| ▲ | Ask HN: What's the Point of Your Startup? | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| 8 points by sawyers 9 hours ago | 12 comments | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
If AI can build anything. Why do you need a human in the loop? For ideation, for market testing, for go to market, for marketing content generation? Why have a startup incubator full of Stanford grads when you can just replace them with a data center and keep all the profit? More importantly, if that is the general temperature of the business space, it seems like acquiring resources is more important than innovating? | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| ▲ | bhu1st 36 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
I know of a social org which runs of entirely on its people's face to face interaction. And, these folks have consulted recently with me about how they can adopt tech to facilitate their ops. I can sit with a LLM and build a platform for them, but idk it will cover the entirety of their day to day nuances. You can't just throw resources at a road with muddy puddles everywhere and let a autonomous vehicle figure it out all by itself. A perfect predictable problem is solvable with large resources, but the minute you touch something human, you need a equivalent human judgement to give it the sought after direction. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| ▲ | _fat_santa 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
> If AI can build anything. Why do you need a human in the loop? I'm currently building a SaaS with my business partner. I'm the "tech guy" while he has decades of industry experience with the industry that our SaaS is targeting. What I found building this is there is a giant subset of preferences, problems, and other minor details that aren't written down anywhere, they are just kept in the minds of the people in that industry. The reason it's not written down is to those people, these things seem obvious. And these things are both extremely important but also very subtle. We use AI heavily in designing our application but there's always a testing pass where my partner goes over some changes and calls out subtle things of how "things work in practice". These things aren't in any manuals, they are seldom even written down and thus AI systems are completely oblivious to these details. Now you could build a system that skips some of these subtleties and still gets the job done but what you will find is potential customers will always return to their existing system that takes these into account. Now one day we might get an AI system that detects these subtleties but in order to do that you would need a load of training data around those things. But how do you even get that training data if all of it is held inside the minds of the people working in that industry? | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| ▲ | tacostakohashi 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
AI can build anything... within the tiny slice of the economy/human experience that is data/software. It turns out there's a vast universe out there involving physical products, real estate, agriculture, plumbing, sanitation, health care... | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| ▲ | vivekyyy 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Honestly speaking, I think it was always possible for someone to replicate what you do in your SaaS, but maybe just a little slower. IMO the value was always in the fact that someone else is willing to obsess about the problem so you don't have to. For example, I could probably always have make a Quizlet clone for myself, but even with agents around I'd rather just use Quizlet than spend the time making my own flashcard app, even if I have to pay like $5-10 a month. Just food for thought | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| ▲ | colesantiago 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Prediction: There will be new jobs. My advice is to find these types of jobs, like powering data centers, cleaning up vibe coded messy codebases as a consultant. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| ▲ | worldsavior 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
AI can't build everything, that assumption is just wrong. Do you even code? | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||