I just quit my 270 000$ job at Coinbase to join the first YCombinator fall batch with my cofounder @not_nang. We’re building PearAI, an open source AI code editor.
Of course it is a cryptobro…
I saw something a few days ago where they were said to have mass-replaced the name of the software with their new name (in the code). Supposedly, little or nothing else changed. Y Combinator used to be better than this, at least I thought they were.
So all it takes to get that sweet, sweet VC mula is a Vscode + extension fork with some hipster branding on top? Really???
Aren’t these guys supposed to be tech geniuses or some shit?
Billions of dollars and they don’t have a single actually knowledgeable intern who could glance at this project and say “yeah, no, I could do this too?”
Or are they’re just ignoring them because AI is a glowing hot buzzword right now?This is baffling. The entire tech sector praises VCs like they’re god’s gift to earth, meanwhile they’re out here backing stupid shit like this, how can anyone take these people seriously?
Aren’t these guys supposed to be tech geniuses or some shit?
Rich/famous tech people have never been “tech geniuses.” They’re always sociopathic business/marketing types.
dawg i chatgpt’d the license […] we busy building rn can’t be bothered with legal
The absolute gall of these guys. Would be inspiring if it wasn’t maddening!
It’s otherwise a fairly well written article but the title is a bit misleading.
In that context, scare quotes usually mean that generative AI was trained on someone’s work and produced something strikingly similar. That’s not what happened here.
This is just regular copyright violations and unethical behavior. The fact that it was an AI company is mostly unrelated to their breaches. The author covers 3 major complaints and only one of them even mentions AI and the complaint isn’t about what the AI did it’s about what was done with the result. As far as I know the APL2.0 itself isn’t copyrighted and nobody cares if you copy or alter the license itself. The problem is that you can’t just remove the APL2.0 from some work it’s attached to.
If they’ve already proven they can steal and lie, of course they’ll get VC money.
AI is a scam, the next one after NFT, crypto…
There are a lot of scams around AI and there’s a lot of very serious science.
While generative AI gets all the attention there are many other fields of AI that you probably use on a regular basis.
The reason we don’t see the rest of the AI iceberg is because it’s mostly interesting when you have enormous amounts of data you want to analyze and that doesn’t apply to regular people. Most of the valuable AIs (as in they’ve been proven to make or save a bunch of money) do stuff like inventory optimization, protein expression simulation, anomaly detection, or classification.
VCs are all scams
Yeah, but I need to know what the one after AI is going to be so I can get in on the ground floor.
Quantum computing. It might be a real thing but it’ll go through a grift phase first.
Another one will be environmental carbon capture, like pulling carbon out of the atmosphere. This one would be easier to fake but might not get traction for longer since the ideological superstructure in our society is already built up so that it is hard for a political crisis to emerge due to global climate concerns. Even though climate change is worsening, and whole cities are being destroyed by hurricanes, the debate is still pretty stabilized. However since this grift will end up being sold as a commercial solution to a political problem, the grift will probably come from a larger player like Lockheed or Boeing, which would necessitate investing in the most evil companies in existence. Still you never know, Tesla stayed afloat for years without making a working product by selling carbon credits issued by the government to other car companies, so you might be able to bootstrap this one
I don’t know if you’re right or if you’re trying to sell me something, but you sound knowledgeable so I’m in. Where do I send my cash?
Lmk if you find out. Maybe something with… lasers?
I simply can’t wrap my head around the thought process behind launching a clusterfuck like this. Y Combinator probably didn’t do their due diligence and simply rode the fading AI Bubble, so I can at least understand how the funding might have been approved.
But actively leaving your $250,000+/year job to team up with some questionable choices to basically fork two OS projects, change the discord links and generate an illegal licence for that shit show, all while proudly stating, publicly, “dawg i chatgpt’d the license, anyone is free to use our app for free for whatever they want. if there’s a problem with the license just lmk i’ll change it. we busy building rn can’t be bothered with legal” when they are made aware of the fact.
This is absolutely insane, sounds like someone was about to get fired and decided to use some personal relations and fresh graduates to somehow successfully cash in one last time with absolutely no regard of even the basics. Pretty wild that those guys even managed to figure out how to found a Startup. Probably asked ChatGPT for instructions there, as well.
Y Combinator probably didn’t do their due diligence
It’s not the first time. They also backed an obvious scam MMO that promised the world and more, while it was nothing more than an asset flip.
I heard that the creator of the MMO had people they knew within ycombinator at the time. I wonder if it’s something similar this time around. Eitherway, it’s not a good look for ycombinator
Is that the MMO where they read Ready Player One and said “Yep, I’m ready to build a mesh peer-to-peer MMO because that means there will be no discernable lag for an infinite number of people, just like in the book”?
The funniest thing here is that they changed the license after the fork. The license was a custom one they wrote using ChatGPT.
Scriptkiddies doing the bare-minimum to profit over other’s hard-work. They’re not going to survive, because they don’t know shit about the internal workings of their product, they won’t be able to scale it quickly, and sooner or later, they’ll run out of money, if it’s not the poor publicity killing their product.
They’re not going to survive
Are you kidding me?
Alexander Bell stole the telephone.
Edison regularly stole inventions from Tesla among others.
Steve Jobs fucking mind raped Woz.
The American Dream is taking someone else’s hard work and profiting off of it.
I’m considering stealing your comment and selling it to the highest bidder. How much ether do you think it would take to knock you out?
No ether needed. All you need is to do this publically.
But they made half a million.
And there are literally hundreds of similar companies raking in billions in investments that magically vanish while the founders live a luxury live and move on.
The real question is: why do VCs shit so much money into obvious frauds? Are they this stupid or do they just hope to pass it on to the greater fool?
$500,000 is nothing to billionaires, or even people who make hundreds of millions a year. It’s a lot to average folks like us, but to them it’s the equivalent of going to the casino with money they can afford to blow.
But I do think you’re right about passing it on to the greater fool. They bet it’ll be the next hot product, regardless if they know it sucks or not. Then some bigger bag of money will come in and buy it up, thinking they’ll be able to somehow milk a sustainable profit out of it. You’d think by now that VCs would be smarter about the boom and bust of tech startups, but alas…
The bigger fool might also be the taxpayer. Oops the company we funded vanished - now we have a $500k loss to write off…
Sadly, I believe you’re correct on that… sigh…
Look at this nobhead flicking Vs like he’s Liam Gallagher.
