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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

#161

Post by theendisney »

purple-leafy wrote: post #152
QuantumNomad_ wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I was in university I unsuccessfully attempted to start a company with two other students. We had a small amount of capital from a single investor. We did not pay ourself any salary. We had spent money on incorporating the company and buying a couple of iPads, and not yet spent money on marketing etc. When after a few months we accepted that it wasn’t going to work, our investor got basically all his money back.…

I had a similar thing happen, made a startup when I was 18 and incredibly dumb. Half my money and half an investors. Ended up having to wind it down because it was a stupid idea and I realised quite quickly after spending money on it. Was a small amount of money but a lot for me. Luckily the investor never asked for money back. Wound down my second one too but lost no money. Then came into some money through a softwa…

Education costs time and money.

It would be depressing if your first painting was your best work.

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

#162

Post by asdff »

rfgplk wrote: post #72
jnovek wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The calculus in “buy or build” has shifted for me over the last six months especially. If I can make an agent build it, I get the version that’s tailored for me. > It was a simple project in terms of technical complexity. That’s the thing, though. The version I build for myself sheds all the features that get in my way. I don’t share them either because they’re only useful for me. Perhaps in the future big tech proje…

> The calculus in “buy or build” has shifted for me over the last six months especially. If I can make an agent build it, I get the version that’s tailored for me. I feel like this is really going to change the software industry moving forwards. Historically it was tedious and time consuming to actually develop tailored dev tools which is why so many organizations relied on third party solutions. When nowadays you ca…

>When nowadays you can easily half bake something in a few hours and get it working, tailored _specifically_ to your needs.

The thing is this requires you are given liberty to actually do this yourself. Think of something like say LMS software. Every college in the country is using what either blackboard or canvas. Could they make some bespoke LMS that works great for physics 101 at State university? Absolutely. But they don't, because the course director for physics 101 does not care or have the time to muck around with LMS prototypes. They barely have time to learn how to use their paid for LMS for anything but hosting the slides and syllabus.

So on the one hand, yes, there is massive creative potential for people to roll their own tools. But this is not often met with the required time and liberty to then go on to roll their own tools. Buying off the shelf still serves the organizational need it ever did: defer the creating to "someone else" who has been anointed by marketshare as the thing to do already, so that if shit really hits the fan you can just say you did what anyone would have done in your position. Same function as management consultancy: insulating fallout from bad ideas from the people who could be fired for it and give them essentially an out where they won't get browbeaten over it.

I think our culture around work and responsibility and "free time" needs a revolution for the LLMs to take off as promised as this playdoh tool.

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

#163

Post by james_marks »

gavinray wrote: post #148
altmanaltman wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what do you mean a true "CEO"? Obviously there is a big difference between what someone like Satya Nadella does and what a CEO of a 10-person firm does. In smaller startups, everyone is directly involved and has to punch above their weight to pull through, not just the CEO. Also devoting everything in your life to one thing is not a mark of intelligence or skill. It is a mark of dedication but by itself means little.…

There are personality traits inherent to successful CEO's that are in-born. For example: I cannot imagine being a successful touring live performer. I am an introvert, I keep a rigid schedule so travel throws everything off, can't keep myself awake very late... Could I perform the functions of a live performer? Yes, though no matter how much I "tried" the mismatch between the job and my natural tendencies is a recipe…

> If you think you could step into those shoes, you're either built different or delusional.

Being a bit delusional is a critical quality of some CEOs, so the distinction hardly matters.

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

#164

Post by [deleted] »

sebmellen wrote: post #20
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?

Generally speaking, every YC company post ~2020 is forced to make pathologically false claims to compete in the (fundraising) market.

[deleted]

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

#165

Post by vasco »

gavinray wrote: post #127
GabrielBianconi wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are many factors at play here but if I had to pick one... an open-source company has to find product market fit twice: first for the OSS project and again for a commercial product. The AI market moves very quickly so it's easy to take a step in the wrong direction and fall behind. I might publish a long-form reflection when the dust settles.

It might come off as trite, but I genuinely am sorry that things didn't pan out for you Very early in my career I used to believe that I or anyone else could be a CEO. It wasn't until working with tiny teams where the CEO/founders devoted everything in their life to the business -- often at the expense of hobbies, romantic relationships, and any shred of free time -- that I realized true CEOs are a rare breed. When a…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman

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

#166

Post by gopher_space »

gavinray wrote: post #148
altmanaltman wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what do you mean a true "CEO"? Obviously there is a big difference between what someone like Satya Nadella does and what a CEO of a 10-person firm does. In smaller startups, everyone is directly involved and has to punch above their weight to pull through, not just the CEO. Also devoting everything in your life to one thing is not a mark of intelligence or skill. It is a mark of dedication but by itself means little.…

There are personality traits inherent to successful CEO's that are in-born. For example: I cannot imagine being a successful touring live performer. I am an introvert, I keep a rigid schedule so travel throws everything off, can't keep myself awake very late... Could I perform the functions of a live performer? Yes, though no matter how much I "tried" the mismatch between the job and my natural tendencies is a recipe…

> There are personality traits inherent to successful CEO's that are in-born.

The problem with your point of view is that "Love of cocaine" is one of them, it's near the top, and you'll never acknowledge the fact.

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

#167

Post by agentifysh »

I've forked this and will be updating and fixing issues going forward.

https://github.com/agentify-sh/gateway

For now I will just open this up to see if there is any interest if so I would be spending whatever free time I get to fix issues and open it up to other contributors so we can keep going.

I think its important to have an LLM gateway tool like this to remain open source.

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

#168

Post by aleph_minus_one »

gopher_space wrote: post #166
gavinray wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are personality traits inherent to successful CEO's that are in-born. For example: I cannot imagine being a successful touring live performer. I am an introvert, I keep a rigid schedule so travel throws everything off, can't keep myself awake very late... Could I perform the functions of a live performer? Yes, though no matter how much I "tried" the mismatch between the job and my natural tendencies is a recipe…

> There are personality traits inherent to successful CEO's that are in-born. The problem with your point of view is that "Love of cocaine" is one of them, it's near the top, and you'll never acknowledge the fact.

> > There are personality traits inherent to successful CEO's that are in-born.

> The problem with your point of view is that "Love of cocaine" is one of them, it's near the top, and you'll never acknowledge the fact.

I don't get why one can't easily acknowledge the slightly weaker statement that traits that are inherent to successful CEOs might be positively correlated to being prone to a love for cocaine (which says nothing about any causality).

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

#169

Post by jacobgold »

GabrielBianconi wrote: post #83

I'm the co-founder and CEO of TensorZero. We started the company two and a half years ago, and raised $7.3m in 2024 (announced only almost a year later). We've spent less than half of this amount. Earlier this week we came to the difficult decision to wind down the project. The open-source repository remains available on GitHub (Apache 2.0) but won't be actively maintained by the team moving forward.

Well, that explain things. Good luck on your next thing.

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

#170

Post by iwontberude »

bel8 wrote: post #132
GabrielBianconi wrote: post #83

I'm the co-founder and CEO of TensorZero. We started the company two and a half years ago, and raised $7.3m in 2024 (announced only almost a year later). We've spent less than half of this amount. Earlier this week we came to the difficult decision to wind down the project. The open-source repository remains available on GitHub (Apache 2.0) but won't be actively maintained by the team moving forward.

Hi! First of all, congrats on getting much further than any of us will ever be able to dream. Having a well funded startup is no small feat. Now one question that you probably get a lot and I must ask: why not pivot?

A distilled model for specific domains is both nearly free and commodity. There is no money in AI outsourcing businesses at scale. If anything you are just a cost center that companies want to squish because your value a negated by the amount of effort it takes to evaluate it’s effectiveness.

News like this is reinforcing the narrative that frontier models and AI outsourcing generally is on the way down.

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