Startups binge on AI while big firms sip cautiously, study shows The Andreessen Horowitz venture capital firm (aka A16z) crunched startup spending data and found young firms stuffing AI into everything, while bigger businesses remain far more restrained. To see what startups are prioritizing, A16z worked with fintech firm Mercury, which provides financial services to many Silicon Valley …
Very much like blockchain, outside of a few specific instances, "AI" is a solution to problems with existing solutions that are more efficient.
I suspect LLMs will flame out and be supplanted by Small Language Models that are trained for specialised use cases. Essentially what we had before but with newer techniques. Whether startups make any better use of them than established firms...
Of course one explanation is that ‘startups’ don’t know any better and latch onto the the latest ’shiny', but more longer lived firms have seen and witnessed all sorts of fads come and go, the vast majority of which turn out to be snake oil.
If I recall correctly, a few years ago, wasn’t ‘blockchain’ going to be the answer to all problems?
In the US at least, most startups have no intention of becoming a going concern. They are set up to move cash into the pockets of the directors and creditors, and whether they produce anything or even exist next year is irrelevant.
A friend went to work for one recently that appeared to have a real product. It didn't, and closed down less than a year after they started - leaving them with about two months of unpaid "consulting fees" and significant unpaid contractual bonuses. Due to the way they'd set things up the commercial creditors got their money and the disguised employees didn't.
Clearly intentional, and sadly in that particular jurisdiction it's basically impossible to impose personal consequences upon the directors.
