Phoebe Gates wants her $185 million AI startup to succeed with 'no ties to my privilege or my last name': 'I have a chip on my shoulder' | Fortune

Yeah that is real nail on the head stuff. The poverty trap is real. I really believe everyone should be poor once in their life for at least a year with no end in sight because many / most who haven't experienced it don't have the empathetic capacity to imagine it.

It's certainly delusional. I've been active in the innovation space for ~25 years, and for most normal people it's taking a massive risk. Here, she's not ending-up on the street if the venture flops, so the risk is low.

So merit my ass, it's easy to take a risk if it's not real risk, i.e. I agree and don't appreciate the sentiment.

like shot in the head and scrawled sideways in the margins

FTFY.

Please no. My crushing despair at the state of the world meds for ignore at least one thing

None of them make it themselves...

But they act like spoiled kids because that's how everyone treats them, because at that level of wealth the only people you're around will say whatever gets you to give them money.

It doesn't take long before they forget how to be a normal human

And then the AI will just make up the discounts and coupon codes. What you really want is a simple, tuned search engine, like we've had for 30 years. Not generated content.

There are already browser extensions that do this.

They are notorious for intercepting connections, adding their own referral links, tracking users and other badness.

https://www.theverge.com/24343913/paypal-honey-megalag-coupon-scam-affiliate-fees

Surely the AI version will be better…. ..

In the two days before it gets undermined by entrenched interests, yeah could be neat.

Please tell me this is a satirical nod towards Honey & Co.

They’re out of their element! They’re like a child that wanders into the middle of a movie . . .

Lightning in a bottle, that cast.

Well, most of that cast.

it's a small indian man named Al.

I’d be surprised if a human were behind it. This is exactly the kind of thing that can be vibe coded pretty fast and is mostly just reselling fancy Google searches through an LLM. I did a quick skim of the website and it’s just a bunch of items scraped from big brands with lots of similar looking images of other products. There’s too many sites for me to really believe they’ve made integrations with all of them.

The insane valuation is because of her name not because the tech is good. The only way to make money on this is the customer data. The margin on that is going to be fucking minuscule especially once LLM costs start going up so they can make money. This adds nothing of value on top so it will go away almost immediately.

Same way daddy did it

He was given roles in his uncles film because he was his nephew. The name change just swept this under the rug. He wanted to get the roles but not let anyone know he got them through favoritism.

Yeah I like him too. The only asterisk on that is that I guess I might like some other actor better who didn’t have a family “in”

I mean nepotism is hardly a new problem :)

The appearance of nepotism.

Nicholas Coppola got cast by his uncle, when any random 15 year old aspiring actor would never stand a chance.

He then changes his name so that other people in Hollywood will (hopefully) not say “oh he got that part because he’s Coppola’s nephew,” even if he absolutely got that job because he’s Coppola’s nephew.

You have misunderstood. He was in fact the beneficiary of nepotism: staring in his uncle’s films. But to keep this a secret, he changed his name. He was hiding the nepotism, not trying to avoid nepotism.

Walk a little more softly. You came off as confidently wrong there.

I haven't set up a browser adblocker on that computer, as I've never really found the need. pihole usually takes care of everything well enough

The first time I had a friend reccomend him, I gave them a funny look, thinking they were talking about Joe Hill the musician and labor organizer XD

Edit: I'm sick of people mentioning musicians without songs; here's Preacher and the Slave, from which we get the term "Pie in the Sky".

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=RHyGpFncovU

Performed by the late Utah Phillips, as Joe Hill was executed a good 110 years ago.

What's crazier is people thinking it's a good enough idea to get $185,000,000 in funding for someone who just graduated college...

Like, it already exists, there's a bunch of those already.

She slapped "AI" on the front of it but because her name is Gates people won't stop throwing money at it. If she doesn't understand her name is why she's getting funding, that just means she's both ignorant and naive and this is an even worse investment and product than it seems on the surface.

They just slap the word AI on it so investors pp's become the big pp.

My little brother works for a supply company, and one of the companies they supply has a new 'AI' tool where folks type in the thing they want and it pulls from other companies to find the lowest price, then color codes it and shit. The supply companies have to put their prices in a database for the 'AI'. All I could think hearing about it is that some C level got absolutely fucking bamboozled.

There are a million of these out there. Most of them suck. Many are, at best, ethically gray. Even the better ones spy on you in a hundred different ways.

I'd love something that actually didn't suck, but "185 million dollar AI startup" doesn't sound promising to me.

The big problem with the concept is that there's money to be made by gaming the system and nobody is good at that cat and mouse game. AI could theoretically help, but let's be real: it's just going to scrape the same 100 identical Amazon referral listicles you'd get in a Google search, with an extra sprinkling of ads.

Yup. Price comparison extensions have been around for decades already.

We already know how things like that can be monetized - just look at the Honey scandal. You rip off both users and business customers... But this time with AI.

What a novel idea, Phoebe. Such Innovation, much wow!

Guaranteed it’s going down the route of:

“Want your store at the top. We can make that happen” nudge, nudge

But it feels so damned blatant for the grift that it is. The “It’s not about my name” is very blinkered view to take.

That’s not right economically. If you were going to spend $200 at store B and now spend $150 at store A, that’s an efficiency of $50. You’re saying that looking for deals isn’t a market benefit, and it absolutely is. Now, their cut of it is of no benefit, and fuck AI. But the service is productive.

Oh, I 100% agree. I test installed the app, and it seems to be some of both (behavior tracking with a Safari extension, and store sponsorship).

That being said, I hate store monocultures even more, like how Amazon/Walmart can bully their suppliers through sheer critical mass and shoppers don’t even look anywhere else. That’s economic inefficiency. Price aggregators are a good thing.

Well if AI doesn't have to be artificial intelligence, I guess it doesn't matter

ah yes stanford, along with other well known UNIVERSITIES, that produces elitists graduates, she says she doesnt want to be "Associated with having a famous parents that paid for everything, including her AI company.

Baby, I’m an anarchist.

Gates isn't the only one with a chip on their shoulder, people generally don't get called "Tankies" just for criticizing crony capitalism