I'm advocating for a mass hiring event and huge growth push, not throwing together MVPs with LLMs!
Big dck money. Big dck ROI -- The next great Batman film, a World of Warcraft 2, autonomous robots on the moon, one of those humanoid robots doing my laundry!
The cost to build has dropped considerably, yes, the barrier to entry has lowered, but the bar is raised and valuations have skyrocketed and set records with trillion+ dollar IPOs too. More capital flowing into individual companies than ever before, albeit a small set of companies.
The potential has gone up, 10-fold, 100-fold.
To me, the market is saturated with pickaxe vendors looking for scrap metal miners, that is, model wrappers hoping to be the next wave of SaaS serving a largely misunderstood - disenfranchised (laid off from their jobs, no hope for the future) - customer base (gen y/z developers) that isn't meeting overall sales expectations. Nobody likes AI. Nobody needs it. They're also being told "Hey, don't be developers anymore". It's very confusing messaging!
So you got Google accidentally dominating most of it anyway just by being in everyone's house and pocket. Deer in headlights they're like "Who me?" They weren't even trying. Gemini surprises everyone. Surpasses everyone. Haha. Don't worry, they're doing a lot worse now that they are trying.
I digress, beyond "AI", what is needed is clearly... <AlexCarp>The Application Layer</AlexCarp>
> Those who are building products with AI, probably aren’t advertising the fact.
Perfectly fine - and gets to the spirit of what I'm talking about. Forget AI, focus on the product (and customer).
LinkedIn was always sooo fake and bad as in it was a living nightmare dystopia some of the shit people would write.
I often wondered: Is this how you get promotions? No way does that actually work or do anything... And then I'm like holy shit is it genuine??? Is this really coming from the heart and I'm the cold, dead, psychopath who can't appreciate a genuinely thoughtful update from a corporate peer?
I had to get out of there.
I'm not on LinkedIn anymore... but I imagine it's even worse now that all the b2b saas posters have gone full agentic.
The ease, extent, and scale at which math integrated with computing along its development makes me wonder if the two fields will effectively enjoin, academically (math and computer programming).
Maybe we will look back on today's math as a kind of arcane, pre-syntactical set of structures that required speakers of the language on both ends interpreting it to make good use of it. No validation or compilation, it can't be applied, just a total wild west - scribbles on a whiteboard and another mathematician making sense of it.
I was just thinking a "Who is firing?" thread would be more informative than a "Who is hiring?" one in 2026+
That would make this one - "Who is quitting?" the more useful counter to "Who wants to be hired?" (because it's easier for candidates to get placed coming directly from another company rather than hiring someone unemployed).
The hiring manager becomes the firing manager - this is your new hiring pipeline... Or... firing pre-pipeline... wait now I'm confused
There are opportunities to build a new Google without AI. In that case AI creates an opportunity in an unexpected way. If Google goes all-in on AI, the opportunity is wide open for someone else.
And we do see that (Proton, DuckDuckGo, even iCloud is becoming very Google-like in recent years).
As for "AI is not good enough" I remain unconvinced - I've seen production quality work, granted not 1-shot from a model but produced by a talented artist.
I never said AGI, (I believe that's only a marketing term from OpenAI). The other stuff at the end of your comment has nothing to do with what I'm talking about here! I really am focused on the low cost of code, video, and other media compared to the massive opportunity to serve content to people worldwide and how much money and disruptive potential is being left on table.
But here's another thought: Code and pixels are still cheaper than ever before.
Another one: The earning potential from code and pixels is the same or greater than it was before AI.
Put it together. If it was real estate where land was cheap but selling at the same rate as before, then investors would be all over it.
Innovation is something you have to believe in - I get that - but from a purely finance perspective why is there not a massive movement to obtain swaths of low cost, high potential IP? Data, engagement, emails and cards on file. Series A-F growth, greater fools and IPOs - either way it's massively generative of productive wealth, and you'll get a few game changers here and there.
I fail to see why it's not a great opportunity for, say, a $1B+ fund in just about any category.
Agree LLMs are more like a calculator than the person who uses it. You actually still need the person to use it! And you want that anyway for accountability and ownership. That's one of the big reasons I think companies should be hoarding AI talent right now.
And 2 - yeah I really mean "product focused" companies, not these YC AI wrapper replicas you see everywhere (no offense to YC but hey, they know what they are doing lol). Those companies must be only there to drive usage to the model providers they wrap.
The disruptive potential is not limited to those who use AI, or those who offer it in their product to end users. The potential is here regardless. Because of the fact workers use it in their workflows - in Adobe software, in their IDE, and so-on, it's effectively here.
The company does not need to do anything special - just hire.
Mainly am asking why those with attention (or VCs who can get it) are not introducing more noise, more content, and more clamoring - as you put it.
I thought that was the whole idea?
Lemon market - maybe - but it remains to be seen IMO. The market seems almost entirely unrealized. There are only a few major AI companies in the media, and it seems like innovation is largely directionless or stalled.
I haven't really seen any "startup boom" for AI yet. It's all the same kind of AI wrapper startup still. The most innovative thing in San Francisco right now is AI complaince.... Compliance... I'll leave you with that.