Ask HN: Founders/investors, what AI bet you made in 2022 and how it is going?

[kjok]

In 2022, many founders and investors made strong bets on AI: new companies, pivots, or funding theses. Now that we have had time to see what actually played out, what did you bet on and how is it doing today? We learn a lot from failure, so especially interested in (and would appreciate) honest stories about what did NOT work and why.

[parttimelarry]

There was an equity crowdfunding round for Replit in early 2022. I threw some money in for the hell of it since I liked what they were doing back when I was doing some volunteer teaching many years ago. They have since rode the vibe coding wave and have grown like crazy. Usually I consider crowdfunding to be a donation, but by dumb luck I think it's a 6x so far.

Later I did some consulting with a financial firm to implement the various RAG + vector database + function calling + chat with their workflows. It became pretty clear that whatever I was doing would soon be built-in to OpenAI / Anthropic's products, so it started feeling like a waste of time to keep building this stuff.