YC criticized for backing AI startup that simply cloned another AI startup

YC's decision-making has become very questionable in the past few years, and though it's cliche to say this, it just resembles a textbook fad-chasing VC firm. YC latest batch includes LumenOrbit, a startup building data-center in the space[2]. The idea is not only impractical, it's simply pointless. I am no space scientist, but I could smell the BS just from the mission statement. Amazing that smart guys at YC couldn't.

[1]: https://x.com/AthensResearch/status/1591138491379122176

[2]: https://x.com/ycombinator/status/1831074690384978072

And so I don’t think YC or the startup can really be blamed here for basically just finding an opportunity and capitalizing on it. They’re an investment firm, not a nonprofit out to improve the world.

What bothers me more is the deeper sense that many things which are / were free/public/etc. are now explicitly becoming private products competing in the marketplace, and not public goods. No one seems particularly interested in making public goods anymore, which is the deeper tragedy. And when events like this or the recent WordPress debacle occur, everyone is incentivized to shut their doors and stop making things open and accessible.

One of the biggest areas you can observe this in is the news/journalism. Pretty much all of the better quality sources are behind paywalls now, when they weren’t five or ten years ago. This makes business sense and perhaps it’s the only real way journalism can fund itself in the Internet age, but it also means that information is increasingly not accessible for everyone. Something like Wikipedia probably couldn’t even get started today for this very reason.

I’m not sure what the way out is, other than the traditional model of patronage from rich people. Unfortunately that group seems less and less interested in funding “cultural” things like the arts or open source software, probably because they’re increasingly comprised of technocrats with no interest in culture.

What would really be great for YC or another organization to do, therefore, would be to fund this kind of public good. Unfortunately that goes against everything in the startup zeitgeist.

It appears that they did violate the license:

https://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0.html

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One of my favorite examples here is wire fraud. The rise of electronic communication created all sorts of new possibilities for fraud, but we didn't get the wire fraud statue until 1952. There's a biography of Joseph "The Yellow Kid" Weil, a con man from the 1890s forward, where he crows about many of the things he got away with because of that. A number of the things he did were probably legal before 1952, but that didn't make them moral before and not moral after.