AI startups, and open-source forks with VC funding. A bad match.
  • Emotet ( Emotet@slrpnk.net ) 
    53·
    2 years ago

    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.

  • LiveLM ( LiveLM@lemmy.zip ) English
    53·
    2 years ago

    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?

    • nednobbins ( nednobbins@lemm.ee ) 
      10·
      2 years ago

      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.

      • nednobbins ( nednobbins@lemm.ee ) 
        1·
        2 years ago

        Maybe.

        There have been a number of technologies that provided similar capabilities, at least initially.

        When photography, audio recording, and video recording were first invented, people didn’t understand them well. That made it really easy to create believable fakes.

        No modern viewer would be fooled by the Cottingley Fairies.
        The sound effects in old radio shows and movies wouldn’t fool modern audiences either.
        Video effects that stunned audiences at the time just look old fashioned now.

        I expect that, over time, people will learn to recognize the low-effort scams. Eventually we’ll reach an equilibrium where most people won’t fall for them and there will still be skilled scammers who will target gullible people and get away with it.

  • some_guy ( some_guy@lemmy.sdf.org ) 
    10·
    2 years 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 ( SuperiorOne@lemmy.ml ) English
    5·
    2 years ago

    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 ".
    3. Add a character AI that calls your code garbage.
    4. Profit.
      • delirious_owl ( delirious_owl@discuss.online ) 
        2·
        2 years ago

        How is it boot licking to get money from rich people to develop open source software?

        Lemmy is FOSS that was funded by a grant from NLNet. Its the same outcome as this.

        If anyone is licking boots, its the rich people licking the FOSS boots

    • Captain Beyond ( beyond@linkage.ds8.zone ) 
      6·
      2 years ago

      Not at all, really. Forking is fine and building a business off of it is fine (I don’t personally see the value in it but apparently Y Combinator saw fit to invest in this so what do I know). Where they fucked up was replacing the existing free software license with some “AI” generated mumbo jumbo, because they were “too busy building” to “bother with legal.”

      You didn’t have to “bother” with creating a license, because there already was one. No one in free software should be rolling their own custom license (GPT generation aside) because there exist perfectly good ones already.

        • Markaos ( Markaos@lemmy.one ) 
          6·
          2 years ago

          No, they are just in violation of the original license. That doesn’t mean they have to comply with it by properly open sourcing the project. Generally it’s also OK to just delete everything.

          There were plenty of cases where commercial software included open source stuff in a way that violated its license, and the accepted way to fix the license violation was for the software/hardware vendor to stop using the violated project going forward. Usually they don’t even have to for example scrub old firmware downloads that improperly included FOSS bits.

            • Markaos ( Markaos@lemmy.one ) 
              3·
              2 years ago

              OK, cool. Just remember that the only entity who can sue in this situation is Microsoft (because when you contribute code to VS Code, you must sign a CLA that says you give Microsoft full perpetual rights to distribute your code under any license they wish - it is Microsoft who then “graciously” releases your code under a copy left license while also building their proprietary version of VS Code using it).

              And Microsoft cannot use the code if it gets released under a copyleft license - that wouldn’t allow them to build their proprietary build with it. So the only one who can do anything has less than zero (because it would improve only the FOSS forks, which are meant to be inferior) interest in making these guys publish the source code as proper FOSS.

  • nednobbins ( nednobbins@lemm.ee ) 
    3·
    2 years ago

    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.