Almost every parent comment on this is negative. Why is there such an anti-OpenAI bias on a forum run by YCombinator, basically the pseudo-parent of OpenAI?
It seems that there is a constant motive to view any decision made by any big AI company on this forum at best with extreme cynicism and at worse virulent hatred. It seems unwise for a forum focused on technology and building the future to be so opposed to the companies doing the most to advance the most rapidly evolving technological domain at the moment.
I'd expect to see a balance though, at least on the notion that people would be attracted to posting on a YC forum over other forums due to them supporting or having an interest in YC.
Can someone give the counter argument to my initial cynical read of this? That read being: OpenAI has more money than it can invest productively within it's own company and is trying to cast a net to find new product ideas via an incubator?
I can't imagine Softbank or Microsoft is happy about their money being funneled into something like this and it implies they have run out of ideas internally. But I think I'm probably being too reflexively cynical
I think that MIT study of 95% of internal AI projects failing has scared off a lot of corporations from risking time in it. I think they also see they are hitting a limit of profitable intelligence from their services. (with the growth in inelegance the past 6–8 months being more realistic, not the unbelievable like in the past few years)
I think everyone is starting to see this as a middle man problem to solve, look at ERP systems for instance when they popped up it had some growing pains as an industry. (or even early windows/microsoft 'developers, developers, developers' target audience)
I OpenAI see it will take a lot of third party devs to take what OpenAI has and run with it. So they want to build a good developer and start up network to make sure that there are a good, solid ecosystem of options corporations and people can use AI wise.
I think it’s more like Open AI has the name to throw around and a lot of credibility but not products that are profitable. They are burning cash and need to show a curve that they can reach profitability. Getting 15 people with 15 ideas they can throw their weight behind is worth a lot
Without putting my weight behind them, here's some counterarguments:
- OpenAI needs talent, and it's generally hard to find. Money will buy you smart PhDs who want to be on the conveyer belt, but not people who want to be a centre of a project of their own. This at least puts them in the orbit of OpenAI - some will fly away, some will set up something to be aquihired, some will just give up and try to join OpenAI anyway
- the amount of cash they will put into this is likely minuscule compared to their mammoth raises. It doesn't fundamentally change their funding needs
- OpenAI's biggest danger is that someone out there finds a better way to do AI. Right now they have a moat made of cash - to replicate them, you generally need a lot of hardware and cash for the electricity bill. Remember the blind panic when DeepSeek came out? So, anything they can do to stop that sprouting elsewhere is worth the money. Sprouting within OpenAI would be a nice-to-have.
I don't think it's about money, they don't invest anything. They gather data about "technical talent" working on AI related ideas. They will connect with 15 of these people to see if they can build it together.
It seems almost like... an internship program for would-be AI founders?
My guess is this is as much about talent acquisition as it is about talent retention. Give the bored, overpaid top talent outside problems to mentor for/collaborate on that will still have strong ties to OpenAI, so they don't have the urge to just quit and start such companies on their own.
Feels like the next logical move to me: they need to build and grow the demand for their product and API.
What better than companies whose central purpose is putting their API to use creatively? Rather than just waiting and hoping every F500 can implement AI improvements that aren't cut during budget crunches.
There’s a difference between having product ideas rooted in compelling hypotheses on the one hand, and random ideas you throw against a wall and see what sticks.
I suspect, but could be wrong, that in OpenAI’s case it is because they believed they will reach AGI imminently and then “all problems are solved”, in other words the ultimate product. However, since that isn’t going to happen, they now have to think of more concrete products that are hard to copy and that people are willing to pay for.
If you are pre-idea today, does OpenAI believe your startup will still be relevant in the face of the AGI progress they forecast to make in the time it takes you to ship?
I ask questions like that in my head all the time. My metric is once their AI is smart enough to make their website not throw up an error half the time, I'll have to more deeply consider any AGI claims
Yeah, my thoughts where along the same line. Seems like they want to be another Ycombinator but more focused on AI. (Although TBF, I guess AI would also get the most traction at Ycombinator these days, given the hype wave).
In 10 years, people will apply for jobs for their children before conception, and wisely not have kids if they can’t line one up (at least as a backup.)
To me, it sounded like, "let's find all the idea guys who can't afford a tech founder. Then we'll see which ones have the best ideas, and move forward with those. As a bonus, we'll know exactly where we'd be able to acquihire a product manager for it!"
I'm highly capable of building some great things, but at my dayjob I'm filled to brim with things to do and a non-ending list of tasks in front of me.
I've built cool stuff before, and if given a little push and some support could probably come up with something useful - and I can implement much of it myself.
Put me in the room with cool people, throw out some conversation starters, shake it up and I'll come up with something.
The country selection menu seems to include countries from around the world. It sounds like only the first and last weeks are actually on-site, the rest in async/remote.
Looks like they want to build up and support middle men to do the apps more than them, and act more like a platform or operating system position. Which makes sense giant corporations reporting 95% failed AI projects and the core success cases are specialist companies tuning the platform to a specific problem are successful. Then there are a ton of snake oil AI apps that are over promising under delivering hurting the image of AI's usefulness
This is probably purely a pivot in market strategy to profitability to increase token usage, increase consumer/public's trust more than farming ideas for internal projects.
It's clearly a talent grab. Where talent = creativity.
Most will submit the app with a dime a dozen ideas. (Or, at internet scale, a dime a few hundred thousand I guess?) No need to even consider those guys.
But it will be a pyramid. There will likely be 20-30 submissions that are at once, truly novel, and "why didn't I think of that!"-type ideas.
Finally, a handful of the submissions will be groundbreaking.
Et voilá. Right there you've identified the guys and gals thinking outside the LLM box about LLMs. Or even AI in general.
Capitalists can't solve problems, they can seek out rent and put meters on things. These "builders" and "innovators" are the reason the web you dearly miss is dead.
The entire internet is now structured to sell to you. premium subscriptions for simple things that aren't technical problems, but are instead artificial complexity to monetize your every move. They profit from the fact that its artificially difficult to host your own data, sync your own devices, or connect to each other without an intermediary.
All of this becomes worse with AI stratifying hardware power again. AI is great, but on american capitalists its pearls before swine.
The internet and many adjacent technologies were all created and iterated on inside the DoD and other wings of government research.
The world really benefits from well funded institutions doing research and development. Medicine has also largely advanced due in part to this.
What’s lost is the recapture. I don’t think governments are typically the best candidate to bring a new technology to marketable applications, but I do think they should be able to force terms of licensure and royalties. Keeping both those costs predictable and flat across industry would drive even more innovation to market.
What happens instead is private entities take public research and capture it almost entirely in as few hands as possible.
In short, the loss of civic pride and shared responsibility to society has created the nickel and dime you to death capitalism we are seeing in the rise today. Externalization of all costs possible and capture as much profit as possible. No thought to second order effects or how the system that is being dodged to contribute back to gave way for the ability for people to so grossly take advantage of it in the first place
Labor, FOSS... can you not imagine anything besides wealthy people creating artificial scarcity to force others to work for them?
Edit: if you don't think this is true, look at the history of truly any country and see what happens when subsistence farmers and indigenous communities refuse to work for capitalists
Think of all the people who solved problems before/outside of typical capitalism. I guess more of those people wouldn't hurt to have right now to counter-balance the shift to hyper-capitalism that is ongoing.
Almost every parent comment on this is negative. Why is there such an anti-OpenAI bias on a forum run by YCombinator, basically the pseudo-parent of OpenAI?
It seems that there is a constant motive to view any decision made by any big AI company on this forum at best with extreme cynicism and at worse virulent hatred. It seems unwise for a forum focused on technology and building the future to be so opposed to the companies doing the most to advance the most rapidly evolving technological domain at the moment.
> Why is there such an anti-OpenAI bias on a forum run by YCombinator, basically the pseudo-parent of OpenAI?
Isnt that a good thing? The comments here are not sponsored, nor endorsed by YC.
I'd expect to see a balance though, at least on the notion that people would be attracted to posting on a YC forum over other forums due to them supporting or having an interest in YC.
Why do you assume that a forum run by X needs to or should support X? And why is it unwise - from what metrics do you measure wisdom?
because of the repeated rugpulling?
Can someone give the counter argument to my initial cynical read of this? That read being: OpenAI has more money than it can invest productively within it's own company and is trying to cast a net to find new product ideas via an incubator? I can't imagine Softbank or Microsoft is happy about their money being funneled into something like this and it implies they have run out of ideas internally. But I think I'm probably being too reflexively cynical
I think that MIT study of 95% of internal AI projects failing has scared off a lot of corporations from risking time in it. I think they also see they are hitting a limit of profitable intelligence from their services. (with the growth in inelegance the past 6–8 months being more realistic, not the unbelievable like in the past few years)
I think everyone is starting to see this as a middle man problem to solve, look at ERP systems for instance when they popped up it had some growing pains as an industry. (or even early windows/microsoft 'developers, developers, developers' target audience)
I OpenAI see it will take a lot of third party devs to take what OpenAI has and run with it. So they want to build a good developer and start up network to make sure that there are a good, solid ecosystem of options corporations and people can use AI wise.
The MIT study found 90% of workers were regularly using LLMs.
The gap was that workers were using their own implementation instead of the company's implementation.
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I think it’s more like Open AI has the name to throw around and a lot of credibility but not products that are profitable. They are burning cash and need to show a curve that they can reach profitability. Getting 15 people with 15 ideas they can throw their weight behind is worth a lot
It's possible that a single senior employee just wanted to do this and it doesn't cost that much and their manager was like "sure"
I really do want this to be the case
Without putting my weight behind them, here's some counterarguments:
- OpenAI needs talent, and it's generally hard to find. Money will buy you smart PhDs who want to be on the conveyer belt, but not people who want to be a centre of a project of their own. This at least puts them in the orbit of OpenAI - some will fly away, some will set up something to be aquihired, some will just give up and try to join OpenAI anyway
- the amount of cash they will put into this is likely minuscule compared to their mammoth raises. It doesn't fundamentally change their funding needs
- OpenAI's biggest danger is that someone out there finds a better way to do AI. Right now they have a moat made of cash - to replicate them, you generally need a lot of hardware and cash for the electricity bill. Remember the blind panic when DeepSeek came out? So, anything they can do to stop that sprouting elsewhere is worth the money. Sprouting within OpenAI would be a nice-to-have.
I don't think it's about money, they don't invest anything. They gather data about "technical talent" working on AI related ideas. They will connect with 15 of these people to see if they can build it together.
It seems almost like... an internship program for would-be AI founders?
My guess is this is as much about talent acquisition as it is about talent retention. Give the bored, overpaid top talent outside problems to mentor for/collaborate on that will still have strong ties to OpenAI, so they don't have the urge to just quit and start such companies on their own.
> OpenAI has more money than it can invest productively
I don't think there is any money given, except travel costs for first and last week.
OpenAI appears to lack clear product vision.
This feels like a program to see what sticks.
Feels like the next logical move to me: they need to build and grow the demand for their product and API.
What better than companies whose central purpose is putting their API to use creatively? Rather than just waiting and hoping every F500 can implement AI improvements that aren't cut during budget crunches.
"Pre-idea stage" support is wild to me
This feels like a program to see what sticks.
Isn't that how we got (and eventually lost) most Google products?
There’s a difference between having product ideas rooted in compelling hypotheses on the one hand, and random ideas you throw against a wall and see what sticks.
I suspect, but could be wrong, that in OpenAI’s case it is because they believed they will reach AGI imminently and then “all problems are solved”, in other words the ultimate product. However, since that isn’t going to happen, they now have to think of more concrete products that are hard to copy and that people are willing to pay for.
15 ppl in first cohort? Aka dont bother applying.
If you are pre-idea today, does OpenAI believe your startup will still be relevant in the face of the AGI progress they forecast to make in the time it takes you to ship?
I ask questions like that in my head all the time. My metric is once their AI is smart enough to make their website not throw up an error half the time, I'll have to more deeply consider any AGI claims
Sam clearly misses Y Combinator.
Yeah, my thoughts where along the same line. Seems like they want to be another Ycombinator but more focused on AI. (Although TBF, I guess AI would also get the most traction at Ycombinator these days, given the hype wave).
Did we ever find out why it is he doesn’t work there anymore?
Was forced to choose between OpenAI and YC by Paul Graham and Jessica. Sama chose OpenAI.
https://x.com/paulg/status/1796107666265108940
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Clearly, dealing with OpenAI doesn't leave any room for fun stuff like YC. Just a hunch.
Indeed.
Exactly what I read between the lines on this.
"pre-idea individuals"
Next up, we're funding prenatal individuals.
In 10 years, people will apply for jobs for their children before conception, and wisely not have kids if they can’t line one up (at least as a backup.)
Right, this corporate linkedin-lingo is getting worse by the day.
Did anyone get confirmation that the form got sent? There is no feedback from pressing "submit" for me.
Same
Same issue
It looks like application submission isn't functioning.
Do a hard refresh while console is open; that'd fix it!
Yeah, clicking "Submit" doesn't do anything obvious, aside from post some arcane errors to the JavaScript Console.
lmao, was this vibe coded?
"it offers pre-idea individuals" wtf
If ideas are a dime a dozen, what even is a pre-idea startup
Why not ask the big bag of words to generate "ideas"?
Just, Devil's Advocate..
but what, exactly, makes you believe this internship program is not an idea generated by the big bag of words?
I first misread it as "OpenAI Grave" where someone would put the list of all discontinued models.
> "pre-idea individuals"
Move over "idea guys", it's the era of the "guy who hypothetically might have an idea at some point".
I've got concepts of an idea
I don't know man?
To me, it sounded like, "let's find all the idea guys who can't afford a tech founder. Then we'll see which ones have the best ideas, and move forward with those. As a bonus, we'll know exactly where we'd be able to acquihire a product manager for it!"
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I caught that too. What's a "pre-idea" individual? Someone who... wants the vague _idea_ of a company?
No, before that
1 reply →
South Park Commons -1 to 0 program seems conceptually similar
I mean, I get it.
I'm highly capable of building some great things, but at my dayjob I'm filled to brim with things to do and a non-ending list of tasks in front of me.
I've built cool stuff before, and if given a little push and some support could probably come up with something useful - and I can implement much of it myself.
Put me in the room with cool people, throw out some conversation starters, shake it up and I'll come up with something.
The FAQ items don't expand for me, on Android Vivaldi.
Do you have to be in the US or can they help to get in?
The country selection menu seems to include countries from around the world. It sounds like only the first and last weeks are actually on-site, the rest in async/remote.
Looks like they want to build up and support middle men to do the apps more than them, and act more like a platform or operating system position. Which makes sense giant corporations reporting 95% failed AI projects and the core success cases are specialist companies tuning the platform to a specific problem are successful. Then there are a ton of snake oil AI apps that are over promising under delivering hurting the image of AI's usefulness
This is probably purely a pivot in market strategy to profitability to increase token usage, increase consumer/public's trust more than farming ideas for internal projects.
Is it just me seeing this as a talent discovery program?
It's clearly a talent grab. Where talent = creativity.
Most will submit the app with a dime a dozen ideas. (Or, at internet scale, a dime a few hundred thousand I guess?) No need to even consider those guys.
But it will be a pyramid. There will likely be 20-30 submissions that are at once, truly novel, and "why didn't I think of that!"-type ideas.
Finally, a handful of the submissions will be groundbreaking.
Et voilá. Right there you've identified the guys and gals thinking outside the LLM box about LLMs. Or even AI in general.
hmm.. wonder what the most accurate Venn diagram for this is?
Capitalists can't solve problems, they can seek out rent and put meters on things. These "builders" and "innovators" are the reason the web you dearly miss is dead.
The entire internet is now structured to sell to you. premium subscriptions for simple things that aren't technical problems, but are instead artificial complexity to monetize your every move. They profit from the fact that its artificially difficult to host your own data, sync your own devices, or connect to each other without an intermediary.
All of this becomes worse with AI stratifying hardware power again. AI is great, but on american capitalists its pearls before swine.
If capitalists can't solve problems, who do you suggest can?
The internet and many adjacent technologies were all created and iterated on inside the DoD and other wings of government research.
The world really benefits from well funded institutions doing research and development. Medicine has also largely advanced due in part to this.
What’s lost is the recapture. I don’t think governments are typically the best candidate to bring a new technology to marketable applications, but I do think they should be able to force terms of licensure and royalties. Keeping both those costs predictable and flat across industry would drive even more innovation to market.
What happens instead is private entities take public research and capture it almost entirely in as few hands as possible.
In short, the loss of civic pride and shared responsibility to society has created the nickel and dime you to death capitalism we are seeing in the rise today. Externalization of all costs possible and capture as much profit as possible. No thought to second order effects or how the system that is being dodged to contribute back to gave way for the ability for people to so grossly take advantage of it in the first place
1 reply →
Labor, FOSS... can you not imagine anything besides wealthy people creating artificial scarcity to force others to work for them?
Edit: if you don't think this is true, look at the history of truly any country and see what happens when subsistence farmers and indigenous communities refuse to work for capitalists
BRB, waiting for capitalists to solve the housing and healthcare crisis, shouldn't be long...
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Think of all the people who solved problems before/outside of typical capitalism. I guess more of those people wouldn't hurt to have right now to counter-balance the shift to hyper-capitalism that is ongoing.
Incredible opportunity for SF Muni to get subsidized with even more full bus wrap ads for AI coding apps that nobody uses