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AI OSS tool repo goes archived over night after raising $7.3M Seed

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Re: AI OSS tool repo goes archived over night after raising $7.3M Seed

#42
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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You can call it a bait but where is VCs due diligence for this. Most VCs where out there defending their infra layers investment. Just look at YC batches and see the inflated number of infra startups.

A great way to launder money then?

Re: AI OSS tool repo goes archived over night after raising $7.3M Seed

#43
post #4

The title makes it sound like they just did a seed round, but the seed round was announced in August of last year [0]. Their website landing page is now also showing the software is no longer maintained. No mention of why they made this decision, my best guess is they burned through their seed money and were unable to attract further investments. [0]: https://www.tensorzero.com/blog/tensorzero-raises-7-3m-seed-...

Burning through $7m in 9 months? That's an impressive amount of avocado toast.

Those Claude tokens are not cheap you know /s

Re: AI OSS tool repo goes archived over night after raising $7.3M Seed

#44
post #6
post #4

The title makes it sound like they just did a seed round, but the seed round was announced in August of last year [0]. Their website landing page is now also showing the software is no longer maintained. No mention of why they made this decision, my best guess is they burned through their seed money and were unable to attract further investments. [0]: https://www.tensorzero.com/blog/tensorzero-raises-7-3m-seed-...

[flagged]

Were the thousands of commits and hundreds of feature branches over the last 9 months just to keep up appearances, then? Were the 850 people who forked it in on the scheme, too?

Re: AI OSS tool repo goes archived over night after raising $7.3M Seed

#45
post #36

About one year ago, I created an LLM gateway with metrics, provider fallback and switching, tools support, injecting, etc. etc., and unique features like acting as an MCP tools client and server, all streamed, with low latency. It was a simple project in terms of technical complexity. I didn't publish it as I counted several similar projects in the field. Putting $7.3M into such a project would make sense only in the…

That's literally every project around AI. All the agent sandboxes. Hosting cron jobs that just hit ai rest endpoints for model completions etc

Re: AI OSS tool repo goes archived over night after raising $7.3M Seed

#46
post #26
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Failure" is the expected median though. You can't due-diligence your way out of "startup ran out of runway"! The discussion here isn't about funding, it's that there's a presumptively useful community tool which got abandoned because its owners took their toys and went home when the money ran out (instead of making a sincere effort at transitioning to community governance). That's on the IP owners being selfish jerk…

Which toys exactly were taken? The repo seems open source, is any component missing?

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Re: AI OSS tool repo goes archived over night after raising $7.3M Seed

#47
post #44
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Were the thousands of commits and hundreds of feature branches over the last 9 months just to keep up appearances, then? Were the 850 people who forked it in on the scheme, too?

Well.. if that's it it's not really much to shown for if you spent $7 million on it.

Re: AI OSS tool repo goes archived over night after raising $7.3M Seed

#48
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Failure" is the expected median though. You can't due-diligence your way out of "startup ran out of runway"! The discussion here isn't about funding, it's that there's a presumptively useful community tool which got abandoned because its owners took their toys and went home when the money ran out (instead of making a sincere effort at transitioning to community governance). That's on the IP owners being selfish jerk…

It's not on anyone to set up your favourite "governance" system. If anyone honestly wants to keep maintaining or using it the code is still there.

[flagged]

Re: AI OSS tool repo goes archived over night after raising $7.3M Seed

#49
post #16

VCs think, 'Apps are risky, infrastructure is safe,' so they invested in AI infra. "infra is safe" Hmm, but that wasn't a good idea. because if an open source infrastructure project like TensorZero gets shut down this quickly, won't they start to realize that those investment theories are also risky? The difficult thing about AI infrastructure is that, unlike other industries, it will not become fragmented. It will l…

Infra is perhaps somewhat safe but realistically it's a really low margin capital intense business long-term unless you can lock-in customers with hundreds of services like AWS. So not a lot of space for a huge ROI.

> are all the rage these days

Are they? Overall it seems kind of tame compared to 2020-21 since VCs are somewhat risk average outside of a few outliers. Funding looks much more concentrated these days.

Re: AI OSS tool repo goes archived over night after raising $7.3M Seed

#50
post #26
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Failure" is the expected median though. You can't due-diligence your way out of "startup ran out of runway"! The discussion here isn't about funding, it's that there's a presumptively useful community tool which got abandoned because its owners took their toys and went home when the money ran out (instead of making a sincere effort at transitioning to community governance). That's on the IP owners being selfish jerk…

Which toys exactly were taken? The repo seems open source, is any component missing?

In response to sibling: > It's still open source because you can fork it if you really want

Yes, that's exactly what it means!

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