from Hacker News

YC criticized for backing AI startup that simply cloned another AI startup

by blinding-streak on 10/1/24, 12:27 PM with 259 comments

  • by dang on 10/1/24, 3:52 PM

    Two big threads about this yesterday:

    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)

  • by CharlieDigital on 10/1/24, 1:26 PM

    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.

  • by paxys on 10/1/24, 12:45 PM

    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.

  • by hbbio on 10/1/24, 12:51 PM

    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 :)

    https://x.com/mwseibel/status/1840846817631879291

  • by kunley on 10/1/24, 1:34 PM

    "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?

  • by dcchambers on 10/1/24, 2:16 PM

    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.

  • by shubhamjain on 10/1/24, 1:36 PM

    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.

    [1]: https://x.com/AthensResearch/status/1591138491379122176

    [2]: https://x.com/ycombinator/status/1831074690384978072

  • by jazz9k on 10/1/24, 12:43 PM

    This is completely allowed under the apache open source license. I'm not sure why people are so upset about it.

    If you don't want this to happen, release software under a different licensing model.

  • by tway223 on 10/1/24, 1:48 PM

    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.

  • by piokoch on 10/1/24, 1:33 PM

    "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".

  • by xyst on 10/1/24, 12:57 PM

    Wow, this clone and fork is pretty bad. This is the type of company that is accepted into YC batches now?

    Not good for the rep of YC.

  • by MeetingsBrowser on 10/1/24, 1:19 PM

    It looks like they edited the front page to say it is a fork of continue.

    Until recently it said

    > PearAI is a fork of VSCode so you'll feel right at home

    http://web.archive.org/web/20240903093719/https://trypear.ai...

  • by typeofhuman on 10/1/24, 2:51 PM

    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.

    0: https://x.com/CodeFryingPan/status/1840248626284789956

  • by sva_ on 10/1/24, 12:56 PM

    This article reads like gossip/drama creation

    Techcrunch article on BuzzFeed level

  • by beepbooptheory on 10/1/24, 1:10 PM

    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?

  • by breck on 10/1/24, 2:12 PM

    Garry Tan in 2019: "we mock the scammers who build nothing real and get fake valuations."

    Source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21296685

  • by ayhanfuat on 10/1/24, 1:40 PM

    Oh the humanity!

    > 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

  • by lolinder on 10/1/24, 12:43 PM

  • by TZubiri on 10/1/24, 1:44 PM

    "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."

    Denormalize incompetence again

  • by gyre007 on 10/1/24, 1:02 PM

    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 …

  • by ellis0n on 10/1/24, 4:08 PM

    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

  • by Vanclief on 10/1/24, 1:35 PM

    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.

  • by dsco on 10/1/24, 1:03 PM

    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.

  • by burcs on 10/1/24, 12:59 PM

    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.

  • by nubinetwork on 10/1/24, 1:50 PM

  • by cynicalpeace on 10/1/24, 1:02 PM

    These guys are gonna get a ton of business because of this publicity. Any press is good press.

  • by MangoCoffee on 10/1/24, 2:03 PM

    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.

  • by JumpCrisscross on 10/1/24, 2:12 PM

    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.

  • by GPerson on 10/1/24, 6:16 PM

    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.

  • by nextworddev on 10/1/24, 12:52 PM

    YC Startup School needs a course on basic business ethics

  • by stroupwaffle on 10/1/24, 1:04 PM

    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.

    Am I missing something?

  • by byyoung3 on 10/1/24, 2:11 PM

    If continue wanted a proprietary code base, they shouldn’t have open sourced their code. That’s the entire point of close-sourcing your code.

  • by 65 on 10/1/24, 2:03 PM

    Even the AI companies are turning into slop now. With hyped markets, being rational when you're greedy becomes impossible.

  • by Artzain on 10/1/24, 1:13 PM

    We all know YC may be super random. Just invest on solid teams regardless of product

  • by purplezooey on 10/1/24, 7:22 PM

    ... the Pear Enterprise License, which Pan admitted was written by ChatGPT.

    Oh my word.

  • by paxys on 10/1/24, 1:40 PM

    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.

  • by dncornholio on 10/1/24, 2:23 PM

    So the issue with this company is that there isn't any issue. Got it.

  • by sevensor on 10/1/24, 3:37 PM

    > On Hacker News, the site for programmers owned by YC

    Oh are we?

  • by keiferski on 10/1/24, 1:37 PM

    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.

  • by Pat_Murph on 10/1/24, 4:08 PM

    The more I learn about YC, the shittier they become...

  • by micromacrofoot on 10/1/24, 1:59 PM

    Well at least they don't make cruise missiles

  • by adr1an on 10/3/24, 7:44 PM

    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 ;/

  • by JackOfCrows on 10/1/24, 1:48 PM

    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.

  • by moomin on 10/1/24, 2:37 PM

    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.

  • by dvektor on 10/1/24, 2:05 PM

    Yeah somehow doesn't surprise me at all. The AI space is well on it's way to becoming as dubious as crypto/web3

  • by thiel_is_hitler on 10/1/24, 12:51 PM

    [flagged]

  • by cies on 10/1/24, 1:03 PM

    > YC criticized for backing AI startup that simply cloned another AI startup

    Free market! Competition spurs innovation and drives down cost.

    "If YC does not back them, someone else will" -- drug dealer logic applied to VC biz

  • by aster0id on 10/1/24, 12:46 PM

    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.