Will AI Replace Founders?

Will AI soon make being a founder irrelevant? I share 8 ideas for AI-resilient startups

This was a big week for the startup world — OpenAI continues to ship changes that alter what a viable startup idea even looks like on a weekly basis.

i have been really struggling to figure out what to build today that is going to not be obsolete within 3 years and it’s distressing tbh

— Siqi Chen (@blader)
Mar 24, 2023

If GPT-4 can learn to create its own software and API documentation, does the world even need founders to build things anymore? Do any defensible startup ideas exist in the post-GPT4 world? Should we all just wait around for an AI-driven, UBI-induced blissful future?

LLMs are world-changing technology, but hype cycles lack nuance. There are still plenty of things for humans to build. With that said, the opportunities that will create tomorrow’s generational companies have definitely shifted.

I thought deeply about this this week and below you’ll find what I believe are the defensible areas to build something new in 👇

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8 AI-Resistent Areas for Startups

It may be true that we’ve finally moved on from “software is eating the world” to “AI is eating software.”

There is a big “if” here, but in the category of big if true, given we are attacking services, the starting market size for the AI opportunity is larger than the entire current software market. -@gradypb at Sequoia AI Ascent https://t.co/cn4wozdJaQ

— sarah guo 🌱 conviction (@saranormous)
Mar 23, 2023

And I mentioned to a friend this week that I think OpenAI should build a phone to compete with Apple since the need for apps may soon go away.

What does that mean for startups? Where are the actual opportunities?

IRL Products + Experiences

Ok, so we know it just became 1000x easier to write software.

"Make me an app"—just talk to your @Replit app to make software https://t.co/U1v5m5Un1U

— Amjad Masad ⠕ (@amasad)
Mar 24, 2023

But despite startups like Figure that have the potential to bring AI into the real world via advanced robotics, AI is currently still limited to the digital world.

While you may be half-jokingly worried that this means humans need to all become manual laborers, I disagree. Instead, we should leverage AI software tools to help accelerate our progress towards real-world breakthroughs such as:

• Nuclear fusion

• Quantum computing

• Energy storage

• Space exploration

• Gene editing

• IRL experiences for humans

• And, yes, augmented reality

I expect we’ll see some VCs publicly shift their strategy away from software as soon as the next few months.