Most of my dev work is in logistics for a very staid industry which doesn't even make this list, that would have a difficult time finding a use for LLMs, because most of the day-to-day jobs involve manual labor. That said, I've been asked "how can AI help us" quite a bit (the unsaid ending to that sentence being, "...help us lay off workers"). Just as a thought experiment, I've considered the pros and cons of automating certain linguistic-heavy aspects of the business. My considered determination is that the penalty from a single fuckup by an LLM in any important scenario would dramatically outweigh all other potential savings.<p>This is probably why no one in a lot of sectors outside those that already provide white-label customer service are seriously considering implementing these things. There is no barrier to doing so from a financial or technical perspective, in fact there's every incentive to try it. Businesses like the one I'm in are just waiting to see how exactly the first movers will be dismembered.
Anyone know what the Energy, Materials Science, and Security ones were? All other categories I can generally intuit how AI is being used, especially LLMs, but not so those three categories.<p>Edit: here they are:<p>Energy:<p>- <a href="https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/elyos-energy">https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/elyos-energy</a><p>- <a href="https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/line-build">https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/line-build</a><p>- <a href="https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/helios-climate-industries">https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/helios-climate-industr...</a><p>- <a href="https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/orbio-earth">https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/orbio-earth</a><p>Materials: <a href="https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/osium-ai">https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/osium-ai</a><p>Security:<p>- <a href="https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/kobalt-labs">https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/kobalt-labs</a><p>- <a href="https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/corgea">https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/corgea</a><p>- <a href="https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/remy-security">https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/remy-security</a>
> AI is (still) eating the world.<p>Citation needed.<p>I work in this space so am fairly optimistic, but it's worth pointing out we're still mostly talking about AI hype. Nothing has really been eaten at all yet from what I've seen.<p>The article claims that there are tons of startups in this space, which is true, but that doesn't mean any of these startups have actually solved any major problems yet.<p>As a reminder, we still haven't "solved" autonomous driving quite yet and we were much further along that road 5 years ago.<p>Working on shipping LLM driven products everyday, I'm becoming increasingly concerned that there's no way the products proposed can possibly match the hype for them. Which is a bit of a bummer since these models have a lot of potential in the sub-hype space, but I fear backlash in the future will lead us to squander that potential.
Odd that the first two categories of AI startups were AI infrastructure. Reminds me of blockchain to some degree.<p>Would have expected to see more vertically focused solution on the top 4 list. Eg, transportation, oil & gas, agriculture, etc… all huge markets.
AI startups have inspired me to think more about what "value creation" really is. There's so many AI startups out there that add AI to make silly process X easier, when it really hides the problem of silly process X existing in the first place. From one perspective, adding AI solves the problem. From another perspective, it further entrenches the problem. Does this create net value? AI is both inspiring and demoralizing... inspiring in that it unlocks a million new doors, but demoralizing in that most of those doors appear to be empty.
Something I've noticed going through founder's LinkedIn pages is that it seems that entrepreneurs seem to be significantly more attractive than the average person. I assume a partial causative factor could be that the number of positive impressions you make on people with influence correlates with success of your startup, and one's capacity to make positive interpersonal impressions correlates with physical attractiveness.