve here apart from lowering costs by generating a plan?

Especially if I need to ‘consult an expert’ isn’t this just a customer company using AI?

You can plan and design your projects without spending weeks/months on research and understanding how construction and code compliance works. It'll also help you save time/money from having to make extra runs to the hardware store or if you end up making the wrong cut/connection if you DIY the first time.

You can say what you want, and the tool has appropriate guardrails to make sure what you're going to build is safe.

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