Maybe Open source is just on mind a lot these recent days.
Because the big discussions of open source were decades ago now. If you add up all the discussions of open source in the past I'd assume they'd out number the AI discussions now. Also, there is very little novel to discuss about open source. Now novel and 'important' are different things, but novel is what tends to write articles and get eyeballs.
One can liberate people from big tech and the other ties them to it in sorts. And there are very very more conversations about the latter than the former.
The point of discussion is to bring change. There has been a real change in how usable Linux has been lets say compared to past but now its really about user adoption I suppose. I genuinely think that we might need to reopen that discussion window as a lot of people are getting interested in linux/homelabbing /realizing that they can degoogle and what not to really get privacy.
Those discussions brought a change into how open source software is written today (git) etc. but now we probably might need discussions about the awareness of these open source products to the general public if we truly want mass adoption I suppose.
What are your thoughts?
I'm not the person you responded to, but I'm certain that way less than half the population knows about or considers open source, that's one of those living in a bubble illusions.
Ultimately those people aren't here and have no interest in being here.
In particular, I've noticed the topic of AI is eating up corporate meetings, turning them into a kind of human slop.
Summarized by Ed Zitron: The Information recently published some worrying data from venture capitalist Jon Sakoda — that “at today’s clip, the industry would run out of money in six quarters,” adding that the money wouldn’t run out until the end of 2028 if it wasn’t for Anthropic and OpenAI.
Now if the market fit indeed exists then someone needs to rearchitect and rewrite the thing. But wasn’t it always the case? The POC always was a hacked together solution with no real viability to be used as the final product.
a bunch of PHP scripts :-D
It may be that there are such projects which can be monetized or need better marketing.
Innovative it is not, however.
LLMs are good at prototyping using data across _all_ similar projects that exist.
It is not a 1-1 copy.
Most frontend is a dozen components. Most backend again is a handful of architectures when it comes to DB/business logic, CRUD.
It goes to say that if you can guide the LLM to build something innovative you can think of, it will put those components together in a reasonable way - good enough to start off with.
Startups that typically end up in incubators etc are not about new fundamental systems (languages, frameworks, theoretical methodologies etc), but rather about new products.
Almost nobody is making things that are so unlike everything that previously existed that LLMs can't help.
I recognize that in reality this hasn't always worked out. But I also don't think that the answer is a black box that can churn out questionable boiler-plate.
Though I would love if the people who take care of the forest take more responsibility to shepherd the chaos.
In a federated society like ours, I doubt that's possible, for good or bad or extinction.
"alexander grahm beLLM invented a new greeting for the telephone during the telephone bubble: heLLMo! to you too!"
The stories I grew up with of Wozniak, Jobs, Larry and the hacker community does not resemble them anymore.
Everyone I know who raised money is a moron or narcissist.
YC has became like a resume builder.
And the genuine hackers I know of are wasting life away working on pointless projects.
Maybe it's just me not being able to not get out of the daily job schedule and taking the piss out.
The clever people are still doing good work, they're just doing so quietly.
Everyone's panicking about "AI features" being bolted onto products like it's 2010 and we're adding social login buttons. That's not the bubble. The bubble is the assumption that current software companies have defensibility.
Here's the thing: we're not adding AI to products. We're removing the need for most products entirely.
Nobody shipped without search after Google. But search was an enhancement—it made existing software better. AI is a solvent. It dissolves the economic moat that justified building the software in the first place.
YC's entire thesis rests on startups capturing value during the window between "this problem is painful" and "an incumbent solves it." But what happens when that window collapses to zero? When any reasonably clever person can get Claude or GPT to generate a bespoke solution to their specific problem in 20 minutes?
I'm watching food service managers—people who optimize labor, inventory, and customer flow in real-time—get told they can't build software. That's a lie we told ourselves to justify $150k engineer salaries and $10M seed rounds. Those managers have exactly the cognitive toolkit needed. They just didn't know C++.
In three years, they won't need to.
The SaaS model assumes friction. It assumes most people can't build the thing themselves, so they'll pay you $50/month forever. Coding AI doesn't make software easier to build—it makes the *act of building* indistinguishable from the *act of using*.
You don't need a project management tool with 600 features. You need to tell your computer what you're trying to coordinate. You don't need Photoshop's menus. You need to describe what you want the image to convey.
Every software company selling picks and shovels to the AI gold rush is missing that they're about to get disintermediated by the prospectors themselves. The cloud was never about technical superiority—it was about control and recurring revenue. What happens when capable models run locally and people can spin up exactly what they need?
VCs are investing in moats that evaporate the moment non-engineers realize they don't need us anymore. Network effects, switching costs, proprietary data—all predicated on software remaining expensive to create.
It's not.
The actual bubble is venture capital itself. You can't invest in defensibility that doesn't exist. And you can't charge rent on the gap between intention and execution when that gap is closing.
We're not in an AI bubble. We're watching the software bubble pop in slow motion.
Even without AI the software industry is not in a good state for a range of reasons. The big tech companies barely sell software - it's custom software operated to perform some other much stickier function, but the value is not in the software per se beyond it enabling selling the other thing.
I do know many funds and people working to build community and startups that actually help people but it’s an uphill battle because it’s not as sexy and the returns aren’t as immediate.
I just took a look at yclist.com, which ends in 2019. Noticed only a few that I've ever heard of and none that I use. Possibly there are some since then but I sort of doubt it.
There are a couple of things that started later than say, 2015 that I actually use but none that come immediately to mind came out of the "startup community."
There are some others, like Stripe, from which I probably benefit somewhat indirectly, but even that dates back to 2010.
So yeah, for me, the SV "startup community" has been a wasteland for a long time. There are probably a few things that I'm not thinking of at the moment, but the fact that they don't come to mind suggests that they just aren't very important.
Not all though but to me, I okay, I am mentioning this a lot nowadays but I am in high school and this is relevant.
When I first lets say wanted to do a startup, my idea was that people would invest in me for me to grow and then I can sell it really later after 15 years of working or sorts to have financial freedom.
I wanted to build things that could make profit for 15 years and be something that could've needed capital to expand the growth just like any other business.
Just because it is in coding/tech and its spicy right now doesn't make the principles of sound business go away.
Yet, the more time I invested in here / seeing YC, it seems that the story is about hype/growth/operating at a loss knowing things aren't sustainable/building wrappers.
Only to sell them at insane profits to somebody later on while the company never made a single profit or something while hiring many people...
What can I say, its just something that I can understand if someone is doing and there might be companies that have this fundamental but untill I find something like that, I am pretty sure not gonna just go and paste AI sticker in somethings as some other people are doing right now...
Its a matter of moral backbone. I can't charge my investor wrong knowing that my project doesn't have potential or sorts and its an hype thing... ,Idk. There are a lot of systemic issues in the whole world that we have to think through to discover how we got here.
> And the genuine hackers I know of are wasting life away working on pointless projects.
Man this is something that I grapple with a lott, we must do something to survive and so most of us work a dead end job even though we can be really passionate about something and so there's definitely that which I resonate with a lot.
Only around 10% of them will succeed at best.
If a massive crash happens then it would be 2% at best.
It's total insanity; comparisons to tulip mania no longer even apply now that people are tossing around numbers like $500 billion when talking about their capex buildouts.
I assumed billboards were for mass consumer marketing. What tiny percentage of the people on these highways are actually in a position to act on any B2B tech marketing? I don't understand the economic choice to pay for a billboard like that. The ones along the highway that make sense to me are for iPhones and such.
"AI" (quotes deliberate) is the biggest story in tech, right now, for better or for worse. HN is a news site, so it's fairly logical that "AI" would dominate.
It wasn't that long ago, that you couldn't find a pitch deck, anywhere, that was missing the word "Blockchain."
I'm finding it interesting. It's definitely a bubble, but unlike crypto, there's some real utility here. I do think that we'll be seeing some excellent stuff (and some awful crap) down the road.
I am not a crypto advocate but there are definitely a lot of similarities.
The only One thing I can respect Sam Altman for is the line that he said about bubbles and "When bubbles happen, smart people get overexcited about a kernel of truth,”
This is the similarity... Both had some use cases, one might have more and the other but we are being so overexcited, I think being forced to be overexcited about this tech
That said, I am not really an industrial-scale user.
I am sure then you will talk about screwdrivers...
Screwdriver wrappers probably lol /s
(This was a joke of sorts and replace screwdriver with AI/AI wrappers and these websites owned by AI wrappers)
The author calculates this by searching for the term "AI" in the name and description of each startup's YC page. But presence of the term "AI" doesn't make a startup an "AI startup," so to speak. For example, I picked one startup at random, Topological, which is "developing physics-based foundation models for CAD optimization." Just because the company uses AI doesn't make it an "AI startup." AI is rapidly proving itself to be an extremely useful and workflow-changing tool, and many companies now have adopted it somewhere in their product without suddenly becoming AI companies.
we're entering juicero levels of delusion
I can't think of a SINGLE company (except ours maybe, only because we haven't updated our website yet, not because we don't want to) that doesn't vomit AI terms _everywhere_ in their product messaging.
I don't know whether consumers/buyers are demanding that, or what. But it seems everywhere and in every discipline. It's in research grant applications, it's in legal tech, everywhere.
AI is the new "we use the internet" - it will just get taken for granted.
# 1 has been said repeatedly before every previous AI winter.
#2 is a lie from people trying to sell you something and the FOMOs parroting the same line.
#3 someone is going to disrupt you regardless, and it's impossible to disrupt yourself (unless you're prepared to stop doing everything that made you successful in the first place)
It is interesting that you have an opinion on what a real AI startup is and either (1) don’t know what foundation models are, or (2) do know what foundation models are but think that a company whose core focus is on developing them for a particular field is just a startup that uses AI but not one one whose core business is AI.
Guess what, you aren't getting into YC as a CAD company and you aren't raising further rounds either.
If all the AI startups are using Anthropic and OpenAI, does this investment in AI startups continue to be the norm until the Anthropic and OpenAI investors see a return?
YC's goals are to manage risk and to make money, and new tech like this is almost certain to make someone a lot of money. All these YC companies are just different random initializations of potential ways that this new generation of AI can affect the world. It's a given that most startups of this breed will fizzle out with no impact, but I imagine that a few of them will actually change how something is done (and make a lot of money in the meantime).
HN hasn't been representative of the startup or innovation scene for a long time, and the noise to signal ratio has degraded.
the boss is nowhere
"An LLM might be able to explain something to you, but it can never understand it for you."
LLM's have applicable tech in the world today, where it's usable where software prior hasn't been able to, I don't see it going away.
Where folks are trying to apply it to replace deterministic software..? Mileage may vary.
It is the logical conclusion to all our efforts before it to build machines that do work for us; every idea pursued to get computers to do more for us, in every possible way, in every possible location, ALL at once and in synchrony, faster, better, stronger.
Artificial intelligence IS HN.
Resistance to that truth, is resistance to a coming singularity that already always was.
HN thread on the apology: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41701265
Speaking of which, apparently PearAI deleted their apology in the intervening year.
Like I'd assume the best case for YC's business model is to pick a winner, fund them, sell off at the company's peak, then find a competitor likely to unseat them and fund that competitor so they can enjoy the profits of capturing the same market again.
Then it goes to label all these startups as AI companies.
This is how they are categorized (2025 batch only):
AI Agents (15%)
Productivity/Ops Tools (11.4%)
AI Infrastructure (10%)
Healthcare (10%)
Consumer Apps (9.3%).
We cannot argue that AI infrastructure is AI, but what about say back office automation and healthcare? Are these AI companies? Or are they automation/healthtech that happen to use LLMs?
Many Fintech and e-commerce companies use ML, are they ML companies?
Let me think about that
devin•1h ago
Operative word here is "kids", and from what I can tell they're not even the smart ones, just the ones who are more geared toward being money and status-obsessed.
hobs•1h ago
badsectoracula•1h ago
And on that topic, WRT Hacker News, personally i find someone running GPT2 on their 90s Silicon Graphics retro workstation much more interesting than yet another topic on how AI is eating everything :-P.
Imustaskforhelp•1h ago
You yourself say that AI is overhyped and that overhype has formed into a bubble of sorts which has eaten Y combinator.
Also I probably don't understand how your point is relevant to the parent comment if I am honest or maybe I am not finding the relevance in which case feel free to explain it so that I learn something new
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psunavy03•35m ago
All else is a combination of luck, skill, and grit, because for every rock star, star athlete, and successful influencer, there are tens or hundreds of thousands who aren't famous because they didn't win that game.
512•1h ago
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