Comment by simonw

> The YC acceptance number is a measure of how many startups YC has decided they can handle in a single batch.

Agreed.

> I think percentage of accepted startups doing X carries more information than total number of startups accepted as a whole.

Disagreed, I think it carries almost no information at all. The only thing your analysis signifies is that companies believe that using AI will make YCombinator more likely to fund them. They are competing for a limited number of slots and looking for ways to appeal to YCombinator. And the only thing that signifies is that YCombinator, specifically, likes funding AI startups right now.

This is not surprising. If you're an investment firm, funding AI companies is a good bet, in the same way that funding Web3 firms used to be a genuinely good bet. Investors ride market trends that are likely to make a company balloon in value or get bought out by a larger company. Investors are not optimizing for "what redefines the industry"; investors optimize to make a return on investment. And those are two entirely different things.

But it's also not surprising given YCombinator's past - the firm has always kind of gravitated towards hype cycles. It would be surprising if YCombinator wasn't following a major tech trend.

If you want evidence that we're seeing an explosion of companies, you need to look at something much more substantial than "YCombinator likes them".

And that's especially given the case that OP wasn't asking "is the tech industry gravitating towards AI?" They were asking, "are we seeing an explosion of new economic activity?"

And frankly, we're not. There are a lot of reasons for that which could have nothing to do with AI (tariffs and general market trends are probably a bigger issue). But we really aren't seeing the kind of transformation that is being talked about.