this post was submitted on 02 Oct 2024
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[–] Metz@lemmy.world 122 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

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...

dawgt 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

Yep, already hate that guy. Talks and behaves like an absolute dipshit.

[–] loutr@sh.itjust.works 50 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

I read your comment before the article and I thought you had made the second quote up lol, unbelievable. And people are throwing money at these guys?

[–] Corkyskog@sh.itjust.works 16 points 1 month ago (2 children)

Sam Bankman Fried looks and talks like half of the people I know who failed out of college, and people trusted him with billions.

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[–] bestboyfriendintheworld@sh.itjust.works 113 points 1 month ago (1 children)

The funniest thing here is that they changed the license after the fork. The license was a custom one they wrote using ChatGPT.

[–] LiveLM@lemmy.zip 85 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (4 children)

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?

[–] grue@lemmy.world 85 points 1 month ago

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.

[–] LiveLM@lemmy.zip 23 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

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!

[–] FrederikNJS@lemm.ee 4 points 1 month ago

Dunning-Kruger is a hell of a drug...

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[–] Emotet@slrpnk.net 82 points 1 month ago (1 children)

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.

[–] rtxn@lemmy.world 56 points 1 month ago (1 children)

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.

[–] menixator@lemmy.dbzer0.com 33 points 1 month ago (1 children)

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

[–] TexasDrunk@lemmy.world 16 points 1 month ago (1 children)

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"?

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[–] dinckelman@lemmy.world 77 points 1 month ago (3 children)

I genuinely just don't understand what's going on in the tech sector anymore

[–] GreenKnight23@lemmy.world 39 points 1 month ago (1 children)
[–] Duamerthrax@lemmy.world 28 points 1 month ago

Feels like the dotcom era all over again, but they're better at stringing the scam along this time. Enough of the people need to believe the lie that it's getting artificial longevity.

[–] Croquette@sh.itjust.works 28 points 1 month ago (2 children)

VC funding is basically gambling, trying to find the next billion dollar company. So they throw money at anything that has any semblance of traction to get in early and cash out when the time comes.

[–] PM_Your_Nudes_Please@lemmy.world 9 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Which is the exact same behavior that caused the dot com bubble. VC funding was throwing money at any and every dot com business, in the hopes that it would explode and lead to profits.

All it did was massively overvalue the dot com companies, which caused a bubble when people finally realized they were overvalued and VC investors turned off the spigot of free money.

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[–] xenoclast@lemmy.world 6 points 1 month ago (2 children)

Gambling with OTHER PEOPLE'S money.

You win, you take a cut. You lose. Someone else suffers.

These people destroy everything for greed.

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[–] Hegar@fedia.io 55 points 1 month ago

If they've already proven they can steal and lie, of course they'll get VC money.

[–] Mwa@lemm.ee 30 points 1 month ago

Tbh I don't think I wanna interact with ai anymore

[–] moitoi@lemmy.dbzer0.com 26 points 1 month ago (4 children)

AI is a scam, the next one after NFT, crypto.....

[–] nednobbins@lemm.ee 20 points 1 month ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] TexasDrunk@lemmy.world 11 points 1 month ago (2 children)

Yeah, but I need to know what the one after AI is going to be so I can get in on the ground floor.

[–] Juice@midwest.social 7 points 1 month ago (1 children)

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

[–] TexasDrunk@lemmy.world 3 points 1 month ago (1 children)

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?

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[–] krolden@lemmy.ml 6 points 1 month ago (1 children)
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[–] xavier666@lemm.ee 5 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Slight correction. AI is not a scam.

While AI is a powerful tool, it enables people to do scams very easily.

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[–] 7eter@feddit.org 22 points 1 month ago

How does one "fork" a repo like this and then is proud about 100+ contributors he got? I believe they know exactly what they are doing and just don't care.

https://twitter.com/gautam_at/status/1840455030551257284

[–] Anticorp@lemmy.world 17 points 1 month ago

Slack is just a skin over IRC, so this isn’t a new type of behavior.

[–] some_guy@lemmy.sdf.org 14 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

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.

[–] SuperiorOne@lemmy.ml 13 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Road to success (2024 AI Hype Edition):

  1. Clone VSCode.
  2. Rename it as LSCode, squash all history, and create some random commits with --author="Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>".
  3. Add a character AI that calls your code garbage.
  4. Profit.
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[–] NigelFrobisher@aussie.zone 4 points 1 month ago

Look at this nobhead flicking Vs like he’s Liam Gallagher.

[–] nednobbins@lemm.ee 4 points 1 month ago (3 children)

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.

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[–] peyotecosmico@programming.dev 3 points 1 month ago
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