Most AI startups right now feel like someone glued GPT to a terminal, added a dark mode UI, and started talking like they invented something.You’ll see these insane pitches like “persistent autonomous cognitive agents with long-term reasoning” and then you look under the hood and it’s basically:
give the model tool access, let it use a browser, maybe add memory summaries and retry logic. That’s the “product.” You can get that on your own just giving access to Claude locally.
Infinite context AI companion.?
The memory startups are especially funny. “Infinite memory AI companion.” Dude. You summarize conversations, stored the important bits, and retrieve them later. Congrats, you invented note taking.
Same with all the “AI employees.” Half the time it just means the model can now click buttons and edit files locally. OpenClaw-type projects are literally just:“what if we stopped preventing the agent from doing stuff within the OS”. Well wait, you'll see what happens. While you wait, run too seeing that you don't care much about permissions:
sudo rm -rf / And the multi-agent companies kill me too. “A collaborative society of specialized AI entities.” Brother, one prompt writes, another checks it, another executes it. Big fucking deal. You can do that yourself, even in the same session.
The funniest part is how fast open source catches up. Some startup raises millions for “AI operating systems,” then 8 days later there’s a GitHub repo made by an insomniac 20 year old that does 80% of the same thing if you’re willing to read documentation written like a ransom note. Often, it does more and it's just not documented. Just give a bit more time to Linus to catch up and we'll get OpenAI being truly Open, just out of Linus's famous spite.
A lot of startup pitches today can basically be translated in your head:
“AI researcher” = long context plus web search. Note taking. Just configure your local agent to summarize and update files as it goes instead of letting it's context window explode.
“AI employee” = tool permissions
“persistent cognition” = summaries plus retrieval
“AI operating system” = Electron app with MCP support
And every few months another entire startup category just gets absorbed into the base models anyway. And VCs keep falling for it. I wonder if they actually beat the SP500 long term with all that work...