AI startups, and open-source forks with VC funding. A bad match.
    •  Captain Beyond   ( @beyond@linkage.ds8.zone ) 
      2•5 hours 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.

  •  LiveLM   ( @LiveLM@lemmy.zip ) English
    33•12 hours 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?

  •  some_guy   ( @some_guy@lemmy.sdf.org ) 
    8•11 hours 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.

    •  nednobbins   ( @nednobbins@lemm.ee ) 
      4•11 hours 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.

  •  Emotet   ( @Emotet@slrpnk.net ) 
    40•15 hours 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.

  •  nednobbins   ( @nednobbins@lemm.ee ) 
    3•12 hours 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.