Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Astral to Join OpenAI

astral.sh

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

331–340 of 951 posts

Re: Astral to Join OpenAI

#331

Post by woodruffw »

throwaway63467 wrote: post #194
NiloCK wrote: post #67

A concern: More and more plainly, OpenAI and Anthropic are making plays to own (and lease) the "means of production" in software. OK - I'm a pretty happy renter right now. As they gobble up previously open software stacks, how viable is it that these stacks remain open? It seems perfectly sensible to me that these providers and their users alike have an interest in further centralizing the dev lifecycle - eg, if Clau…

It’s a small tool shop building a tiny part of the Python ecosystem, let’s not overstate their importance. They burned through their VC money and needed an exit and CLI tool chains are hyped now for LLMs, but this mostly sounds like an acquihire to me. Dev tools are among the hardest things to monetize with very few real winners, so good for them to get a good exit.

As a point of information: Astral did not, in fact, burn through its VC money. I agree that dev tools are difficult to monetize, though.

(Source: I'm an Astral employee.)

Re: Astral to Join OpenAI

#332

Post by vlovich123 »

butlike wrote: post #259
captainbland wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the issue is that LLMs are a cash problem as much as they are a technical problem. Consumer hardware architectures are still pretty unfriendly to running models which are actually competitive to useful models so if you want to even do inference on a model that's going to reliably give you decent results you're basically in enterprise territory. Unless you want to do it really slowly. The issue that I see is t…

You got me thinking that what's going to happen is some GPU maker is going to offer a subsidized GPU (or RAM stick, or ...whatever) if the GPU can do calculations while your computer is idle, not unlike Folding@home. This way, the company can use the distributed fleet of customer computers to do large computations, while the customer gets a reasonably priced GPU again.

The kinds of GPUs that are in use in enterprise are 30-40k and require a ~10KW system. The challenge with lower power cards is that 30 1k cards are not as powerful, especially since usually you have a few of the enterprise cards in a single unit that can be joined efficiently via high bandwidth link. But even if someone else is paying the utility bill, what happens when the person you gave the card to just doesn’t run the software? Good luck getting your GPU back.

Re: Astral to Join OpenAI

#333

Post by incognito124 »

Bnjoroge wrote: post #203

This was pretty obvious to just about anyone tbh. FastAPI is probably next

I thought some more about it, and unfortunately it makes sense. IIRC there were several "insider" blogposts from OpenAI that said something along the lines of "Yeah almost every service we write is FastAPI"

Re: Astral to Join OpenAI

#334

Post by everforward »

skydhash wrote: post #305
everforward wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is more about `ruff` than `uv`. Linting is all about parsing the code into something machines can analyze, which to me feels like something that could potentially be useful for AI in a similar way to JetBrains writing their own language parsers to make "find and replace" work sanely and what not. I'm sort of wondering if they're going to try to make a coding LLM that operates on an AST rather than text,…

Writing a parser is not that much of work to buy a company in order to do it. Piggybacking on LSP servers and treesitter would be more efficient.

Writing a literal parser isn’t too hard (and there’s presumably an existing one in the source code for the language).

Writing something that understands all the methods that come in a Django model goes way beyond parsing the code, and is a genuine struggle in language where you can’t execute the code without worrying about side effects like Python.

Ty should give them a base for that where the model is able to see things that aren’t literally in the code and aren’t in the training data (eg an internal version of something like SQLAlchemy).

Re: Astral to Join OpenAI

#336

Post by cozzyd »

ainch wrote: post #165
huqedato wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMO, they are buying business just to put them down later to avoid potential competition. The recipe is not new, it has been practiced by Google/Microsoft for many years.

What competition was OpenAI likely to face from a team working on fast Python tooling?

   $ uv install claude-agent-sdk 
   I'm sorry Dave, I can't do that

Re: Astral to Join OpenAI

#338

Post by gritspants »

seanplusplus wrote: post #316

I'm into this. Anthropic acquiring Bun, now OpenAI acquiring Astral. Both show the big labs recognize that great AI coding tools require great developer tooling, and they are willing to pay for it rather than build inferior alternatives. Good outcome for the teams. Not exactly a great look for the "AGI is right around the corner" crowd — if the labs had it, they would not need to buy software from humans.

I'm assuming that they were buying great Rust devs (given codex is written in it).

Re: Astral to Join OpenAI

#339

Post by Kwpolska »

pennomi wrote: post #263
jedahan wrote: post #35

great for astral, sucks for uv. was nice to have sane tooling at least for a few years, thanks for the gift.

Time for the PSF to consider something inspired by uv as a native solution.

The core-adjacent people have completely failed to produce reasonable packaging tools for decades, why would you want another new tool from them?
Post reply on HN