{"id":383189,"date":"2026-04-05T12:58:09","date_gmt":"2026-04-05T12:58:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/383189\/"},"modified":"2026-04-05T12:58:09","modified_gmt":"2026-04-05T12:58:09","slug":"im-worried-about-the-helpless-ai-disruptors-of-the-future","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/383189\/","title":{"rendered":"I’m Worried About the Helpless AI Disruptors of the Future"},"content":{"rendered":"

On Friday, the Wall Street Journal published<\/a> an article about AI entrepreneurs dropping out of college and being supported by venture capitalists. I\u2019m a little worried about them:<\/p>\n

\u201cWhile young founders have long dropped out of college to chase startup dreams during past technological booms, this time, their financial backers are funding housing for them and ensuring their daily needs, from changing sheets, taking out the trash and booking travel, are met.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a lot of VC money blowing this way and that right now in the tech world, and this article is about the latest crop of young people who think they\u2019re capable enough to absorb some of it while they have the youth and vitality to do so\u2014which is perfectly understandable. This time, however, founders sense a \u201cshort window of opportunity\u201d to create their various unicorns before something like the dawn of AGI happens, ostensibly. And VCs sound like they\u2019re encouraging that perception, and doing everything short of wiping their butts for them to make sure they build quickly.<\/p>\n

That perception of a ticking clock gives me flashbacks to other Wall Street Journal articles about tech incubators during boom periods. Here\u2019s a quote from one from 2010 about something called i\/o Ventures:<\/a><\/p>\n

Incubators typically help nurture small businesses by providing space, services and mentorship to entrepreneurs, often for a fee or an equity stake in their business. Well-known incubators include Y Combinator and Plug and Play Tech Center, with many venture-capital firms also incubating start-ups. [One entrepreneur] says\u00a0incubators can have downsides\u2014he notes some try to exert too much control, while others are geared to younger entrepreneurs who are fresh out of college\u2014he is exploring i\/o ventures because he hasn\u2019t raised any funding and is looking for camaraderie with other start-up founders.<\/p>\n

The headline for that article was \u201cStart-Up Incubators Reborn,\u201d because at the time, incubators were a throwback to the dot-com bubble days. In 2010, people were making apps, but like the dot-com era, the app era ended too<\/a>.<\/p>\n

In the AI era, the young people are even younger, the article (which doesn\u2019t use the word \u201cincubator\u201d) says. \u201cThe average age of founders of so-called AI unicorns\u2014companies worth more than $1 billion\u2014has fallen from 40 in 2020 to 29 in 2024, according to investment firm Antler,\u201d the Journal notes.<\/p>\n

One 21-year-old founder of a defense tech company:<\/p>\n

[\u2026] lives in a house with 10 of his employees in San Francisco\u2019s Twin Peaks neighborhood, where investor money pays the rent, for a personal chef, a house cleaner and someone to make sure the trash gets taken out and the fridge is stocked with LaCroix. It also paid for them to convert the garage into a gym and add a cold plunge pool to the deck, changes that help ensure they can work 15 hours per day, seven days per week, and to rarely leave the house.<\/p>\n

One of the homes features a \u201cden mother\u201d\u2014actually the VC\u2019s office manager\u2014who says of the future billionaires she cleans up after, \u201cI\u2019d do anything for them.\u201d The Journal notes that \u201ca happy birthday sign from months earlier still hangs on the wall of the fraternity brothers\u2019 apartment and a leftover keg lingers in the building basement.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cMy worst-case scenario is going back to Harvard, which isn\u2019t a worse-case scenario at all,\u201d says one 19-year-old entrepreneur quoted in the article.<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t think you necessarily need college anymore,\u201d says another 19-year-old quoted in the article.<\/p>\n

We tend to put on our survivorship bias glasses when we read about startups. Most startups go nowhere<\/a>, of course. And callow, college-aged tech entrepreneurs getting write-ups in the Wall Street Journal are a tradition dating back to at least the year 2000<\/a>. But I sort of think the latest ones think AGI is going to come soon and take out their trash for them for the rest of their lives, even after their den mothers move on. And that troubles me a bit.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"On Friday, the Wall Street Journal published an article about AI entrepreneurs dropping out of college and being…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":383190,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[220,218,219,61,60,80],"class_list":{"0":"post-383189","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-ie","12":"tag-ireland","13":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/383189","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=383189"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/383189\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/383190"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=383189"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=383189"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=383189"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}