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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

#61

Post by ojosilva »

pavlov wrote: post #17

This is the claim in the repo readme that presumably unlocked the VC investment: “TensorZero is used by companies ranging from frontier AI startups to the Fortune 10 and fuels ~1% of global LLM API spend today.” One percent seems like a lot. Anyone on HN use this?

Just tell AI to write your copy and that's what you get, overhype-as-a-service.

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

#62

Post by realsarm »

jdw64 wrote: 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…

I also believe the same. Many VCs are obsessed with moat that they clearly got wrong. To me the value created at app layers are so much that gives them the flexibility to diversify their infra layers. Good harnessed do not depend on a specific model provider or memory layer or etc that when it is taken down like anthropic fable they get no risk exposure. Many even after growing train their own model like what cursor did with composer. There’s many more examples in other verticals like manus, superhuman, fireflies, lovable, replit, cursor, nouswise, cline windsurf and kilo but many are concentrated in coding because again I think VCs have preferred this definition of moat.

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

#63

Post by skeledrew »

ajross wrote: post #48
singpolyma3 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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]

No, there is no social contract here. Microsoft gives free hosting because it's cheap and also provides a path to their paid offerings. People share stuff they work on for fun, to help flesh out their resume, to get help, etc. There's no reason for a maintainer not to drop a project in a heartbeat if it becomes the slightest bit of a burden.

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

#65

Post by api »

yett wrote: post #29
RobotToaster wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

And AI tokens

That would be a lot still. That’s a lot of money.

I’d bet on extreme irresponsibility.

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

#66

Post by Blackthorn »

hoppp wrote: post #6
LeonM wrote: 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]

Sometimes things just fail.

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

#67

Post by rfgplk »

RobotToaster wrote: post #22
LeonM wrote: 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.

$7m actually isn't a whole lot, especially if they hired a (larger) engineering team. Assuming their cali based, that's easily 150-200k per engineer, a team of 20 easily eats through that. Idk the specifics, but I don't the organization was fradulent, it could also be that they're going commercial and no longer want to maintain their oss stack

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

#68

Post by skeledrew »

ajross wrote: post #46
thih9 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

[flagged]

The project is Apache2 licensed. You can literally do anything you want with the code. Stop trying to push guilt on people for no longer providing free services.

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

#69

Post by realsarm »

jnovek wrote: post #38
ajross wrote: 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…

While most startups fail eventually, failure in less than a year with over 7 million dollars is not the expected median. It’s the exact sort of thing that due diligence is supposed to prevent. Also the whole project is open source. If you want, you could take it over.

That's why either VCs confused moat with bot farms and farmed stars over solving genuine problems or they just blindly invested based on founders track record no matter what. To me both are really by product vibe coding hype and chatgpt killing wrappers.

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

#70

Post by dpkirchner »

pqtyw wrote: post #47
jnovek wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's not even clear they spent all the money. Maybe it just wasn't a viable product.
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