6 insights from studying 112(!) AI companies in YC W23
Charlie Guo
6 replies
I spent the weekend analyzing over 100 AI and ML companies from the latest batch of YC. Here are 6 key takeaways that I learned:
1. Lots of developer tools. YC has always filtered for technical founders, and many of them are using AI to do what they know - improve the software developer workflow.
2. Lots of competition. There were many companies that seemed quite similar, either in their product or their use case. Some examples: AI-generated sales emails, AI-generated code, ML model hosting/infrastructure all had multiple companies with very similar descriptions.
3. These companies seem very new. While most YC companies publicly launch during the program, there was a striking number who have only gone live in the last month or so.
4. It's unclear how defensible some of the technology is. I haven't checked under the hood, but some companies seem like thin wrappers around OpenAI's ChatGPT/GPT-4.
5. That said, there are still opportunities for ChatGPT competitors. Large enterprises, healthcare, and government are not going to send sensitive data to OpenAI. This leaves a gap for startups to build on-premise, compliant GPTs for these verticals.
6. Some of the most interesting companies are bringing AI to specialized niches. There’s AI for hedge funds, for construction projects, for drug discovery, and more. I can't wait to see what the future holds.
You can check out the full list here: https://www.ignorance.ai/p/analy...
Replies
David J. Kim@between_team
Interesting takeaways. Definitely agree on #4. Unless the AI is highly highly specialized with a unique dataset, I doubt their startups would survive OpenAI.
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It'll be exciting to see what the future of AI holds for all these specialized niches (especially in drug discovery).
Thank you for doing the hard work @charlierguo !
This is a great reference for AI, tech, and more.
And I recently saw on Twitter that AI startups are shutting down (at a higher rate than before) who were in YC.
Is this true? If it is, what might be the reason?
@barun_sharma I'm not sure whether that's true, but it wouldn't be too surprising. The pace of AI development has been insane in the last 3 months, and there are probably many startups that were working on products that have been made obsolete by OpenAI's developments.
Fully agree with #5 and #6.
When will these big corporations make a substantial enough action
for the public to take notice?
🤔
I think we are entering a new era where prompt tech has become a proprietary tech and valuable asset.