This AI Startup "Copied" an Open-Source Project and Got Half a Million Dollar Funding by Y Combinator

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.

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

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

Permanently Deleted
- But they made half a million.
  
  And there are literally hundreds of similar companies raking in billions in investments that magically vanish while the founders live a luxury live and move on.
  
  The real question is: why do VCs shit so much money into obvious frauds? Are they this stupid or do they just hope to pass it on to the greater fool?
- They're not going to survive
  
  Are you kidding me?
  
  Alexander Bell stole the telephone.
  
  Edison regularly stole inventions from Tesla among others.
  
  Steve Jobs fucking mind raped Woz.
  
  The American Dream is taking someone else's hard work and profiting off of it.

So all it takes to get that sweet, sweet VC mula is a Vscode + extension fork with some hipster branding on top? Really???

Aren't these guys supposed to be tech geniuses or some shit?
Billions of dollars and they don't have a single actually knowledgeable intern who could glance at this project and say "yeah, no, I could do this too?"
Or are they're just ignoring them because AI is a glowing hot buzzword right now?

This is baffling. The entire tech sector praises VCs like they're god's gift to earth, meanwhile they're out here backing stupid shit like this, how can anyone take these people seriously?

Aren’t these guys supposed to be tech geniuses or some shit?

Rich/famous tech people have never been "tech geniuses." They're always sociopathic business/marketing types.
dawg i chatgpt'd the license [...] we busy building rn can't be bothered with legal

The absolute gall of these guys. Would be inspiring if it wasn't maddening!
Dunning-Kruger is a hell of a drug...
https://youtu.be/BzAdXyPYKQo

I simply can't wrap my head around the thought process behind launching a clusterfuck like this. Y Combinator probably didn't do their due diligence and simply rode the fading AI Bubble, so I can at least understand how the funding might have been approved.

But actively leaving your $250,000+/year job to team up with some questionable choices to basically fork two OS projects, change the discord links and generate an illegal licence for that shit show, all while proudly stating, publicly, "dawg i chatgpt'd the license, anyone is free to use our app for free for whatever they want. if there's a problem with the license just lmk i'll change it. we busy building rn can't be bothered with legal" when they are made aware of the fact.

This is absolutely insane, sounds like someone was about to get fired and decided to use some personal relations and fresh graduates to somehow successfully cash in one last time with absolutely no regard of even the basics. Pretty wild that those guys even managed to figure out how to found a Startup. Probably asked ChatGPT for instructions there, as well.

Y Combinator probably didn’t do their due diligence

It's not the first time. They also backed an obvious scam MMO that promised the world and more, while it was nothing more than an asset flip.
- I heard that the creator of the MMO had people they knew within ycombinator at the time. I wonder if it's something similar this time around. Eitherway, it's not a good look for ycombinator

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

we don't either.
- 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.
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.
- 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.
- Gambling with OTHER PEOPLE'S money.
  
  You win, you take a cut. You lose. Someone else suffers.
  
  These people destroy everything for greed.
You know it’s bad when the guy previously worked at Coinbase

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

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

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

There are a lot of scams around AI and there's a lot of very serious science.

While generative AI gets all the attention there are many other fields of AI that you probably use on a regular basis.

The reason we don't see the rest of the AI iceberg is because it's mostly interesting when you have enormous amounts of data you want to analyze and that doesn't apply to regular people. Most of the valuable AIs (as in they've been proven to make or save a bunch of money) do stuff like inventory optimization, protein expression simulation, anomaly detection, or classification.
- We are seeing it in healthcare for doing some great photo or record screening. I am sure it may put some folks out of a job, but it will save lives as well.
Yeah, but I need to know what the one after AI is going to be so I can get in on the ground floor.
- Quantum computing. It might be a real thing but it'll go through a grift phase first.
  
  Another one will be environmental carbon capture, like pulling carbon out of the atmosphere. This one would be easier to fake but might not get traction for longer since the ideological superstructure in our society is already built up so that it is hard for a political crisis to emerge due to global climate concerns. Even though climate change is worsening, and whole cities are being destroyed by hurricanes, the debate is still pretty stabilized. However since this grift will end up being sold as a commercial solution to a political problem, the grift will probably come from a larger player like Lockheed or Boeing, which would necessitate investing in the most evil companies in existence. Still you never know, Tesla stayed afloat for years without making a working product by selling carbon credits issued by the government to other car companies, so you might be able to bootstrap this one
- Lmk if you find out. Maybe something with.. lasers?
Slight correction. AI is not a scam.

While AI is a powerful tool, it enables people to do scams very easily.
- 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.
VCs are all scams
- Google built something

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

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

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.

Road to success (2024 AI Hype Edition):

Clone VSCode.
Rename it as LSCode, squash all history, and create some random commits with --author="Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>".
Add a character AI that calls your code garbage.
Profit.

For the second step there is git blame-someone-else

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.

This is great. So all their VC-funded work will get released publicly, and we all benefit.

I don't see why people are upset that FOSS projects are getting VC funding for development..
- Haha. Maybe.
  
  I doubt the VCs will provide much followup funding if they can't control the code base but weirder things have happened.

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

ahem

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This is how open source is supposed to work. Everything they're doing is now going to improve the open source codebase. This is good.

👅👢
- 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
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.
- It doesn't matter what the license chatgpt spat out says. If they forked from a Foss base repo, then all of the code they make will be FOSS too. This is great.
It's not how open source works but how venture funding works which is boggling minds here