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

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

#131

Post by phil21 »

drawkward wrote: post #104
CharlieDigital wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't matter so long as they didn't violate any licenses. Where the product starts and where it ends will be two totally different endpoints that are sure to diverge once they find their domain and business model.

If you are so inept that copying someone else's codebase wholesale is what makes you a viable company, then perhaps you aren't worthy of investing in. Unless, the investor is just trying to fund the most ruthless, least ethical, win-at-all-costs type of people, which as I type this seems like a sad but unsurprising move.

> Unless, the investor is just trying to fund the most ruthless, least ethical, win-at-all-costs type of people

This was probably the hardest realization I came to in business/startup world.

That's precisely what most investors (at least the ones with any large amount of money) look for. They could care less if your product is good, or if you developed it ethically, or if you treat employees or customers well.

Most would invest in the next Oracle and sleep like babies if given the chance to get in early - even if they had a crystal ball to see how badly it will impact the industry and social fabric as a whole down the road 20 years later.

Especially VCs. They exist to make money. Full stop. The rest is marketing fluff for the naive masses.

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

#132

Post by jjmarr »

gyre007 wrote: post #25
hbbio wrote: post #11

The worst part is that instead of backing out and let's say kicking them out of the batch, YC doubled down praising the (pretty poor imho) justification that may also have been written by ChatGPT, like the license :) https://x.com/mwseibel/status/1840846817631879291

I don’t thinks its the worst , but it did feel in bad taste. YC have put money and trust in them, so why would they kick them down? Would you? They haven’t committed any crime so why would they distance themselves (Note: I am not a YC founder or affiliated with YC in any way)

It'd be unethical for YC to kick them out. PearAI signed an agreement with the startup incubator and presumably didn't misrepresent their product. The main criticism is that YC made a bad business decision by backing a non-innovative product. That's an issue that should be handled privately between YC and the founders, not through public humiliation.

If I get hired at a job I expect my boss to (publicly) back me if another team criticizes my work, then tell me the issues in a 1-on-1. If I have investors I expect them to (publicly) back my business strategy and privately tell me their concerns.

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

#133

Post by CharlieDigital »

lolinder wrote: post #103
CharlieDigital wrote: post #68

I've been in the VC-backed startup space as a lead/principal engineer or technical advisor for the last 4 years. In that time, I've worked at 1 startup that closed a $100m C, one that closed a multi-million B, one that recently closed a $30m C, and one that started with a $8m seed. I've started my own startup and worked with founders of other startups on the side advising on the technical side (and once in a while bu…

> bad teams can rarely survive turbulence and it is so hard to tell if a team has the right "vibes" or not. Their apology makes it pretty clear that this team doesn't have the right vibes: "We thought the license in the root repo wasn’t that important, so we just generated one that we thought was open." The license that was generated was the "Pear Enterprise License". These guys thought the license didn't matter so t…

It's very possible that they have the wrong vibes and will fail; this is why any VC is smart to bet on multiple teams, even if many are building very similar products. A good portion of those teams will go nowhere and fall apart by themselves. Even the best VC-partner can't always tell how a teams vibes are from the inside until it's too late.

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

#134

Post by sbarre »

CharlieDigital wrote: post #68

I've been in the VC-backed startup space as a lead/principal engineer or technical advisor for the last 4 years. In that time, I've worked at 1 startup that closed a $100m C, one that closed a multi-million B, one that recently closed a $30m C, and one that started with a $8m seed. I've started my own startup and worked with founders of other startups on the side advising on the technical side (and once in a while bu…

Most of this tracks with what I've seen over the years...

Most VCs invest in teams first, products/ideas second.

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

#135

Post by brendoelfrendo »

CharlieDigital wrote: post #100
kibwen wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It doesn't matter so long as they didn't violate any licenses. It appears that they did violate the license: https://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0.html 4. Redistribution. You may reproduce and distribute copies of the Work or Derivative Works thereof in any medium, with or without modifications, and in Source or Object form, provided that You meet the following conditions: a. You must give any other recipient…

That's a problem to be resolved by their legal counsel and often not even a fatal problem (e.g. work out some licensing agreement). The first job of a startup is to understand how to solve a valuable problem. If the team is solving a valuable problem, they can figure out how they want to navigate even violation of licenses. Everything else can be negotiated.

This is such an obnoxious way to look at operating a business and helps explain why the rest of society finds tech bros to be so insufferable.

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

#136

Post by stroupwaffle »

dewey wrote: post #42
stroupwaffle wrote: post #37

I watched the video promoting Continue.dev and just think to myself, these AI editors don’t actually add much value. EMacs and Treesitter is much faster way to “find all references to X” in the codebase. Other questions can be answered with the naive grep implementation and marginal brain power. If all they’re investing in here is to write boilerplate code, well, that takes not much time in the grand scheme of things…

> Am I missing something? Yes, you are basically posting a modern equivalent of the famous "Dropbox reply". "EMacs and Treesitter...naive grep implementation". There's value in these tools, that's why GitHub, JetBrains, Cursor all built businesses on top of AI coding extensions. Personally I don't use the "Write this full function for me"-features but use it as a way smarter auto-complete. People don't really use the…

JetBrains built a business on top of IDEs long before AI was mainstream.

GitHub built their business on top of Git and collaborative coding. Microsoft (who owns GitHub) built part of their business on Visual Studio (also IDEs) long before AI was mainstream.

So it’s a natural extension to their existing business.

But if you’re selling me on a smarter autocomplete, I can already say from experience that AI can bounce good implementation ideas around, but it ALWAYS takes my intervention to get it right.

I’m happy to pay for an AI service, but I’m not going to pay for an AI service, an AI coding extension, an AI diff util, an AI SCM, and so-forth.

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

#137

Post by kunley »

rickspencer3 wrote: post #66
jazz9k wrote: post #2

This is completely allowed under the apache open source license. I'm not sure why people are so upset about it. If you don't want this to happen, release software under a different licensing model.

In my experience, issues like this occur when people project ethical standards onto projects when those ethical standards are not embedded in the license. In my view, if you believe it is unethical for someone to re-license your Apache code with their own proprietary license, then it shouldn't have an Apache license. Taking a proprietary fork of an Apache licensed code base and creating an Enterprise product around i…

Yes but they don't defend their view about enterprise product, instead saying they "chatgpt'ed" the license and "can't be bothered with legal", which is IMO even worse - I mean, as a founder how can one be so dumb to openly say that? Especially that they have access to YC's legal and administrative support?

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

#138

Post by 0x19129 »

mkesper wrote: post #92
prnak120 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is not that simple. Very few licenses are accepted by, e.g., Linux distributions. If you create your own modified license, for example BSD with two additional clauses that prohibit use for AI training and use in startups without significant modifications then no one will use it. That is the reason why people are forced to release under the extremely permissive licenses and hope for moral behavior by their users. T…

That's simply not free software / open source anymore. First of the four freedoms is "to use for any purpose". https://osssoftware.org/blog/free-and-open-source-software-f... And we absolutely don't need any more licenses to compare against. https://spdx.org/licenses/

That is so according to the OSI definition. But conditions and the level of exploitation have changed, so first steps like the AGPL have emerged.

If the Microsoft-funded OSI does not agree, perhaps we need an OSI-2.0.

You will increasingly find developers that disagree with AI exploitation, so a new institution that is not Microsoft-funded would be welcome. That is how the original OSI started before they purged ESR.

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

#139

Post by tedivm »

CharlieDigital wrote: post #100
kibwen wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It doesn't matter so long as they didn't violate any licenses. It appears that they did violate the license: https://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0.html 4. Redistribution. You may reproduce and distribute copies of the Work or Derivative Works thereof in any medium, with or without modifications, and in Source or Object form, provided that You meet the following conditions: a. You must give any other recipient…

That's a problem to be resolved by their legal counsel and often not even a fatal problem (e.g. work out some licensing agreement). The first job of a startup is to understand how to solve a valuable problem. If the team is solving a valuable problem, they can figure out how they want to navigate even violation of licenses. Everything else can be negotiated.

This mentality, where ethics and morals are ignored, is how we get things like Theranos.

These people stole a project, illegally changed the license, and pretended it was their own. This is basically theft and fraud, and it's kind of disgusting seeing people defend it.

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

#140

Post by ramraj07 »

paxys wrote: post #4

People look at the top 5 YC success stories and think every company they fund is of that standard. In reality they "graduate" 500-1000 startups every year . They aren't all winners. In fact I'd wager Pear AI is a lot closer to the norm in terms of quality and competency than, say, Stripe or Airbnb. If you look at their recent batches there is an endless parade of thin ChatGPT wrappers.

I just read this same comment from you on another post! Talk about cloning your comment in posts about cloning code.
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