[fhd2]

Not sure why this is down voted, that is the key question. Impact means different things to people. Could be:

1. Building a sustainable business and making decent money

2. Building a market leader and making ludicrous amounts of money

3. Advancing the state of the art in technology

4. Helping people with their little daily struggles

5. Solving pressing problems humanity is facing

Or many other things I suppose. Now if you believe that AI is eventually going to make anything humans can build now redundant, that'd be a reason to believe nothing else matters in the end I suppose. But even if we get there, there's a lot of road leading to that destination. Any step provides value. Software built today can provide value even if nobody is going to need it ten years from now. And it's not like you could even predict that.

[mirekrusin]

The motive is to get acquired in most cases. It’s obvious and starts to make sense when you see startup that has no feasible monetisation strategy on the horizon, yet they exist and get funding. They’re betting on building infra to be hopefully used in large corp and this is their demo/PoC.