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😺 YC startups love AI

😺 YC startups love AI

PLUS: Biden warns about AI

Noah Edelman & Pete Huang
April 05, 2023

Welcome, humans.

Trump was indicted yesterday. The internet is blowing up and so are AI deepfakes of Trump in mugshots and prison jumpsuits.

Here’s what’s going on in the world of AI today:

👀 YC Demo Day is tomorrow
🤖 Autonomous AI agents
🎙 Biden's thoughts on AI
🕹 AI that dubs videos without voice actors

AI Is Everywhere At Y Combinator 🗻

Y Combinator's famous Demo Day takes place tomorrow, and this batch is loaded with AI startups trying to make a name for themselves.

In fact, 57 of the 273 companies this time are generative AI startups. So far, the theme has been AI assistants for specific workflows:

Hightime puts a copilot in your video calls to guide sales/customer calls.
Kyber helps businesses automate customer support.
Truewind makes AI-powered accounting & finance software.

It was a chaotic birth for these companies. So many founders swarmed generative AI, only to realize most ideas were not viable companies or too easily snatched up by existing companies.

In fact, we heard multiple stories of companies making late pivots just 2-3 weeks ago as ChatGPT Plugins hit the front pages.

Bottom line: For now, AI is a battleground for companies with distribution. We’ll see where this first wave of post-ChatGPT startups can shake things up.

FROM OUR PARTNERS

This Startup Uses AI To Deliver Marketing Campaigns 👇

Most companies market products in a way they think might land with customers.

But RAD AI leverages proprietary AI to craft marketing messages they know will land with customers.

The B2B SaaS startup scans millions of web pages, Reddit threads, and APIs to craft a content strategy that taps into consumer psychology.
Their results are rad and the startup has landed clients like Accenture, Ro, MGM and Dignity Health.
Featured on Benzinga, Tech Crunch, Entrepreneur and Vanity Fair

After growing 310% last year with a $2.2 million run rate, RAD is raising a community round with thousands of investors participating.

Join over 3500 investors (VC and private) and invest on Wefunder before the round closes.

Devs Are Building AI On Steroids 💉

Developers spent early 2023 pumping out hundreds of AI writing assistants, cover letter generators and blog post writers. If you ask us, it got a liiiittle repetitive.

Now, they're turning to a new paradigm: autonomous agents.

Buzzwords aside, these are bots powered by GPT-4 that take a goal (e.g., "Make The Neuron world-famous") and decide what tasks are needed to complete it.

For example, the demo video for Auto-GPT shows the system reasoning through its steps ("I need to find a calendar of upcoming events") before choosing the right action (searching for certain keywords).

A-Team, assemble: Some of these agents can also summon more agents to help, like a manager with unlimited interns. This dovetails with recent research showing ChatGPT as a "brain" that calls in other AI models for help.

And much like humans, some of these agents are clever enough to delegate their work away.

Zoom out: Projects like these are causing the AI community to wonder if these systems are early versions of general intelligence.

And if they're not there yet with GPT-4, will GPT-5 bring about Skynet?

Around the Horn 🦄

Amazon announced a 10-week-program for AI startups that includes access to AI models, go-to-market advice, and up to $300k in AWS credits.
People in emerging countries like India, Brazil, and South America are more likely to trust and embrace AI tech than wealthier countries like Japan and the US.
Midjourney disallowed pictures of Chinese President Xi Jinping to be created on its platform.
Biden said that while AI has potential to help challenges like disease and climate change, it also poses risks to our society that should be addressed.
How a debate about SpongeBob art is raising questions about copyright infringement for Hollywood's creative industries.

Treats To Try 🍿

Featured: Flexible, scalable, affordable inference. Get 4x more inferences per dollar with Salad’s Inference Endpoints API. Start generating results in 2 minutes with Salad.
Rask localized and dubs videos in 60+ languages without needing voice actors.
AIdeaMap is a copilot that visualizes your brainstorms and ideas.
Namique uses GPT to come up with unique brand names for your business.
Tomorrow helps predict weather-related threats before they happen.
Koe.ai: Transform your voice using AI.