Over 40% of the latest YC batch are AI/ML startups

I wonder if this gold rush is leaving openings for building simple solutions that don&#x27;t need AI and emphasize traditional UX instead of conversational UI. If you have some domain knowledge, maybe you should focus on ensuring your product does a narrowly defined 100% job at what&#x27;s needed, and it may shine when you&#x27;re pitching against AI-based competitors whose products look like magic 95% of the time but are wrong or unusable the remaining 5%.<p>&quot;We are not a black box that sends everything to someone else&#x27;s giant API&quot; can be a selling point as businesses become more aware of their cloud dependencies.

Surprisingly, there was only one (!) education startup in this batch. Doesn&#x27;t bode well for us as we&#x27;re applying in this Summer 23 cycle albeit with customers, revenue, PMF, etc.

Thin wrappers around ChatGPT may be ok to start.<p>There&#x27;s no point on creating your own GPT before validating your idea and getting some traction.<p>Amazon didn&#x27;t build their logistics and freight division first to then start selling books.<p>Once your product or service is off the ground and more resources are available then you can start moving away from OpenAI.<p>This could be much simpler that you think, particularly if you designed your systems with this in mind and considering future costs of training LLMs will be a fraction of what they are today.

And most of those &quot;companies&quot; are shims over GPT. Zero moat, fake it till you make it mentality, gather investor money and maybe we&#x27;ll roll our own in good time.<p>Don&#x27;t know how I feel about that, it quacks like a bubble but there is massive value that can be delivered.

Not surprising. You can sit down and bust out something pretty cool in an afternoon using the infrastructure currently in place (openai, huggingface etc). Makes more sense than being the 57th SaaS web app in any given space.

So over 40% of YC batch are working on making API calls to OpenAI?

This is not going to end well.

feel kind of sorry (or excited?) for this batch lol. i have trouble believing that many companies were already working on AI&#x2F;ML stuff. basically huge land&#x2F;cash grab right now. surely at this level there has to be a lot of overlap... it really feels like just throwing everyone into the pit and having them duke it out and see who wins, loser be damned. i suppose that&#x27;s the VC play in general, just a bit jarring to see it front and center.

How many of those are just a minor prompt + API call to OpenAI?

I hope one of them is using machine learning to recognize photos of melanoma. I was thinking in the shower this morning that would be a handy service.

Always thought that YC was meant to pick the Crème de la Crème of ideas. Different times indeed.

Sure...<p>They sure <i>&#x27;really&#x27;</i> are AI companies and totally not just wrappers around OpenAI or ChatGPT&#x27;s API and giving Microsoft and Google more ideas to absorb for free with another AI bubble waiting to pop as soon as OpenAI increases prices. &#x2F;s<p>Then we will see how unprofitable these so-called AI hype &#x27;startups&#x27; are.

Surely this technology will be used for the benefit of humanity. By 2030 we will be working 15 hour weeks and all people will have homes!

Is there still gold to be had, or are they just enriching the shovel-sellers?

oh yeah I&#x27;ve noticed this trend on indiehacker. Lotsa lotsa new products being advertised as AI-powered and whatnot. So it doesnt suprise me a lot.

&quot;We&#x27;re So Lo Mo... I mean So Mo Lo&quot;

The companies that stuck with paper and didn&#x27;t adopt computers, the web and mobile went out of business. The same will happen in the near future with the companies that are unwilling or unable to adopt AI&#x2F;ML in their business.