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931 points sohzm | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.228s | source
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Havoc ◴[] No.44462964[source]
To a casual outside observer the quality of the companies YC invests in seems to have absolutely cratered. Have they just given up on vetting and switched to a throw money at everything approach?
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seunosewa ◴[] No.44463085[source]
My feeling is that they are investing in founders who they find impressive who are working in AI. Not so much in the uniqueness of their ideas.
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diggan ◴[] No.44463207[source]
Isn't that a very outspoken objective of YC, to fund people, not ideas? Long time ago I caught up to what YC is doing, but even when I first joined HN back in like 2013 I think the whole "Fund people, not ideas" shtick was already explicitly what they were doing, unless I remember wrong.
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conartist6 ◴[] No.44464108[source]
So why are they so insistent that they want AI ideas? I felt sick when I read the list of things they say they want to invest in and every single thing was framed as, "build some service, but for AI".

Also in this AI era I've learned something else: it isn't intelligence that builds institutions. It's philosophy, and it's faith. The AI industry is full of smart people, but If you lack a set of beliefs you won't know why you're working or what you're working towards or how to put one foot in front of the other day after day to make steady progress towards helping people over the longest time scales.

In the AI era our industry has found itself with one of the more bizarre problems I could imagine: in accepting that it builds products for AIs and not for humans, it has become philosophically bankrupt

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1. diggan ◴[] No.44464299[source]
> So why are they so insistent that they want AI ideas? I felt sick when I read the list of things they say they want to invest in and every single thing was framed as, "build some service, but for AI".

If I tried to enter the mindset of a VC, I could potentially see that as a "Is this person at the 'edge of progress' currently" flag, although I wouldn't trust it more than a "Is this person chasing hype" warning personally. Maybe it's a good way of getting some specific type of person to apply, in some other way?