This post has already been removed from the front page and my comment was flagged and I guarantee you have shadowbanned me already. Let's be real, you do this all the time Mr. Goebells. Your boys PG and Thiel are traitors who supported J6 and are actively trying to elect Donald Trump and JD Vance.
I've been in the VC-backed startup space as a lead/principal engineer or technical advisor for the last 4 years.
In that time, I've worked at 1 startup that closed a $100m C, one that closed a multi-million B, one that recently closed a $30m C, and one that started with a $8m seed.
I've started my own startup and worked with founders of other startups on the side advising on the technical side (and once in a while building the initial PoCs).
Some have failed, some have succeeded wildly, some have hit their limits of growth, some have a great product that solves an obvious problem yet get zero traction.
Here is a lesson-learned as far as "copying" goes: it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter if there are 3 companies in the same domain doing the same thing; then it simply comes down to insider connections, sales, marketing, and pricing.
In the end, the team that wins isn't always the one with the best product; there is a fair bit of luck and timing, marketing is super important, and having the right leadership team in place makes all the difference. The non-product aspects of a successful business are supremely underappreciated, especially by the technical folks. Bad products can become good products eventually; bad teams can rarely survive turbulence and it is so hard to tell if a team has the right "vibes" or not.
So it makes sense for YC or any VC to bet broadly because the reasons why a team succeeds and another fails is so intangible with so much luck and timing involved as well that making broad bets -- even if two YC-batch companies are very similar in terms of domain and product -- is just sound business.
Edit: to be clear, these are not my principles (no need to attack me personally); these are simply my observations about teams that have succeeded and teams that have floundered. I left 1 company because because in principle, I disagreed with their loose operational style in a regulated space.
The problem here is not that they stole the idea, it's that they literally just took an open-source codebase and filed off the serial numbers to claim it as their own proprietary work, and they did so in the most comically inept way possible.
From the OP:
PearAI offers an AI coding editor. The startup’s founder Duke Pan has openly said that it’s a cloned copy of another AI editor called Continue, which was covered under the Apache open source license. But PearAI made a major misstep: PearAI originally slapped its own made-up closed license on it, called the Pear Enterprise License, which Pan admitted was written by ChatGPT.
> PearAI made a major misstep: PearAI originally slapped its own made-up closed license on it
This is comical but not the core fuck-up: PearAI failed to attribute, thereby violating Community’s license.
It might be salvageable if they can convince customers they aren’t dragging everyone who uses them into a legal morass. But that will likely take more funding, and “help me pay lawyers” isn’t a great pitch.
Good artist copy, great artists steal. PearAI tried and failed to copy. Y Combinator's value-adding play is in striking a licensing and indemnification deal between PearAI and Community. (If Community is smart, they'll demand an arm and a leg. They're owed it.)
There's a really great Radiolab podcast Dealing with Doubt[0] that talks about how high level competitive poker has evolved over the years.
ANNIE DUKE: Sometimes you have to be 40 percent sure. Sometimes you have to be 30 percent sure. You know, if there's $70 in the pot and you only have to call $10, you know, now you're in the 15 percent range in terms of how certain you have to be that your hand is good.
JAD: In that case, you can bet this hand that you're really not sure about knowing that while you might lose this time ...
MIKE PESCA: If I do that a million times in my poker life, the law of high numbers indicates that I'm going to be very much a winner in the long run. It might be the very long run, but you should be ahead in the long run.
ANNIE DUKE: Because it's not—it's not about winning the hand all the time, it's about winning the hand enough of the time.
Any VC is making a bet of the same nature. Because there is some intangible in the team itself, it makes sense for the VC to bet on multiples if they believe that there is a valuable problem to be solved here. Some team(s) will be more successful than others, but it's really difficult to tell at the outset.
YC is putting through 200+ companies per batch and making a tiny investment. It’s far more efficient to swallow the occasional bad bet than to do a lot due diligence… Now the VCs that came in after… that’s another story.
It doesn't matter so long as they didn't violate any licenses.
Where the product starts and where it ends will be two totally different endpoints that are sure to diverge once they find their domain and business model.
If you are so inept that copying someone else's codebase wholesale is what makes you a viable company, then perhaps you aren't worthy of investing in.
Unless, the investor is just trying to fund the most ruthless, least ethical, win-at-all-costs type of people, which as I type this seems like a sad but unsurprising move.
> Unless, the investor is just trying to fund the most ruthless, least ethical, win-at-all-costs type of people
This is exactly what VCs are looking for. They are going to hand you a check worth several hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars. They are not doing this because it's a charity; they are doing this because they are making a bet that they'll get some return on that investment.
This is the purpose of a VC: to deploy capital in a way that is likely to yield the greatest returns for the investors.
From a VC perspective, probably all the better: you've just shortcut a huge phase of R&D and can get right into marketing and sales. As long as there's some viable route to clean up any licensing issues (there almost always is).
You're thinking ethically; without the shrewdness and single-minded focus on profit that VC's have.
Spoken as if there was only one single binary option for investment!
The strategy implies that the marginal value of the lack of ethics/the personality type to do that is the thing thats worth investment. If thats true, then venture capitalism and perhaps capitalism itself is super fucked: a machine for developing and rewarding the worst impulses of humanity.
Investors cheer when Uber, Lyft, and UPS drivers are treated as contractors.
They frown when they try to advocate for more rights, better employment conditions, and better pay.
Such is the nature of modern capitalism.
The Costco's and James Sinegal's of the world are few and rare; I wish we'd see more companies and leadership teams that valued labor and were more ethical. But a survey of the most successful CEO's (Ellison, Zuckerberg, Musk, et al) and companies leads us to believe that such principles are often opposed to the machinations of capitalism.
It's business under the laws, regulations, customs, and choices of American business in 2024.
I say that because, while 'capitalism' is a significant element, many people (not you) justify or rationalize their behavior or the current 'system' by asserting it's a law of human nature or economics, not their choices that yield their behavior and the system, and both can change. It's like criminals who say 'hate the game, not the player'.
Inevitability is a lazy argument for lazy thinkers and irresponsible people (again, to emphasize, the parent didn't make it). It's the corruption of power - they can do what they want, and therefore nobody can compel them to think harder and get better results.
So I think it's essential to draw the distinction.
> (Ellison, Zuckerberg, Musk, et al)
Other than Ellison, even the others didn't act this way a decade ago. Silicon Valley was built by a different ethos - 'don't be evil'. Power corrupts.
At any rate, emergent behaviors can arise from complex systems, and thats exactly what I am alleging of (venture) capitalism at this stage of its evolution. If you have differences of opinion, by all means share them.
The American economic system is and always has been designed explicitly to extract the maximum profit from any venture at any cost.
See: children mangled in factories, minimum wage laws, the oil industry, pretty much every OSHA regulation.
If capitalism were at all capable of recognizing any externalities at all, we wouldn't have to create a vast legal system to protect workers, they would be treated safely and fairly because that is an ethically valuable thing to do.
If capitalism were capable of considering morals, ethics, or even the law in general, we would live in a much better world. However, capitalists regularly dodge taxes while extracring wealth from any natural or human resources that exist. They then simply hoard that wealth. Remember we're living in the worst wealth inequality in this country's history. Global warming caused by the oil industry is wrecking the planet. Amazon warehouse workers get docked pay for using the bathroom and AI companies are pointing cameras at drivers to measure how often they blink.
I have no clue how you can look at the world around you and not see the rampant exploitation and value extraction. The US is in a very bad way because of it. Increased poverty, homelessness, starvation.
Hell, just look at our for-profit medical industry. People regularly go bankrupt due to ludicrous and exploitative price gouging. Tell me how ethical capitalism creates a system where hospitals are owned by private investment firms who squeeze the sick and dying for every cent they have and more.
Capitalism does not, and fundamentally cannot consider ethics. Only profit.
I’ve never looked into it deeply, but as I understand it the opposite is true. I’ve read in passing that statistically the most successful sales people are kind, insightful and find ways to align with their customers best interests. Likewise, I’ve also read in passing that economies with cultures of respect and collaboration far outperform ones that are very competitive.
Maybe someone has more information about those topics that me?
That's why I pointed it out. It's a perfectly legitimate explanation for this type of behavior. (And, imo, abhorrent and where capitalism-as-harnessing-greed really falls apart.)
As for "smart," I assume there are some not well understood externalities to this kind of behavior, such as erosion of trust or other social ills that are hard to quantify until they reach a critical point.
>As for "smart," I assume there are some not well understood externalities to this kind of behavior, such as erosion of trust or other social ills that are hard to quantify until they reach a critical point.
I think the externalities may be hard to quantify but they are well-understood by now (and are things like erosion of trust, which you mentioned).
Just look at the societal attitudes towards Silicon Valley now vs. 25 years ago. VCs complain about how society now so full of negativity towards technology, but they only have themselves to blame for that. They shit the bed, and people got wise.
> Unless, the investor is just trying to fund the most ruthless, least ethical, win-at-all-costs type of people
This was probably the hardest realization I came to in business/startup world.
That's precisely what most investors (at least the ones with any large amount of money) look for. They could care less if your product is good, or if you developed it ethically, or if you treat employees or customers well.
Most would invest in the next Oracle and sleep like babies if given the chance to get in early - even if they had a crystal ball to see how badly it will impact the industry and social fabric as a whole down the road 20 years later.
Especially VCs. They exist to make money. Full stop. The rest is marketing fluff for the naive masses.
Starting off by making an obviously hamfisted move matters. It's a headwind to overcome.
Is it possible to overcome? Sure.
Yes, you can heal after shooting yourself in the foot.
(And, of course, removing attribution is violating licenses). However, they're unlikely to face litigation for this. The possible legal consequences aren't the actual consequences they're likely to face.
I can all but promise you these "headwinds" that they are facing in terms of negative PR are in fact a net positive. At their stage, any press is good press.
AFAICT, the attribution's been there since the beginning on their GitHub? (see: About section)[1].
I agree adding their own license was hamfisted, but honestly, if I'm funding a company I hope they would spend less than <$1 on legal and licensing initially. The first order of business is almost always proving whether your business should even exist.
It's claimed to be accidental, but the entire commit history is full of commits saying "remove cont....." that neuter all references to Continue. They didn't even want the name in the commit history.
> I hope they would spend less than <$1 on legal and licensing initially
They claim that they intended to make the project open source all along. Just keeping the Apache license would have been less time consuming than asking ChatGPT for one, with the added benefit of being a real license.
I mean, whatever floats your boat, but if I'm funding a company, I hope they've spent whatever they need to spend to determine whether or not what they're doing is legal and sensible, even if that involves spending more than $1.
Cloning an open source project and having Chat-GPT write you an enterprise license is not how you "prove whether your business should even exist." It's how you scam rich people into giving you money.
4. Redistribution. You may reproduce and distribute copies of the Work or Derivative Works thereof in any medium, with or without modifications, and in Source or Object form, provided that You meet the following conditions:
a. You must give any other recipients of the Work or Derivative Works a copy of this License;
c. You must retain, in the Source form of any Derivative Works that You distribute, all copyright, patent, trademark, and attribution notices from the Source form of the Work, excluding those notices that do not pertain to any part of the Derivative Works;
That's a problem to be resolved by their legal counsel and often not even a fatal problem (e.g. work out some licensing agreement).
The first job of a startup is to understand how to solve a valuable problem. If the team is solving a valuable problem, they can figure out how they want to navigate even violation of licenses.
Sure. We can break into each other's houses. It's illegal but "that's a problem to be resolved by [our] legal counsel and often not even a fatal problem".
Certainly not because one is important and the other isn't. It's because one is prosecution by the state, and the other isn't, so they have different burdens and different repercussions.
This mentality, where ethics and morals are ignored, is how we get things like Theranos.
These people stole a project, illegally changed the license, and pretended it was their own. This is basically theft and fraud, and it's kind of disgusting seeing people defend it.
There's a reason why big corps don't use copyleft software, if it were as simple as this they would be violating copyleft licenses left and right.
They lose claim to intellectual property rights over their own technology, even the risk (certainty) of a lawsuit over this is enough to kill the company.
And we are not talking about the company being sued for a breach of license. We are talking about this being used in any kind of dispute in court, client didn't pay? They can just allege that whatever they bought wasn't even the property of the startup, so they had no righ to sell it to them, boom good luck collecting your contract payments.
If you are a big company with a lot of business, sure you move on. But a company that is a couple of months old with this liability already? It's doomed.
You've got the wrong impression; I left the startup that closed the $100m C because I didn't agree with some of their practices (or lack thereof).
I'm just sharing my perspective having seen success and failure in the startup space over the last 4 years first hand from teams that have succeeded and teams that have failed.
It doesn't seem to me, by the contrary. They're describing the harsh reality whether one likes it or not. As it's stated about reality in the Cambridge dictionary: "the state of things as they are, rather than as they are imagined to be". But it seems a good idea to rethink how we use the word "success", even if it's "success" at the eyes of many.
I like the story "The Honest Farmer", retold by Ella Lyman Cabot, I found in "The Moral Compass", pg. 262, edited by William J. Bennett, which introduces the story with this: "The dictionary defines integrity as 'an uncompromising adherence to a moral code' and says the word traces its origins to a Latin term meaning 'untouched'. Here is integrity, untouched and unshaken by altered circumstances."
Anyone who uses open source software licensed under Apache 2.0 must include the following in their copy of the code, whether they have modified it or not:
1. The original copyright notice
2. A copy of the license itself
3. If applicable, a statement of any significant changes made to the original code
4. A copy of the NOTICE file with attribution notes (if the original library has one)
[...]
However, you do not need to release the modified code under Apache 2.0. Simply including any modification notifications is enough to comply with the license terms.
The problem is that they took someone else's code, claimed they built it themselves, and then claimed that as evidence for the velocity and capability of their team.
If they had said it's based on X. Or that they're going in a different direction. Or even that they're going in the same direction but will best that other team. Who cares? YC should bet on multiple companies in the same space. It's only logical.
What bothers people is the lie.
Also. They did break the terms of the license. They replaced the Apache license with their own enterprise license. They said they have the rights to relicense the code. Apache requires that they disclose the origin of the code and what modifications they made. And they lied to YC about that, they don't have any of these rights.
It's not sound business to lie to investors. It's not sound business to violate licenses.
Wild take, copying matters. If you have a great idea, and no capital and I copy you and have more capital (money, social), I can deploy my capital to crush you in the market. This very idea that ideas don't matter is hogwash, you can say that idea alone is not enough, but it matters. This is why big companies sometimes get sued by the govt, they copy smaller companies ideas, add it into their already established product for free and stifle growth for the world.
You have almost certainly seen that mechanism in action, even though you don't realize it. The most visible way that it works is through the sale of those patents to patent trolls (usually after the company has nothing left) and the resulting big-money lawsuits against big corporations that ripped them off.
> bad teams can rarely survive turbulence and it is so hard to tell if a team has the right "vibes" or not.
Their apology makes it pretty clear that this team doesn't have the right vibes:
"We thought the license in the root repo wasn’t that important, so we just generated one that we thought was open."
The license that was generated was the "Pear Enterprise License". These guys thought the license didn't matter so their instinct was to ask ChatGPT to generate one that they "thought was open" and they didn't even blink when it generated one with "Enterprise" in the title.
These guys are either dishonest or completely out of their depth.
It's very possible that they have the wrong vibes and will fail; this is why any VC is smart to bet on multiple teams, even if many are building very similar products. A good portion of those teams will go nowhere and fall apart by themselves. Even the best VC-partner can't always tell how a teams vibes are from the inside until it's too late.
Maybe you're right. I'd like to think that "are these the type of people who turn to ChatGPT for completely inappropriate things" would have made it into the VC screening process, but then again "using ChatGPT for completely inappropriate things" is practically a requirement to get funding these days.
Maybe the point isnt to invest in the team with the best ideas, but to invest in the most ruthless/least ethical because thats what the investors believe will win the day?
> a company that clearly showed bad intent and dishonesty in their attitude
You've described most "successful" startups.
FTX, Binance, Uber, etc.
The company I was in that raised a $100m C was in a real mess behind the scenes operating in a highly regulated space (one of the reasons I left; I disagreed with certain practices in principle).
Dang, that many startups in that short period of time, how is that plausible? I say that wholeheartedly considering the time it takes to take something from an idea to a PoC to an MVP. Don’t get me wrong, I know there are plenty of quick slap together projects out there, similar to the one been commented here, they are more like a marketing wrapper of bundles from others people’s work, which is something to be frowned upon… specially if you are technically motivated.
Well, IMHO, when considering a project, knowing that you are solving for a customer demand problem is very different than from a VC minded problem. I personally would never advise or be part of such an “Arrangement.” These are my clear principles, and my success will come or fail, but my integrity will never be questioned.
> Dang, that many startups in that short period of time, how is that plausible?
I joined each at different stages. Some I left after short stints because the vibes were just wrong. Some failed and I could immediately tell that the vibes were off after the first bit of turbulence. I'm still at one of the startups because the vibes are good and we've got a good product and team.
I'd say it matters. Life becomes so much harder if you have to justify why your seed/pre-seed startup has a unique advantage, but you're just ripping off the competition. Maybe you have unique hustle. That's a fairly incredible claim - especially in a crowded space like AI.
I think it's at least a warning klaxon. We're entering this market by copying a competitor (not just in UI/UX, but literally byte-for-byte). How are we going to beat them? How do we ensure the same does not happen to us?
AI-powered coding is such a ridiculously crowded arena. I would be pretty apprehensive. Even if I was dead-set on doing an AI startup, I would still look for a different market.
All good points. Problem is, they didn’t attribute after the copy. And that’s literally all they had to do. Now they stand in violation of that license which I admit I don’t know what that means, but it probably isn’t good. I mean, how do you fuck up piggy-backing off open source? I’ve had many companies piggy back off my own project and it’s whatever, because they attribute to the original codebase. But it’s all whatever. Most these discussions are gonna end up in the trash over the next 5 years anyway as rationalistic machines spread more and more.
>Here is a lesson-learned as far as "copying" goes: it doesn't matter
LOL. Why is the West complaining about China 'copying' their ideas and products? It seems hypocritical. Why are Western companies crying foul about China?
Morality, economy, something about China... Perhaps the most HN comment ever on its face, but also could you unpack either of these points? No worries if not, and I can't even decide which one I would like argued for more! I would hope, (only for the sake of the rationality of your points, please do not turn this into something about political correctness), that you are not opposing the Chinese way to morality itself. For the simple reason that it is a fundamental category error! But perhaps more profound a conceit is connecting morality to the economy. Is not our best advances in economics precisely in step with it's secularization, it's scientific nature which needs not for any old ideas of the individual and her maxims or "moral" nature?
I guess, in your system here, what is this thing, economy, that could be harmed by a "lack of morality"? How do we understand it? Which came first? Why and how could there be this connection? I am far from an expert, but this seems to fly in the face of the whole spectrum of thought in this area, from Smith to Marx to Friedman. But would be very interested to understand it more if you have some literature.
Chinese have an open philosophy on knowledge and by proxy, copying that information and imitation. This goes back to the time of Confucius.
Point being: it is somewhat culturally specific to be "anti-copyright". I use that in quotes because it's not exactly that; it's more like Chinese culture's default is to copy and copyright is a relatively recent legal mechanism.
You've probably got the wrong impression. My own startups have failed partially because I'm so bad at lying -- even small white lies. Mostly my own projects are just open sourced or maintained for free for a small community of passionate users. I've realized I'm great at building software, built terrible at marketing, sales, and extracting capital.
Still, ripping off open-source projects seems plainly scummy, and is a strong signal of a lack of actual product level competence. Hence my difficulty to find anything redeemable about your take.
> Here is a lesson-learned as far as "copying" goes: it doesn't matter.
There is this tendency among a subset of the tech community to look down on copying. I think this is probably coming from more junior people who recently came out of university where plagiarism is punished, or people in academia such as in PhD programs which are trained to highly value originality.
People look at the top 5 YC success stories and think every company they fund is of that standard. In reality they "graduate" 500-1000 startups every year. They aren't all winners. In fact I'd wager Pear AI is a lot closer to the norm in terms of quality and competency than, say, Stripe or Airbnb. If you look at their recent batches there is an endless parade of thin ChatGPT wrappers.
> In reality they "graduate" 500-1000 startups every year.
I think people think otherwise because they used to be more selective, and haven't noticed just how much their volume has grown over the years. Early on it was a few dozen startups per year, then a hundred or so, and eventually the current state of greenlighting almost two startups every day on average (we're 275 days into the year and YC has racked up 509 companies in this years batches so far). They're less of a startup accelerator and more of a startup shotgun at this point.
Harvard admits 2,000 students every year, so it isn't all that different. The reputation is always built/sustained by the outliers rather than the average graduate.
That's still selective compared to the volume of applicants though and the output isn't universally stellar but generally regarded as pretty high. Compared to YC's recent batches with a large number of ChatGPT and other gen AI model wrappers.
Harvard admits 2,000 undergraduates every year, but it's actually a very large school, granting just about 10,000 degrees per year. The annual commencement ceremony in Harvard Yard only goes through the graduates school-by-school; once dismissed all the graduates decamp to school-specific ceremonies all around campus, where they get their names called and walk across the stage to receive the handshake and (empty) envelope. Perhaps more like YC than you think?
It’s game theory. AWS would do the same thing by pitting teams against each other internally. Often times, we would have multiple products doing the same exact thing but slightly differentiated. Of course AWS claims to not deprecate services but they would resource the successful service team and PIP everyone out of the unsuccessful team and bring it back to a skeleton crew. If you wonder why the AWS Product offerings are so F'd and inconsistent it's because of them using management techniques like this.
I’ve never been able to stomach Azure (as much as I like Microsoft’s tools) because it lacks anything like AWS IAM. Without it having actual, pragmatic security let alone simple, cost effective audit documentation seems like so much more of a headache.
This is true for every VC no? And the whole idea behind VCs? They aren't exactly only aiming to fund the startups they think 100% will be successful, as then they wouldn't fund anyone, so instead they spread out the risk to catch any surprise winners.
Does anyone really look at the line-up of funded startups from a VC and think they're all winners?
Yes but there's a difference between a VC investing a billion dollars in one startup and one investing $100K each in a thousand of them. In the first case they will obviously do a ton of due diligence, go over business plans, get board seats, look at code and more. YC on the other hand has a 10-minute chat with the founder and...that's it.
The earlier you invest, the larger the risk and looser the diligence.
> Yes but there's a difference between a VC investing a billion dollars in one startup and one investing $100K each in a thousand of them.
Isn't that just the difference between "seed funding" and "Series-A/B/C/$letter" funding? In the former, you want small amounts spread across as many parties as possible, while in the "Series" funding you do higher amounts but more concentrated, as you have more data to invest more in what you think will be the "winner".
> YC on the other hand has a 10-minute chat with the founder and...that's it.
I don't think that's true, but I've never been through the process myself. I know for a fact that the extensive written application is also part of it, that is reviewed by people before any interview even happens. I'm sure others who actually been through the process can add if anything is missing.
Which part of it do you think is not true? The written application is not extensive at all. It takes maybe 1-hour of focused time. That’s all I had ever spent on the written part of the application and I’ve been interviewed three times as a solo founder. And the interview really is just ten minutes long, though sometimes they go a little over the limit.
For sure- it's just that YC didn't used to operate like that. They have morphed from an interesting higher-touch incubator whose involvement was a strong positive signal into a scattershot VC, but not everyone realizes that so being "YC backed" still carries more prestige than is warranted.
Most VCs try to avoid having the portcos actively compete with each other (ie they won't back 2 separate ride hailing apps) b/c they'll end up competing for the same pool of customers
Correct what exactly? Did they release this as their final product as the first milestone?
From what I gleaned the company has barely started and the founder recently(?) quit his job. They raised money on an idea and forked another project, changed the branding, and used it as the base to build a prototype
That doesn't mean this is the end product that YC invested in.
Lots of companies created MVPs this way before using funding and their new runway of time to do it properly.
If they do release it as the end product with little effort that’s basically fraud
> Also the funding should come with a clause to cover this sort of behaviour
Lol if you’re not aware, they came up with the gold standard in simple seed investment contracts used by nearly every pre-series-a startup in existence. Adding clauses like “don’t fork open source code” is just pointless and cumbersome legal bs that does nothing but get in the way.
What does this do to society when people with no product, no use, and no hope of profit are consistently rewarded with free money? It practically incentivizes bullshit.
Well this just goes to the core of your view on the role of luck in life. Are there 1,000 startups coming out of YC every year and 5 of them are run by geniuses who single handedly disrupt loads of markets. Or are there 1,000 startups coming out of YC every year full of roughly equally good people 5 of which get extremely lucky and make boatloads of money.
Airbnb just forked hotels, Stripe just forked Visa.
The worst part is that instead of backing out and let's say kicking them out of the batch, YC doubled down praising the (pretty poor imho) justification that may also have been written by ChatGPT, like the license :)
I don’t thinks its the worst, but it did feel in bad taste. YC have put money and trust in them, so why would they kick them down? Would you? They haven’t committed any crime so why would they distance themselves (Note: I am not a YC founder or affiliated with YC in any way)
There's a question in a (reasonably) dead reply that I want to resurrect:
> Are we to go out and memorize everyone’s personal framework/religion (cause I can tell I’m not going to) or do you have something else in mind except a dead end question that goes nowhere?
No, what I expect is for people to have thought about their own personal framework.
That said, it's worth at least understanding a bit about other people's frameworks, because a) people have been thinking and writing about these topics for thousands of years, and you just might learn something. And b) you are living in a world with other people, people who are not dummies. If your own moral code is, say, "grab the cash and run", there going to treat you differently.
That's part of why most professional organizations will have codes of ethics. E.g., IEEE has a good one for themselves [1] and another one specifically for software engineers. [2] It's true even in areas where making money is the primary goal, like business and finance.
Take the current article as an example. The PearAI founders have revealed something about their moral code. That will matter down the road. E.g., Whenever I'm hiring somebody I'll look at their resume and flag companies with known ethical problems. Maybe that gets them binned, maybe I ask them about it. And when I've founded something, the ethics of my cofounders has been among my highest criteria. That's true for a lot of founders and execs I know.
They haven't built anything and didn't even bother to properly rename everything in the original repository.
It's clear they are not deserving of YC backing, nor are they trustworthy, as they seem to have misrepresented their involvement in building the software. They're not in crypto anymore :)
> They haven’t committed any crime so why would they distance themselves
There are bad, socially unacceptable things that are also not crimes (for instance: lying in a lot of contexts). Crimes (for the most part) are just the more extreme bad things someone can do.
If you think the bar for distancing from someone is "committing a crime," your bar is far too low. Unfortunately, that minimal bar is a meme that has been pushed with some success by people who want to get away with shady shit.
EDIT: Looks like they have since changed the license to Apache 2.0 but it's still in violation of the original MIT license and does not contain the required copyright notice.
It'd be unethical for YC to kick them out. PearAI signed an agreement with the startup incubator and presumably didn't misrepresent their product. The main criticism is that YC made a bad business decision by backing a non-innovative product. That's an issue that should be handled privately between YC and the founders, not through public humiliation.
If I get hired at a job I expect my boss to (publicly) back me if another team criticizes my work, then tell me the issues in a 1-on-1. If I have investors I expect them to (publicly) back my business strategy and privately tell me their concerns.
"Pear Enterprise License, which Pan admitted was written by ChatGPT."
I hope it's not a new trend: doing some unethical sh*t and justifying that "AI" did that.
I guess handing over creation of a legal document to chatgpt, done in a narrowly selected YC startup which is supposed to be smartest founders around, that's insulting the intelligence of everyone, isn't it?
Edit: forgot to underline: they had all the legal and administrative support of YC yet they gave this task of creating legal document to chatGPT.
How can this be even remotely a norm?
i also think that's why this story sorta went viral, it blended the worst aspects of AI in the tech popular culture by bragging about theft and saying dawg unironically
There's two very separate reasons I find this a bad look for YC.
1. The very cavalier response from the founders about the licensing issue. "dawg I chatgpt'd the license" is not a valid legal defense. Had they immediately owned up to the mistake and said "This was an oversight on our part and we are immediately restoring the content of the Apache license" it would not have been an issue. But Open Source only works if people follow the rules.
2. In general, this is just an indication that YC is not the quality filter it once was. It seems they are more interested in founders online following (the founders are both YouTubers with significant channel sizes) than they are about the business itself.
> 2. In general, this is just an indication that YC is not the quality filter it once was. It seems they are more interested in founders online following (the founders are both YouTubers with significant channel sizes) than they are about the business itself.
I noticed same thing with the latest batches (2019+) where founders sometimes with only a welcome page in the site, an e-mail list, and a blog going to Linkedin and doing a lot of self-promoting to generate steam in the company instead to deliver something good.
This reminds me of another clone that YC backed: Athens Research[1]. Supposedly, open-source alternative to Roam Research. The company barely lasted for two years before shutting down[1]. While it's laudable to create open-source alternative, I always believed copying in such cases should be spiritual, not blatant, where even your name is just a derivative of the original.
YC's decision-making has become very questionable in the past few years, and though it's cliche to say this, it just resembles a textbook fad-chasing VC firm. YC latest batch includes LumenOrbit, a startup building data-center in the space[2]. The idea is not only impractical, it's simply pointless. I am no space scientist, but I could smell the BS just from the mission statement. Amazing that smart guys at YC couldn't.
They initially changed the license to make it appear that they wrote the code, which is outright illegal:
"You must give any other recipients of the Work or Derivative Works a copy of this License; and
You must cause any modified files to carry prominent notices stating that You changed the files; and
You must retain, in the Source form of any Derivative Works that You distribute, all copyright, patent, trademark, and attribution notices from the Source form of the Work, excluding those notices that do not pertain to any part of the Derivative Works;"
> They initially changed the license to make it appear that they wrote the code, which is outright illegal:
The founder was also on Twitter bragging about how they were the "true open source" editor in this space because they already have 100+ open source contributors, when the majority of those were just upstream VS Code contributors whose patches they had merged back into their fork.
1. It may be legally permissible, but it is impolite, to change the license away from the well-known Apache software license towards something which has not been legally vetted, and is in fact generated entirely by AI with minimal oversight.
2. There is an open question of what the supposed value add is here from the Pear team, that could not have been achieved by the people whose work they are co-opting.
3. Without a clear value proposition, the oversight given to projects by YC is called into question. I think this is the point most people are concerned by.
Your first point is not true. If Continue wanted a copyleft license, they would have done so. Continue basically said they are fine with people forking and changing the license
> This is completely allowed under the apache open source license.
Which part?
Removing attribution is definitely not allowed – see section 4 c of the Apache license.
Distributing under a different license might be allowed if the new license is fully compatible with the terms of the Apache license, which would take some amount of lawyering to work out, and is almost certainly not the case with a bunch of gobbledygook generated by ChatGPT.
So the can of worms here now shifts to piracy. Whenever it comes up, a large percentage of people here on HN support it. "you wouldn't have purchased it anyway", "the original authors don't lose anything".
The same can be said about using the Apache license and the service here in question. In fact, the difference is that it's completely legal.
A fair point. But having the internet turn on you before you get any traction is also probably going to be a death-knell for an early stage company. It doesn't bode well for their ability to make or raise money.
I can't think of a more effective way to entrench a oligopoly: small companies get screwed because if they use open source the way the big girls do they get cancelled, and they can't get big because they can't use open source the way the big girls do.
And I think those conversations are worth listening to. Do we want a society where people release a lot of open-source code? Or do we want one where people get tired of doing free labor for greedy jerks, and so stop releasing things openly?
Civilization runs on politeness and other things that flow not from our current laws but from respect for others. We ignore that at our peril.
As long as we're nit-picking, we're talking about the Apache license.
But my point isn't about the specific license. It's about one set of people very generously doing lots of labor and publishing the result in hopes of making the world a little better. And then some other people exploiting that for personal gain with no regard for the first group.
That's a social dynamic that's at the heart of IP laws. For example, Gutenberg enabled the creation of the publishing industry. Pirate book publishers saw a way to make some money by exploiting the labor of authors and original publishers for their own gain. That moral problem is why copyright was considered important enough to put into the constitution. [1]
Focusing on the specific text of a specific license is missing the point. Both my point and the point of this article, which is why YC is taking heat for backing these guys.
>That's a social dynamic that's at the heart of IP laws. Pirate book publishers saw a way to make some money by exploiting the labor of authors and original publishers for their own gain.
This is a _gross_ misunderstanding of what publishing was like in the first few centuries of the printing press.
Copyright laws originated as a form of government censorship and control over the printing press in 15th-16th century Europe. Governments and religious authorities sought to regulate the spread of information by granting exclusive printing privileges to select printers. This allowed them to censor and control what content was published.
It was only when the people who were censored won that copyright was invented to keep them from killing everyone involved.
I never claimed that I was reporting on the whole arc of publishing law over hundreds of years. I was laying the foundation for the next sentence, which is pointing at why this was so important to put in the US Constitution. The relevant text being, "[The Congress shall have Power . . . ] To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries." Which is pretty clearly about balancing the economic interests of authors and inventors against the public good. Which is indeed at the heart of modern IP laws.
That's twice now that you've replied in a way that to me seems like favoring the argumentative nitpick over the substance of what I'm saying. If I don't reply after this, it'll be because I feel like there's not much point in writing for somebody who I can't get through to.
>I never claimed that I was reporting on the whole arc of publishing law over hundreds of years. I was laying the foundation for the next sentence, which is pointing at why this was so important to put in the US Constitution.
Printed press invented: circa 1440
US Constitution drafted: circa 1780
1780 - 1440 = 340
>hundreds of years
Hmmm.
>That's twice now that you've replied in a way that to me seems like favoring the argumentative nitpick over the substance of what I'm saying.
If your argument is based on false premises then there is no substance in your conclusion.
Not being polite will get you yelled at, as is happening right now, and should not be surprising. Legally there may be nothing and they are welcome to ruin their reputation and suffer the consequences.
I find it baffling in conversations I keep having with people that someone thinks that because something is legally permissible, then it is acceptable. It's the same vein of when people cry "free speech" when they said something reprehensible, as if that somehow should protect them from how people react to their horrible statements.
I think what is driving this is one the of the fundamental problems with the tech industry and its relationship to society: the ingraining of the assumption that because something is legal to do means it is OK to do. They are not and I think there should be more outrage when something like this tries to slide by.
Had me in the first half. If free speech is only strict legal protection with no cultural backing then you still can’t reasonably express contrary views and it’s worthless.
So the fact that it is culturally taboo to, say, use racial obscenities in public discourse (not directed at any particular person) means you think the first amendment is worthless? Because that's a deeply hamfisted belief but is in fact, the world we live in.
This sounds like a bunch of unwritten rules that only apply to the poor. Anyone who can ignore people yelling at them from their yacht in international waters is perfectly fine.
I guess random lynchings are a way to pass the time when you are completely powerless by choice.
It is not that simple. Very few licenses are accepted by, e.g., Linux distributions. If you create your own modified license, for example BSD with two additional clauses that prohibit use for AI training and use in startups without significant modifications then no one will use it.
That is the reason why people are forced to release under the extremely permissive licenses and hope for moral behavior by their users.
That is the reason why the smug response "You allowed me to do this" isn't sufficient.
That is so according to the OSI definition. But conditions and the level of exploitation have changed, so first steps like the AGPL have emerged.
If the Microsoft-funded OSI does not agree, perhaps we need an OSI-2.0.
You will increasingly find developers that disagree with AI exploitation, so a new institution that is not Microsoft-funded would be welcome. That is how the original OSI started before they purged ESR.
Sorry but software licensed under AGPL absolutely can be used for every purpose. It's just that you have to share the (modified) code with your users if they access the software via the network. https://www.fsf.org/bulletin/2021/fall/the-fundamentals-of-t...
> That is the reason why people are forced to release under the extremely permissive licenses and hope for moral behavior by their users.
No one is forcing you to release source code under permissive licenses. You're literally saying that you're doing it because you want more users. Congratulations on your imaginary internet points.
Meanwhile Bezos is very much making non-imaginary money off your work.
In my experience, issues like this occur when people project ethical standards onto projects when those ethical standards are not embedded in the license.
In my view, if you believe it is unethical for someone to re-license your Apache code with their own proprietary license, then it shouldn't have an Apache license.
Taking a proprietary fork of an Apache licensed code base and creating an Enterprise product around it seems like a valid business move to me. My guess is that the "uproar" is not coming from the original project creators, but from outside community members who consider such things "anti-social" or whatnot, but I could be wrong.
Yes but they don't defend their view about enterprise product, instead saying they "chatgpt'ed" the license and "can't be bothered with legal", which is IMO even worse - I mean, as a founder how can one be so dumb to openly say that? Especially that they have access to YC's legal and administrative support?
> if you believe it is unethical for someone to re-license your Apache code with their own proprietary license, then it shouldn't have an Apache license.
It's not just unethical, it is clearly illegal.
If you don't own the copyright to a program's source code, you cannot legally relicense that source code! Same holds true for any other copyrightable creative work which can be licensed. This is a very clear case of copyright infringement.
Nothing in the Apache license permits the licensee to relicense the source code (meaning, entirely replace the license with a different one).
It does permit you to build derivative enterprise products, and you have no obligation to keep the source code open for derivative products. But if you do release the source code for your derivative product, any original unmodified Apache licensed portion of the code retains that license and you cannot remove it if you aren't the copyright holder for that original work.
It's like someone taking all the money from the 'take a penny, leave a penny' jar, or taking all the books from a little free library, or not putting their shopping cart in the cart return area.
A completely legal violation of the social contract. Or in layman's terms, a dick move.
> This is completely allowed under the apache open source license. I'm not sure why people are so upset about it.
AFAIK, people are not upset about the forking, but everything surrounding the forking, the actual business they "created" and the LLM-generated license.
Otherwise I agree, would be very strange if someone publishes a FOSS project, someone forks it and people get outraged. But I guess wouldn't be the weirdest things social media folks been upset about in the end...
1. I disagree
2. How is it not ethical or moral? As stated above, you are allowed to resell software based on the Apache license and integrate it into a service. The original authors haven't lost anything.
You are confusing legality and morality. Legality can be an indicator of morality, in that laws tend to flow out of our moral senses. But legality is a lagging indicator, and new circumstances tend to create gaps where things are legal but not moral.
One of my favorite examples here is wire fraud. The rise of electronic communication created all sorts of new possibilities for fraud, but we didn't get the wire fraud statue until 1952. There's a biography of Joseph "The Yellow Kid" Weil, a con man from the 1890s forward, where he crows about many of the things he got away with because of that. A number of the things he did were probably legal before 1952, but that didn't make them moral before and not moral after.
If you get a traffic ticket, you can pay a lawyer to get it knocked down to a non-moving violation, thus saving your insurance rates from spiking. This is 100% legal, but is it ethical? The other poor saps in the court haven’t lost anything, it’s not zero-sum. And yet, it somehow feels dirty to be able to wash your hands of a crime by dint of having money.
They didn't just "resell" and "integrate" this source code. Rather, they attempted to re-license it, despite not being the copyright holder in the first place. They have no legal right to remove or replace the original license.
They can build derivative works, and apply a new additional license on top, assuming the additional license is compatible with the original one, and the original one is retained for any unmodified portion of the original work. But they cannot legally remove the original license entirely, nor remove copyright/attribution from any code that they did not write.
Think about this more deeply: if permissive licenses allowed you to replace the license entirely at will with no restrictions, that would effectively mean the work is in the public domain. There would be no purpose to having any license text at all, if these licenses could be trivially removed and violated at will.
A startup repackaging an open source project and selling it as a paid service doesn't "reflect poorly" on whoever is funding them. In fact it will be touted as a massive success story.
I think it's bad not just from a social perspective (because exploitation acts to diminish the amount of open code) but from an investor one. Forking a repo, committing IP crimes, and then doing some marketing jazz hands is not obviously the foundation for a successful IPO in 5 or 10 years. Indeed, for me it'd be the opposite; I'd call it a sign these founders don't have the depth to go the distance.
It's also brand damage for YC among the more thoughtful sort of founder, which at least used to be an important concern to YC. At 1000 startups a year, though, maybe they've just decided that there's a bubble, and in a bubble it doesn't make financial sense to care about things like quality or longevity. You just shovel out whatever people are buying and worry about consequences later.
Forking is not the issue. The real issue is the (mis-)presentation of the additional work and value they bring to the fork. Based on the code commits in the two repos it is minimal if anything at all, while they clearly claimed they have 100 contributors which is totally false.
"PearAI offers an AI coding editor. The startup’s founder Duke Pan has openly said that it’s a cloned copy of another AI editor called Continue, which was covered under the Apache open source license. But PearAI made a major misstep: PearAI originally slapped its own made-up closed license on it, called the Pear Enterprise License, which Pan admitted was written by ChatGPT."
It looks like someone created the following prompt: "Chat GPT write some parody story about current state of startups/VC state in 2024".
I can tell just from looking at most recent YC founders that they're not hackers.
I could be wrong of course. I'm probably wrong. Maybe these people who are attractive, care about popular fashion and becoming popular on tweeter are actually just as capable hackers as all the hackers I actually know (none of whom care about those things). I admit YC probably knows better than me.
But if I'm not wrong, and these people really aren't hackers, it means YC has decided that normies > hackers when it comes to YC. I really don't predict that's going to end well for YC.
I mean, obviously it's a numbers game. There are only so many hackers, but there are a lot of Ivy League people and FANG people. So YC chose to open their gates. Whether this will be a profitable decision is an open question.
Just the first one to be so bold. This happens in every batch AFAIK. YC continually invests in competing companies, sometimes back-to-back batches and sometimes in the same batch.
The article missed another huge aspect. The founder falsely claimed PearAI had "100+ contributors"[0]. Those contributions were to the original repo not to theirs.
Combine this with their other actions and it really looks like they're scammers. Garry Tan's downplaying denial remarks make it look to me like they're trying to save face at YC - since it looks like they've been duped.
Why do you have to clone the thing when we have super powerful LLMs now? Aren't they supposed to make us all 10x devs and also extremely good with business? At the very least, isn't your chatbot supposed to give you good and new ideas? Because thats why you are selling it?
> OHIO @parenth_: You illegally relicensed Pear to an enterprise, non open source license called "Pear Enterprise Edition (EE) license" even though Continue is Apache 2.0. Your project violates multiple terms in the Apache license. @continuedev you should sue these clowns.
> FRYING PAN & @CodeFryingPan: 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 Imk i'll change it. we busy building rn can't be bothered with legal
Please point to the license provision that permits you to completely remove the license and replace it with a different one.
I'll save you time: there isn't one. Nor would that ever make sense in any license, because broadly granting that right in a license would completely defeat the purpose of having any license terms at all.
lol maybe verify your claim before using such a snarky, arrogant tone
"You may add Your own copyright statement to Your modifications and may provide additional or different license terms and conditions for use, reproduction, or distribution of Your modifications, or for any such Derivative Works as a whole, provided Your use, reproduction, and distribution of the Work otherwise complies with the conditions stated in this License."
to be clear, Apache 2.0 requires you to give a copy of the license in a derivative, but does not require you to apply Apache 2.0 to a derivative. the term you are probably looking for is copyleft, which Apache 2.0 definitely does not have
I'm well-versed in the terms of Apache 2.0. You are misinterpreting them. The key clause here is that last one: provided Your use, reproduction, and distribution of the Work otherwise complies with the conditions stated in this License.
The entire parts of the code base you didn't modify are still copyrighted by their original authors, and are still subject to the Apache 2.0 license. This is why big tech companies make third-party open source contributors agree to CLAs; without that, they would be unable to relicense the work in the future (among other reasons).
In general, even with a permissive license, you can't just fork a project, make a trivial one-line change, call it a derivative work, and replace the license on the unmodified portions of the code base with an entirely different one. If that was the case, there would be no purpose whatsoever to having any license restrictions at all, because that loop-hole would allow anyone to trivially remove the license restrictions at will.
You can reproduce and distribute. That isn't even remotely the same as saying you can sub-license or re-license code that you don't own the copyright on.
Source code is generally copyrighted by its author (or the author's employer, in the case of work for hire). If you wish to use, reproduce, or distribute code that you don't own the copyright of, you need a license to do so, and you must follow the terms of the license.
If you include that work in your own derivative work, and you choose to make your derivative work be open source (which is entirely optional with permissive licenses), then for any unmodified portions of the code you must comply with the original license. This is because you are inherently reproducing and distributing copyrighted source code that you didn't write and don't hold the copyright for. You have no ability to change the license on that unmodified code, as you aren't the copyright holder, the license does not grant you ownership, and you must continue to comply with the original license terms to include that code in your open source repo at all.
"it’s a cloned copy of another AI editor called Continue, which was covered under the Apache open source license Apache open source license. But PearAI made a major misstep: PearAI originally slapped its own made-up closed license on it, called the Pear Enterprise License, which Pan admitted was written by ChatGPT."
I have been surprised recently how many competing companies YC have founded recently. I know VCs do this all the time but I still find it a bit strange - not sure how I would’ve felt if the same fund backed my competitor. That said, YC have always said that they were backing founders not ideas so …
I can state the fact that the favorite of PG and one of the top-8 worst social founders of YC, Amassad, resold the idea of my startup to Google, pretending to be an investor. But he is not a real investor, as he invested in a copy of my project, which I had been developing since 2012.
In 2020, during the pandemic, I found myself without any protection. I was robbed, and my Upwork account was even destroyed. I didn’t have enough money for food. I asked for help with my project in a remote accelerator where Amassad was a judge. I presented my project and expected a constructive conversation. But then I saw that Amassad immediately created copies of it within his network with his team. This had already happened with the YC startup Sixa, which was a copy of my post from a Ukrainian forum, and I mentioned this directly in my YC application. It was ignored and later the founder of Sixa disappeared with $7M (including money from Ukrainian investors) and he’s still being searched for. I think he was either killed or managed to deceive everyone and disappear.
I believe there is a crisis of honesty and technological integrity at YC now, as there’s a huge demand for managers and actors. YC feels like a massive megamarket where all the managers trade technologies like at a Chinese microelectronics market only with better PR and networking.
Unpunished evil always comes back. But it’s unclear how it can be punished in YC when all that matters is money and there’s no room for accountability in investments. When there are fake projects, 20% management errors from irresponsibility, and people whose success is measured by how many enemies they have, how can justice prevail? In Amassad’s home country of Pakistan, which he left for America, a supermarket was looted in 4 hours after opening. He would be better off helping his country than stealing projects from Ukrainian founders.
I think for PG, Amassad may be bitch, but he's our bitch.. the world is run by hackers. I hope we live to see the next version of the Matrix, rather than see this one destroyed. AI can helps? no, no, AI can't helps if we don't change ourselves
We recently applied to the current YC batch and got rejected. Seeing this just made me die a little inside.
We are a small SaaS that has very happy paying customers and a huge market. We solve a boring problem, with boring technologies and we are not the next OpenAI or Stripe. Yet we have easily a 10,000 X potential.
I feel like YC now prioritizes funding things that can be hyped more instead of actually funding things that can be solid software businesses.
Your profile mentions something with Blockchain? I'm not too sure, but are there any use cases except for Bitcoin stuff? From the solutions I heard there are offen more practicable solutions available compared to using Blockchain tech.
Are there any areas where an AI startup can actually make an impact? All I've seen is either billion+ funded foundational models, or thin GPT wrappers - all with the same probability of being default alive.
Isn't this how open-source works. Sure it sucks. However creators can pick a different license, like AGPL, if they don't want something like this to happen.
I saw someone on x/twitter post this:
Neovim is a fork of Vim which is a fork of Vi.
They were pretty clear in their repo that they were forked from Continue. I get that they were rather lackadaisical about the licensing, but that's kind of their brand, and they since apologized.
It's amusing to see some comments downplaying the significance of 'copying.' Apparently, it only becomes a concern when Chinese companies replicate Western products and ideas. Perhaps it's time to stop crying about Chinese clones.
Do we have public sources on YC’s recent returns, e.g. on its ‘20 or ‘23?
Pitchbook shows -16% IRR for YCCG21 (TVPI .73x, -1810 bps on benchmark) and -5% for ESP22 (TVPI .93x, +25 bps on benchmark). But those were notoriously difficult vintages.
It’s not surprising that this happens when plagiarism and theft are foundational parts of the machine learning ethos. It is literally built into the ideology being bandied about at these places.
I watched the video promoting Continue.dev and just think to myself, these AI editors don’t actually add much value.
EMacs and Treesitter is much faster way to “find all references to X” in the codebase. Other questions can be answered with the naive grep implementation and marginal brain power.
If all they’re investing in here is to write boilerplate code, well, that takes not much time in the grand scheme of things. Where the value add is actually in the design phase. And, as a result of these tools people are going to just skip those crucial steps.
Yes, you are basically posting a modern equivalent of the famous "Dropbox reply". "EMacs and Treesitter...naive grep implementation".
There's value in these tools, that's why GitHub, JetBrains, Cursor all built businesses on top of AI coding extensions. Personally I don't use the "Write this full function for me"-features but use it as a way smarter auto-complete. People don't really use them to jump to "find all references to X" as that's perfectly well solved.
I don’t think expecting someone to know how to set up an editor (or not; there are plenty of turnkey distros like LazyVim) or knowing how to use the most basic of *nix tools is on par with the Dropbox reply.
> there’s value in these tools, that’s why… all built businesses on top of AI
Or is it because those companies realized they would rapidly lose market share if they didn’t? You don’t have to add value to become popular, you just have to make people think they’re missing out. Eventually your house of cards might come crashing down, but in the meantime, you’ve successfully enriched yourself. If you have a competing product that is technically equal or superior, it can be maddening to see the popular kid surpassing you without merit.
Nothing in the company I work for got adopted as fast as GitHub Copilot. I think it provides value for myself too. So saying that it doesn't provide value is definitely wrong, and I was skeptical at first too.
JetBrains built a business on top of IDEs long before AI was mainstream.
GitHub built their business on top of Git and collaborative coding. Microsoft (who owns GitHub) built part of their business on Visual Studio (also IDEs) long before AI was mainstream.
So it’s a natural extension to their existing business.
But if you’re selling me on a smarter autocomplete, I can already say from experience that AI can bounce good implementation ideas around, but it ALWAYS takes my intervention to get it right.
I’m happy to pay for an AI service, but I’m not going to pay for an AI service, an AI coding extension, an AI diff util, an AI SCM, and so-forth.
I ve tried to use these editors. I tried using copilot and gemini... They all hinder me more than help. And yet I use chatgpt few hours per day copy/pasting my code between my editor and a browser and it makes me massively more productive.
Why? Because all these editors/add ons overwhelm the model with useless context while at the same time lack actual guidance of a proper prompt. They are all follies giving people false hope they can have stuff "happen" without any skill involved.
This is the standard low effort "here's a collection of random comments from X/Reddit" news article. There is no real substance, and this whole thing will blow over in a week as all the terminally online people move on to the next thing to get outraged about.
I guess this is "enshittification all the way down!". Surely, YC made a mistake but not having a more thorough review. But I believe the phenomenon is even more widespread, we'll fixate on this one. Meanwhile, plenty of VCs are being scammed by kids. Can't blame them, really... Who's hiring? AI filtering out resumés, and so on.
Sorry for coming up too cynical, but we are going through crazy times. Hopefully it will stabilize soon... ~~AI~~ LLMs can't really reason. But the public (layman, managers, and big fish) are being deceived because billions of dollars were burnt ;/
Prediction: as technology becomes more “mundane” and infiltrates more aspects of life, explicitly copying another business model or business idea itself will increasingly become normalized, even expected. Nowadays this tactic gets a bad name, but in the wider world of business, it’s pretty common to take an idea from one place and sell it elsewhere, or take something that is free and sell it for money. There are a million and one Italian restaurants, but no one gets criticized for opening yet another one (except as a poor business decision.)
And so I don’t think YC or the startup can really be blamed here for basically just finding an opportunity and capitalizing on it. They’re an investment firm, not a nonprofit out to improve the world.
What bothers me more is the deeper sense that many things which are / were free/public/etc. are now explicitly becoming private products competing in the marketplace, and not public goods. No one seems particularly interested in making public goods anymore, which is the deeper tragedy. And when events like this or the recent WordPress debacle occur, everyone is incentivized to shut their doors and stop making things open and accessible.
One of the biggest areas you can observe this in is the news/journalism. Pretty much all of the better quality sources are behind paywalls now, when they weren’t five or ten years ago. This makes business sense and perhaps it’s the only real way journalism can fund itself in the Internet age, but it also means that information is increasingly not accessible for everyone. Something like Wikipedia probably couldn’t even get started today for this very reason.
I’m not sure what the way out is, other than the traditional model of patronage from rich people. Unfortunately that group seems less and less interested in funding “cultural” things like the arts or open source software, probably because they’re increasingly comprised of technocrats with no interest in culture.
What would really be great for YC or another organization to do, therefore, would be to fund this kind of public good. Unfortunately that goes against everything in the startup zeitgeist.
I mean most of the "AI" companies are all about copying everyone else's intellectual property, why not just start copying companies wholesale? That seems like real bigbrain time.
Looking through the comments there are a number of people here who are determined to defend the company’s lousy morals. They are missing the point. What the company did was not just shady, it a lousy business proposition all round.
If defending entrepreneurs with questionable ethics is your thing, go back to defending AirBnB, Uber and WeWork. At least those firms had a strategy and made their founders rich. This thing is a dead man walking.
Everything is getting en-shittified, even YC itself.
This has been a trend for my cohort of college graduates. Graduated right in time for a housing crisis, inflation, layoffs, etc. Can't help but feel at least a little bitter about folks who pulled the ladder up behind them.
What generation are you? I'm an early millennial and even back then we were talking about this, how the boomers left us a dying world and a crumbling society. Then my generation failed to do anything about it, and everything only got worse. I am terrified for Gen Z and Alpha who have to come into this mess. I fear their kids, if they choose to have them, will be even worse off.
Pear AI founder: We made two big mistakes - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41701265 - Sept 2024 (188 comments)
Y Combinator Traded Prestige for Growth - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41697032 - Sept 2024 (240 comments)
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