Corporate VCs Ride AI Startup Wave (axios.com) 13
Generative artificial intelligence is all the rage in startup-land, and corporate venture capital investors don't want to be left out. From a report: A small but growing number of companies' venture arms are rolling out efforts, in various forms, that are focused on investing in the current AI startup boom. Generative AI and large language models are getting a lot of attention for their potential to automate many business tasks, big and small. "From an enterprise perspective, more than two-thirds of leaders are trying to prioritize generative AI," Paul Drews, managing partner at Salesforce Ventures, tells Axios. Of the 44 startups Workday Ventures has backed, about 25% are already using tech developed by OpenAI, according to managing director Barbry McGann. She adds it's because the AI company's tools are so "enterprise-ready," making it easy for business software makers to quickly integrate the tech.
Can I interest you in my startup? (Score:4, Funny)
Re: Can I interest you in my startup? (Score:2)
I was a little suspicious at first, but I asked chatGPT and it cited 27,000 good reasons to invest! I shall just need a few days to empty everyones pension funds and savings accounts and invest it all in your fine business opportunity.
LLM Proliferation (Score:4, Insightful)
These startups are where low-level scammers will obtain their LLM weaponry. Big investors are thinking they can grab a piece of that action (just like they did with cryptocurrency). But it's scams all the way down. There won't be a ROI.
The LLM space doesn't even have something unjackable like crypto's public ledger. The tech is going to walk out the back door and be for sale on Tor to any Indian scammer. There goes your startup's revenue stream. Unless you think there's big bucks to be made selling Clippy to legitimate businesses.
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah, it's as if nobody learned anything from the dot-com boom. No investor made any money back then.
Re: (Score:2)
The internet had proven utility years before the boom. The public and the moneymen had to catch up with the tech. "AI" is solution looking for a problem. It doesn't even mean anything, as used in the late hype. It's not a technology, it's a buzzword. It's less than blockchain. Super Nintendo games had "AI" 30 years ago.
Re: (Score:2)
Sure, keep arguing about the semantics of the term 'AI' while the rest of the world moves on, uses the new technology effectively and makes shitloads of money doing so.
I've had better, more informative, more educational, more insightful conversations with ChatGPT in the past weeks than with any Slashdotter. That is simultaneously amazing and fucking sad. This used to be a place dominated by reason, intelligence, open-mindedness and an embrace of the future. Now it is a bunch of old grumpy fucks judging ever
High Risk High Reward (Score:5, Insightful)
We get this all the time. VC putting in a lot of money into a new trend, gambling that it will not be a fad.
When we hear that VC are investing into something, it is just basically saying there is a new, "new shiny" out there. With odds slightly better that it will be the next big thing, then it would fail.
However I have more faith in AI technology over Cryptocurrencies, because it has been an established product for decades. We sometimes just didn't call it AI, and it was managed to handle smaller limited tasks. AI is the next Big Data, which was the next Business Intelligence, which was the next Decision Support System, which was the next Data Warehouse, which as the next Database, which was the next Digital Storage, with was the next filing system....
See you in 3 years (Score:4, Insightful)
when the bubble bursts
VC money invested in hot new fads is bad news. It never ended well.