AI startups, and open-source forks with VC funding. A bad match.
  • Metz@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1233·
    3 months ago

    I just quit my 270 000$ job at Coinbase to join the first YCombinator fall batch with my cofounder @not_nang. We’re building PearAI, an open source AI code editor.

    Of course it is a cryptobro…

    dawgt i chatgpt’d the license, anyone is free to use our app for free for whatever they want. if there’s a problem with the license just lmk i’ll change it. we busy building rn can’t be bothered with legal

    Yep, already hate that guy. Talks and behaves like an absolute dipshit.

  • LiveLM@lemmy.zipEnglish
    861·
    3 months ago

    So all it takes to get that sweet, sweet VC mula is a Vscode + extension fork with some hipster branding on top? Really???

    Aren’t these guys supposed to be tech geniuses or some shit?
    Billions of dollars and they don’t have a single actually knowledgeable intern who could glance at this project and say “yeah, no, I could do this too?”
    Or are they’re just ignoring them because AI is a glowing hot buzzword right now?

    This is baffling. The entire tech sector praises VCs like they’re god’s gift to earth, meanwhile they’re out here backing stupid shit like this, how can anyone take these people seriously?

  • dinckel@lemmy.world
    791·
    3 months ago

    I genuinely just don’t understand what’s going on in the tech sector anymore

      • Duamerthrax@lemmy.world
        301·
        3 months ago

        Feels like the dotcom era all over again, but they’re better at stringing the scam along this time. Enough of the people need to believe the lie that it’s getting artificial longevity.

    • Croquette@sh.itjust.works
      301·
      3 months ago

      VC funding is basically gambling, trying to find the next billion dollar company. So they throw money at anything that has any semblance of traction to get in early and cash out when the time comes.

      • PM_Your_Nudes_Please@lemmy.world
        101·
        3 months ago

        Which is the exact same behavior that caused the dot com bubble. VC funding was throwing money at any and every dot com business, in the hopes that it would explode and lead to profits.

        All it did was massively overvalue the dot com companies, which caused a bubble when people finally realized they were overvalued and VC investors turned off the spigot of free money.

      • xenoclast@lemmy.world
        6·
        3 months ago

        Gambling with OTHER PEOPLE’S money.

        You win, you take a cut. You lose. Someone else suffers.

        These people destroy everything for greed.

      • leisesprecher@feddit.org
        42·
        3 months ago

        But they made half a million.

        And there are literally hundreds of similar companies raking in billions in investments that magically vanish while the founders live a luxury live and move on.

        The real question is: why do VCs shit so much money into obvious frauds? Are they this stupid or do they just hope to pass it on to the greater fool?

        • bassomitron@lemmy.worldEnglish
          241·
          3 months ago

          $500,000 is nothing to billionaires, or even people who make hundreds of millions a year. It’s a lot to average folks like us, but to them it’s the equivalent of going to the casino with money they can afford to blow.

          But I do think you’re right about passing it on to the greater fool. They bet it’ll be the next hot product, regardless if they know it sucks or not. Then some bigger bag of money will come in and buy it up, thinking they’ll be able to somehow milk a sustainable profit out of it. You’d think by now that VCs would be smarter about the boom and bust of tech startups, but alas…

            • ✺roguetrick✺@lemmy.world
              21·
              3 months ago

              Overall billionaires wasting their money to pay for idiots that then waste it in consumption would be a tax positive, I believe. We should encourage that behavior instead of them buying assets and then extracting rents like the parasites they are. I don’t care if they get to write off the money they lose from their income.

      • CosmicTurtle0@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        344·
        3 months ago

        They’re not going to survive

        Are you kidding me?

        Alexander Bell stole the telephone.

        Edison regularly stole inventions from Tesla among others.

        Steve Jobs fucking mind raped Woz.

        The American Dream is taking someone else’s hard work and profiting off of it.

  • Emotet@slrpnk.net
    541·
    3 months ago

    I simply can’t wrap my head around the thought process behind launching a clusterfuck like this. Y Combinator probably didn’t do their due diligence and simply rode the fading AI Bubble, so I can at least understand how the funding might have been approved.

    But actively leaving your $250,000+/year job to team up with some questionable choices to basically fork two OS projects, change the discord links and generate an illegal licence for that shit show, all while proudly stating, publicly, “dawg i chatgpt’d the license, anyone is free to use our app for free for whatever they want. if there’s a problem with the license just lmk i’ll change it. we busy building rn can’t be bothered with legal” when they are made aware of the fact.

    This is absolutely insane, sounds like someone was about to get fired and decided to use some personal relations and fresh graduates to somehow successfully cash in one last time with absolutely no regard of even the basics. Pretty wild that those guys even managed to figure out how to found a Startup. Probably asked ChatGPT for instructions there, as well.

    • rtxn@lemmy.worldEnglish
      38·
      3 months ago

      Y Combinator probably didn’t do their due diligence

      It’s not the first time. They also backed an obvious scam MMO that promised the world and more, while it was nothing more than an asset flip.

      • menixator@lemmy.dbzer0.com
        18·
        3 months ago

        I heard that the creator of the MMO had people they knew within ycombinator at the time. I wonder if it’s something similar this time around. Eitherway, it’s not a good look for ycombinator

        • TexasDrunk@lemmy.world
          15·
          3 months ago

          Is that the MMO where they read Ready Player One and said “Yep, I’m ready to build a mesh peer-to-peer MMO because that means there will be no discernable lag for an infinite number of people, just like in the book”?

  • Hegar@fedia.io
    37·
    3 months ago

    If they’ve already proven they can steal and lie, of course they’ll get VC money.

  • Mwa@lemm.eeEnglish
    322·
    3 months ago

    Tbh I don’t think I wanna interact with ai anymore

    • nednobbins@lemm.ee
      20·
      3 months ago

      There are a lot of scams around AI and there’s a lot of very serious science.

      While generative AI gets all the attention there are many other fields of AI that you probably use on a regular basis.

      The reason we don’t see the rest of the AI iceberg is because it’s mostly interesting when you have enormous amounts of data you want to analyze and that doesn’t apply to regular people. Most of the valuable AIs (as in they’ve been proven to make or save a bunch of money) do stuff like inventory optimization, protein expression simulation, anomaly detection, or classification.

      • Chuymatt@beehaw.org
        2·
        3 months ago

        We are seeing it in healthcare for doing some great photo or record screening. I am sure it may put some folks out of a job, but it will save lives as well.

      • Juice@midwest.social
        7·
        3 months ago

        Quantum computing. It might be a real thing but it’ll go through a grift phase first.

        Another one will be environmental carbon capture, like pulling carbon out of the atmosphere. This one would be easier to fake but might not get traction for longer since the ideological superstructure in our society is already built up so that it is hard for a political crisis to emerge due to global climate concerns. Even though climate change is worsening, and whole cities are being destroyed by hurricanes, the debate is still pretty stabilized. However since this grift will end up being sold as a commercial solution to a political problem, the grift will probably come from a larger player like Lockheed or Boeing, which would necessitate investing in the most evil companies in existence. Still you never know, Tesla stayed afloat for years without making a working product by selling carbon credits issued by the government to other car companies, so you might be able to bootstrap this one

    • xavier666@lemm.eeEnglish
      5·
      3 months ago

      Slight correction. AI is not a scam.

      While AI is a powerful tool, it enables people to do scams very easily.

      • nednobbins@lemm.ee
        1·
        3 months ago

        Maybe.

        There have been a number of technologies that provided similar capabilities, at least initially.

        When photography, audio recording, and video recording were first invented, people didn’t understand them well. That made it really easy to create believable fakes.

        No modern viewer would be fooled by the Cottingley Fairies.
        The sound effects in old radio shows and movies wouldn’t fool modern audiences either.
        Video effects that stunned audiences at the time just look old fashioned now.

        I expect that, over time, people will learn to recognize the low-effort scams. Eventually we’ll reach an equilibrium where most people won’t fall for them and there will still be skilled scammers who will target gullible people and get away with it.

  • some_guy@lemmy.sdf.org
    14·
    3 months ago

    I saw something a few days ago where they were said to have mass-replaced the name of the software with their new name (in the code). Supposedly, little or nothing else changed. Y Combinator used to be better than this, at least I thought they were.

  • SuperiorOne@lemmy.mlEnglish
    13·
    3 months ago

    Road to success (2024 AI Hype Edition):

    1. Clone VSCode.
    2. Rename it as LSCode, squash all history, and create some random commits with --author="Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>".
    3. Add a character AI that calls your code garbage.
    4. Profit.
  • nednobbins@lemm.ee
    84·
    3 months ago

    It’s otherwise a fairly well written article but the title is a bit misleading.

    In that context, scare quotes usually mean that generative AI was trained on someone’s work and produced something strikingly similar. That’s not what happened here.

    This is just regular copyright violations and unethical behavior. The fact that it was an AI company is mostly unrelated to their breaches. The author covers 3 major complaints and only one of them even mentions AI and the complaint isn’t about what the AI did it’s about what was done with the result. As far as I know the APL2.0 itself isn’t copyrighted and nobody cares if you copy or alter the license itself. The problem is that you can’t just remove the APL2.0 from some work it’s attached to.

    • delirious_owl@discuss.online
      31·
      3 months ago

      This is great. So all their VC-funded work will get released publicly, and we all benefit.

      I don’t see why people are upset that FOSS projects are getting VC funding for development…

      • nednobbins@lemm.ee
        1·
        3 months ago

        Haha. Maybe.

        I doubt the VCs will provide much followup funding if they can’t control the code base but weirder things have happened.