YC: Requests for Startups

This list variously refers to AI, LLMs, and models. Any idea why it would use different terms where it does, and what each means?

I doubt there's much thought behind it, and just the fact that each "Request" is written by a different person.

It’s used mostly correctly in each case, and they have different meanings.

AI is a marketing catch-all that encompasses technologies of a certain level of “how did they do that” automation that are generally understood to leverage machine learning models under the hood (but not always).

LLMs are one class of ML models that operate in a text-in-text-out fashion.

“Models” are more of a statistical/mathematical term that generally mean “anything that can make a prediction” - it’s broader than just ML (eg climate models that are first-principles-based, not learned from data).