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

https://techcrunch.com/2024/09/30/y-combinator-is-being-criticized-after-it-backed-an-ai-startup-that-admits-it-basically-cloned-another-ai-startup/

by blinding-streak • 2 years ago

333 250 2 years ago

techcrunch.com

jazz9k• 2 years ago

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.

richbell• 2 years ago

I'm not sure why people are so upset about it.

1. It reflects poorly on YC.

2. Something can be legal without being moral or ethical.

billy99k2• 2 years ago

1. I disagree 2. How is it not ethical or moral? As stated above, you are allowed to resell software based on the Apache license and integrate it into a service. The original authors haven't lost anything.

paxys6• 2 years ago

A startup repackaging an open source project and selling it as a paid service doesn't "reflect poorly" on whoever is funding them. In fact it will be touted as a massive success story.

johnday2• 2 years ago

There are a few confounding factors here:

1. It may be legally permissible, but it is impolite, to change the license away from the well-known Apache software license towards something which has not been legally vetted, and is in fact generated entirely by AI with minimal oversight.

2. There is an open question of what the supposed value add is here from the Pear team, that could not have been achieved by the people whose work they are co-opting.

3. Without a clear value proposition, the oversight given to projects by YC is called into question. I think this is the point most people are concerned by.

spencerchubb5• 2 years ago

Your first point is not true. If Continue wanted a copyleft license, they would have done so. Continue basically said they are fine with people forking and changing the license

diggan3• 2 years ago

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

AFAIK, people are not upset about the forking, but everything surrounding the forking, the actual business they "created" and the LLM-generated license.

Otherwise I agree, would be very strange if someone publishes a FOSS project, someone forks it and people get outraged. But I guess wouldn't be the weirdest things social media folks been upset about in the end...

llm_trw10• 2 years ago

This is a conversation I keep having with people who support permissive licenses.

Oh no, you're allowed to do whatever you want, but you shouldn't.
>Then why is Amazon allowed to do it if they shouldn't?
It's not polite.
>...

billy99k2• 2 years ago

So the can of worms here now shifts to piracy. Whenever it comes up, a large percentage of people here on HN support it. "you wouldn't have purchased it anyway", "the original authors don't lose anything".

The same can be said about using the Apache license and the service here in question. In fact, the difference is that it's completely legal.

The original authors don't lose anything.

prnak120• 2 years ago

It is not that simple. Very few licenses are accepted by, e.g., Linux distributions. If you create your own modified license, for example BSD with two additional clauses that prohibit use for AI training and use in startups without significant modifications then no one will use it.

That is the reason why people are forced to release under the extremely permissive licenses and hope for moral behavior by their users.

That is the reason why the smug response "You allowed me to do this" isn't sufficient.

wpietri9• 2 years ago

And I think those conversations are worth listening to. Do we want a society where people release a lot of open-source code? Or do we want one where people get tired of doing free labor for greedy jerks, and so stop releasing things openly?

Civilization runs on politeness and other things that flow not from our current laws but from respect for others. We ignore that at our peril.

drpossum2• 2 years ago

Not being polite will get you yelled at, as is happening right now, and should not be surprising. Legally there may be nothing and they are welcome to ruin their reputation and suffer the consequences.

I find it baffling in conversations I keep having with people that someone thinks that because something is legally permissible, then it is acceptable. It's the same vein of when people cry "free speech" when they said something reprehensible, as if that somehow should protect them from how people react to their horrible statements.

I think what is driving this is one the of the fundamental problems with the tech industry and its relationship to society: the ingraining of the assumption that because something is legal to do means it is OK to do. They are not and I think there should be more outrage when something like this tries to slide by.

jhalcr• 2 years ago

They initially changed the license to make it appear that they wrote the code, which is outright illegal:

"You must give any other recipients of the Work or Derivative Works a copy of this License; and You must cause any modified files to carry prominent notices stating that You changed the files; and You must retain, in the Source form of any Derivative Works that You distribute, all copyright, patent, trademark, and attribution notices from the Source form of the Work, excluding those notices that do not pertain to any part of the Derivative Works;"

jsheard2• 2 years ago

They initially changed the license to make it appear that they wrote the code, which is outright illegal:

The founder was also on Twitter bragging about how they were the "true open source" editor in this space because they already have 100+ open source contributors, when the majority of those were just upstream VS Code contributors whose patches they had merged back into their fork.

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

rickspencer3• 2 years ago

In my experience, issues like this occur when people project ethical standards onto projects when those ethical standards are not embedded in the license.

In my view, if you believe it is unethical for someone to re-license your Apache code with their own proprietary license, then it shouldn't have an Apache license.

Taking a proprietary fork of an Apache licensed code base and creating an Enterprise product around it seems like a valid business move to me. My guess is that the "uproar" is not coming from the original project creators, but from outside community members who consider such things "anti-social" or whatnot, but I could be wrong.

kunley2• 2 years ago

Yes but they don't defend their view about enterprise product, instead saying they "chatgpt'ed" the license and "can't be bothered with legal", which is IMO even worse - I mean, as a founder how can one be so dumb to openly say that? Especially that they have access to YC's legal and administrative support?

evanelias5• 2 years ago

if you believe it is unethical for someone to re-license your Apache code with their own proprietary license, then it shouldn't have an Apache license.

It's not just unethical, it is clearly illegal.

If you don't own the copyright to a program's source code, you cannot legally relicense that source code! Same holds true for any other copyrightable creative work which can be licensed. This is a very clear case of copyright infringement.

Nothing in the Apache license permits the licensee to relicense the source code (meaning, entirely replace the license with a different one).

It does permit you to build derivative enterprise products, and you have no obligation to keep the source code open for derivative products. But if you do release the source code for your derivative product, any original unmodified Apache licensed portion of the code retains that license and you cannot remove it if you aren't the copyright holder for that original work.

ptx• 2 years ago

This is completely allowed under the apache open source license.

Which part?

Removing attribution is definitely not allowed – see section 4 c of the Apache license.

Distributing under a different license might be allowed if the new license is fully compatible with the terms of the Apache license, which would take some amount of lawyering to work out, and is almost certainly not the case with a bunch of gobbledygook generated by ChatGPT.

HyprMusic2• 2 years ago

Except the original code isn't Apache open-source, it's MIT[0] and still requires copyright attribution.

[0] https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/blob/main/LICENSE.txt

jslakro• 2 years ago

I agree, it had been different with a license like MIT

wilsonnb3• 2 years ago

It's like someone taking all the money from the 'take a penny, leave a penny' jar, or taking all the books from a little free library, or not putting their shopping cart in the cart return area.

A completely legal violation of the social contract. Or in layman's terms, a dick move.

TiredOfLife2• 2 years ago

Both Apache and MIT require attribution. They removed it.

lolinder4• 2 years ago

Ongoing discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41701265

paxys6• 2 years ago

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.

diggan3• 2 years ago

This is true for every VC no? And the whole idea behind VCs? They aren't exactly only aiming to fund the startups they think 100% will be successful, as then they wouldn't fund anyone, so instead they spread out the risk to catch any surprise winners.

Does anyone really look at the line-up of funded startups from a VC and think they're all winners?

paxys6• 2 years ago

Yes but there's a difference between a VC investing a billion dollars in one startup and one investing $100K each in a thousand of them. In the first case they will obviously do a ton of due diligence, go over business plans, get board seats, look at code and more. YC on the other hand has a 10-minute chat with the founder and...that's it.

The earlier you invest, the larger the risk and looser the diligence.

tomtheelder• 2 years ago

For sure- it's just that YC didn't used to operate like that. They have morphed from an interesting higher-touch incubator whose involvement was a strong positive signal into a scattershot VC, but not everyone realizes that so being "YC backed" still carries more prestige than is warranted.

whiplash4514• 2 years ago

YC does not (cl)aim to be every VC.

htrp• 2 years ago

Most VCs try to avoid having the portcos actively compete with each other (ie they won't back 2 separate ride hailing apps) b/c they'll end up competing for the same pool of customers

ActionHank2• 2 years ago

It's meant to be a "smart gamble", not "throw money everywhere and see what does well".

Also the funding should come with a clause to cover this sort of behaviour, if they don't correct it now it will happen again.

dmix• 2 years ago

Correct what exactly? Did they release this as their final product as the first milestone?

From what I gleaned the company has barely started and the founder recently(?) quit his job. They raised money on an idea and forked another project, changed the branding, and used it as the base to build a prototype

That doesn't mean this is the end product that YC invested in.

Lots of companies created MVPs this way before using funding and their new runway of time to do it properly.

If they do release it as the end product with little effort that’s basically fraud

tonygiorgio• 2 years ago

Also the funding should come with a clause to cover this sort of behaviour

Lol if you’re not aware, they came up with the gold standard in simple seed investment contracts used by nearly every pre-series-a startup in existence. Adding clauses like “don’t fork open source code” is just pointless and cumbersome legal bs that does nothing but get in the way.

arder• 2 years ago

Well this just goes to the core of your view on the role of luck in life. Are there 1,000 startups coming out of YC every year and 5 of them are run by geniuses who single handedly disrupt loads of markets. Or are there 1,000 startups coming out of YC every year full of roughly equally good people 5 of which get extremely lucky and make boatloads of money.

Airbnb just forked hotels, Stripe just forked Visa.

whateveracct• 2 years ago

Airbnb just forked hotels, Stripe just forked Visa.

uhh this is not the same as TFA. this is a very quippy, pg-esque way of excusing the behavior though.

MeetingsBrowser5• 2 years ago

Stripe just forked Visa

Clicking a button on GitHub is different from existing in the same industry.

Unless I am missing an Apache licensed code base that powers all of Visa…

jsheard2• 2 years ago

In reality they "graduate" 500-1000 startups every year.

I think people think otherwise because they used to be more selective, and haven't noticed just how much their volume has grown over the years. Early on it was a few dozen startups per year, then a hundred or so, and eventually the current state of greenlighting almost two startups every day on average (we're 275 days into the year and YC has racked up 509 companies in this years batches so far). They're less of a startup accelerator and more of a startup shotgun at this point.

jessriedel2• 2 years ago

Yea I sorta figured YC was more like Harvard in that the brand and selectivity are super important. Isn’t this eating the seed corn?

oceanplexian• 2 years ago

It’s game theory. AWS would do the same thing by pitting teams against each other internally. Often times, we would have multiple products doing the same exact thing but slightly differentiated. Of course AWS claims to not deprecate services but they would resource the successful service team and PIP everyone out of the unsuccessful team and bring it back to a skeleton crew. If you wonder why the AWS Product offerings are so F'd and inconsistent it's because of them using management techniques like this.

hallway_monitor• 2 years ago

With how terrible AWS is to use this makes complete sense. I will stick with Azure when I can, which is usually.

whiplash4514• 2 years ago

There is quality/competency, and there is business ethics.

As an incubator, you own the practices of the companies in your portfolio.

It does not take a lot of rotten fruits to ruin the brand.

andyjohnson0• 2 years ago

If you look at their recent batches there is an endless parade of thin ChatGPT wrappers.

Possibly related post from yesterday:

Y Combinator Traded Prestige for Growth

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41697032

2OEH8eoCRo0• 2 years ago

What does this do to society when people with no product, no use, and no hope of profit are consistently rewarded with free money? It practically incentivizes bullshit.

ramraj072• 2 years ago

I just read this same comment from you on another post! Talk about cloning your comment in posts about cloning code.

aster0id2• 2 years ago

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.

sambull• 2 years ago

The people pulling those ladders never had to working about housing crisis, inflation, layoffs.

paxys6• 2 years ago

The word enshittified has been enshittified.

solardev• 2 years ago

What generation are you? I'm an early millennial and even back then we were talking about this, how the boomers left us a dying world and a crumbling society. Then my generation failed to do anything about it, and everything only got worse. I am terrified for Gen Z and Alpha who have to come into this mess. I fear their kids, if they choose to have them, will be even worse off.

aster0id2• 2 years ago

Late millenial. I agree with everything you said.

thiel_is_hitler2• 2 years ago

[flagged]

Unknown• 2 years ago

hbbio2• 2 years ago

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

gyre0072• 2 years ago

I don’t thinks its the worst, but it did feel in bad taste. YC have put money and trust in them, so why would they kick them down? Would you? They haven’t committed any crime so why would they distance themselves (Note: I am not a YC founder or affiliated with YC in any way)

hbbio2• 2 years ago

They haven't built anything and didn't even bother to properly rename everything in the original repository.

It's clear they are not deserving of YC backing, nor are they trustworthy, as they seem to have misrepresented their involvement in building the software. They're not in crypto anymore :)

wpietri9• 2 years ago

Is your standard for ethics really, "Well it's not a criminal violation of the law?"

HyprMusic2• 2 years ago

They relicensed the code to their own license[0], which violates the original license, so you could argue they committed copyright infringement.

[0] https://github.com/trypear/pearai-app/blob/e921c7ae272168577...

EDIT: Looks like they have since changed the license to Apache 2.0 but it's still in violation of the original MIT license and does not contain the required copyright notice.

jjmarr• 2 years ago

It'd be unethical for YC to kick them out. PearAI signed an agreement with the startup incubator and presumably didn't misrepresent their product. The main criticism is that YC made a bad business decision by backing a non-innovative product. That's an issue that should be handled privately between YC and the founders, not through public humiliation.

If I get hired at a job I expect my boss to (publicly) back me if another team criticizes my work, then tell me the issues in a 1-on-1. If I have investors I expect them to (publicly) back my business strategy and privately tell me their concerns.

tivert2• 2 years ago

They haven’t committed any crime so why would they distance themselves

There are bad, socially unacceptable things that are also not crimes (for instance: lying in a lot of contexts). Crimes (for the most part) are just the more extreme bad things someone can do.

If you think the bar for distancing from someone is "committing a crime," your bar is far too low. Unfortunately, that minimal bar is a meme that has been pushed with some success by people who want to get away with shady shit.

Not a crime != OK.

tasuki• 2 years ago

They haven’t committed any crime

What about the license change? Not a crime?

nextworddev• 2 years ago

YC Startup School needs a course on basic business ethics

sva_3• 2 years ago

This article reads like gossip/drama creation

Techcrunch article on BuzzFeed level

burcs2• 2 years ago

Yeah I noticed some pretty obvious spelling/grammatical errors too. I wonder what's going over there?

"...Continue as well as the original project that Continued used, VSCode."

lotsofpulp• 2 years ago

Perhaps spelling/grammatical errors are how you know a human wrote it.

Or at least a human went through the trouble of editing a few errors in.

xyst• 2 years ago

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.

leetrout• 2 years ago

Just the first one to be so bold. This happens in every batch AFAIK. YC continually invests in competing companies, sometimes back-to-back batches and sometimes in the same batch.

llmfan2• 2 years ago

I can tell just from looking at most recent YC founders that they're not hackers.

I could be wrong of course. I'm probably wrong. Maybe these people who are attractive, care about popular fashion and becoming popular on tweeter are actually just as capable hackers as all the hackers I actually know (none of whom care about those things). I admit YC probably knows better than me.

But if I'm not wrong, and these people really aren't hackers, it means YC has decided that normies > hackers when it comes to YC. I really don't predict that's going to end well for YC.

llmfan2• 2 years ago

I mean, obviously it's a numbers game. There are only so many hackers, but there are a lot of Ivy League people and FANG people. So YC chose to open their gates. Whether this will be a profitable decision is an open question.

burcs2• 2 years ago

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.

sva_3• 2 years ago

Vim is not a fork of Vi.

ahakki• 2 years ago

https://web.archive.org/web/20160107114945/http://www.moolen...

MeetingsBrowser5• 2 years ago

neovim didn’t seek VC funding and advertise as if they built their own editor.

The first text on neovims page is ”Vim-fork focused on extensibility and usability”

spencerchubb5• 2 years ago

Pear never advertised that they built everything themselves. They were very open about the fork

TiredOfLife2• 2 years ago

Isn't this how open-source works.

No, it doesn't! Open source comes with licenses that have various requirements.

gyre0072• 2 years ago

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 …

MeetingsBrowser5• 2 years ago

That said, YC have always said that they were backing founders not ideas so …

And apparently now that means they are investing in founders who know how to click a button on GitHub and have an active ChatGPT subscription

cynicalpeace3• 2 years ago

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

MeetingsBrowser5• 2 years ago

Developer tooling, especially AI powered, has historically not been the most forgiving industry.

cynicalpeace3• 2 years ago

Good point, but they can always pivot, since they're obviously good at marketing. Seems YC made a good choice

dsco• 2 years ago

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.

cies• 2 years ago

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

stroupwaffle2• 2 years ago

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?

dewey3• 2 years ago

Am I missing something?

Yes, you are basically posting a modern equivalent of the famous "Dropbox reply". "EMacs and Treesitter...naive grep implementation".

There's value in these tools, that's why GitHub, JetBrains, Cursor all built businesses on top of AI coding extensions. Personally I don't use the "Write this full function for me"-features but use it as a way smarter auto-complete. People don't really use them to jump to "find all references to X" as that's perfectly well solved.

sgarland2• 2 years ago

I don’t think expecting someone to know how to set up an editor (or not; there are plenty of turnkey distros like LazyVim) or knowing how to use the most basic of *nix tools is on par with the Dropbox reply.

there’s value in these tools, that’s why… all built businesses on top of AI

Or is it because those companies realized they would rapidly lose market share if they didn’t? You don’t have to add value to become popular, you just have to make people think they’re missing out. Eventually your house of cards might come crashing down, but in the meantime, you’ve successfully enriched yourself. If you have a competing product that is technically equal or superior, it can be maddening to see the popular kid surpassing you without merit.

stroupwaffle2• 2 years ago

JetBrains built a business on top of IDEs long before AI was mainstream.

GitHub built their business on top of Git and collaborative coding. Microsoft (who owns GitHub) built part of their business on Visual Studio (also IDEs) long before AI was mainstream.

So it’s a natural extension to their existing business.

But if you’re selling me on a smarter autocomplete, I can already say from experience that AI can bounce good implementation ideas around, but it ALWAYS takes my intervention to get it right.

I’m happy to pay for an AI service, but I’m not going to pay for an AI service, an AI coding extension, an AI diff util, an AI SCM, and so-forth.

Roark662• 2 years ago

I ve tried to use these editors. I tried using copilot and gemini... They all hinder me more than help. And yet I use chatgpt few hours per day copy/pasting my code between my editor and a browser and it makes me massively more productive.

Why? Because all these editors/add ons overwhelm the model with useless context while at the same time lack actual guidance of a proper prompt. They are all follies giving people false hope they can have stuff "happen" without any skill involved.

steeeeeve• 2 years ago

People don't really use them to jump to "find all references to X" as that's perfectly well solved.

Clearly not a software engineer.

beepbooptheory• 2 years ago

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?

Artzain• 2 years ago

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

CuriouslyC• 2 years ago

Mostly just invest in Stanford grads and ex-FAANG. When they talk about founders being outsiders in their videos I LOL.

MeetingsBrowser5• 2 years ago

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...

CharlieDigital11• 2 years ago

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.

kibwen2• 2 years ago

The problem here is not that they stole the idea, it's that they literally just took an open-source codebase and filed off the serial numbers to claim it as their own proprietary work, and they did so in the most comically inept way possible.

From the OP:

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.

CharlieDigital11• 2 years ago

It doesn't matter so long as they didn't violate any licenses.

Where the product starts and where it ends will be two totally different endpoints that are sure to diverge once they find their domain and business model.

kevin_nisbet• 2 years ago

The funny? thing is, this isn't the only YC company I've seen do this.

adolph2• 2 years ago

From: https://fossa.com/blog/open-source-licenses-101-apache-licen...

  Anyone who uses open source software licensed under Apache 2.0 must include the following in their copy of the code, whether they have modified it or not:

  1. The original copyright notice
  2. A copy of the license itself
  3. If applicable, a statement of any significant changes made to the original code
  4. A copy of the NOTICE file with attribution notes (if the original library has one)

[...]

  However, you do not need to release the modified code under Apache 2.0. Simply including any modification notifications is enough to comply with the license terms.

JumpCrisscross3• 2 years ago

PearAI made a major misstep: PearAI originally slapped its own made-up closed license on it

This is comical but not the core fuck-up: PearAI failed to attribute, thereby violating Community’s license.

It might be salvageable if they can convince customers they aren’t dragging everyone who uses them into a legal morass. But that will likely take more funding, and “help me pay lawyers” isn’t a great pitch.

Good artist copy, great artists steal. PearAI tried and failed to copy. Y Combinator's value-adding play is in striking a licensing and indemnification deal between PearAI and Community. (If Community is smart, they'll demand an arm and a leg. They're owed it.)

DonHopkins• 2 years ago

I bet they ate their own dogfood by having ChatGPT file the serial numbers off for them.

freejazz2• 2 years ago

which Pan admitted was written by ChatGPT.

What morons

segmondy• 2 years ago

Wild take, copying matters. If you have a great idea, and no capital and I copy you and have more capital (money, social), I can deploy my capital to crush you in the market. This very idea that ideas don't matter is hogwash, you can say that idea alone is not enough, but it matters. This is why big companies sometimes get sued by the govt, they copy smaller companies ideas, add it into their already established product for free and stifle growth for the world.

CharlieDigital11• 2 years ago

    > If you have a great idea, and no capital and I copy you and have more capital (money, social), I can deploy my capital to crush you in the market

This is precisely how our markets work and why we have a system of trademarks, patents, and copyright.

Use those tools to your advantage if you are small.

slenk• 2 years ago

That is called capitalism. Like the word you used a lot.

whiplash4514• 2 years ago

Your comment is interesting but seems orthogonal to the problem at hand.

We are talking about a company that clearly showed bad intent and dishonesty in their attitude.

And that's doing a big disservice to the AI space coming from a high-profile incubator such as YC.

If you can't be a good example, you'll just have to be a terrible warning.

CharlieDigital11• 2 years ago

    > a company that clearly showed bad intent and dishonesty in their attitude

You've described most "successful" startups.

FTX, Binance, Uber, etc.

The company I was in that raised a $100m C was in a real mess behind the scenes operating in a highly regulated space (one of the reasons I left; I disagreed with certain practices in principle).

drawkward7• 2 years ago

Maybe the point isnt to invest in the team with the best ideas, but to invest in the most ruthless/least ethical because thats what the investors believe will win the day?

lolinder4• 2 years ago

bad teams can rarely survive turbulence and it is so hard to tell if a team has the right "vibes" or not.

Their apology makes it pretty clear that this team doesn't have the right vibes:

"We thought the license in the root repo wasn’t that important, so we just generated one that we thought was open."

The license that was generated was the "Pear Enterprise License". These guys thought the license didn't matter so their instinct was to ask ChatGPT to generate one that they "thought was open" and they didn't even blink when it generated one with "Enterprise" in the title.

These guys are either dishonest or completely out of their depth.

https://x.com/CodeFryingPan/status/1840831339337302204

CharlieDigital11• 2 years ago

It's very possible that they have the wrong vibes and will fail; this is why any VC is smart to bet on multiple teams, even if many are building very similar products. A good portion of those teams will go nowhere and fall apart by themselves. Even the best VC-partner can't always tell how a teams vibes are from the inside until it's too late.

james_marks• 2 years ago

These guys are either dishonest or completely out of their depth.

More likely both.

light_hue_1• 2 years ago

The problem is that they took someone else's code, claimed they built it themselves, and then claimed that as evidence for the velocity and capability of their team.

If they had said it's based on X. Or that they're going in a different direction. Or even that they're going in the same direction but will best that other team. Who cares? YC should bet on multiple companies in the same space. It's only logical.

What bothers people is the lie.

Also. They did break the terms of the license. They replaced the Apache license with their own enterprise license. They said they have the rights to relicense the code. Apache requires that they disclose the origin of the code and what modifications they made. And they lied to YC about that, they don't have any of these rights.

It's not sound business to lie to investors. It's not sound business to violate licenses.

foobarian• 2 years ago

Here is a lesson-learned as far as "copying" goes: it doesn't matter.

There is this tendency among a subset of the tech community to look down on copying. I think this is probably coming from more junior people who recently came out of university where plagiarism is punished, or people in academia such as in PhD programs which are trained to highly value originality.

sbarre• 2 years ago

Most of this tracks with what I've seen over the years...

Most VCs invest in teams first, products/ideas second.

MangoCoffee2• 2 years ago

Here is a lesson-learned as far as "copying" goes: it doesn't matter

LOL. Why is the West complaining about China 'copying' their ideas and products? It seems hypocritical. Why are Western companies crying foul about China?

spaintech• 2 years ago

Dang, that many startups in that short period of time, how is that plausible? I say that wholeheartedly considering the time it takes to take something from an idea to a PoC to an MVP. Don’t get me wrong, I know there are plenty of quick slap together projects out there, similar to the one been commented here, they are more like a marketing wrapper of bundles from others people’s work, which is something to be frowned upon… specially if you are technically motivated.

Well, IMHO, when considering a project, knowing that you are solving for a customer demand problem is very different than from a VC minded problem. I personally would never advise or be part of such an “Arrangement.” These are my clear principles, and my success will come or fail, but my integrity will never be questioned.

CharlieDigital11• 2 years ago

    > Dang, that many startups in that short period of time, how is that plausible?

I joined each at different stages. Some I left after short stints because the vibes were just wrong. Some failed and I could immediately tell that the vibes were off after the first bit of turbulence. I'm still at one of the startups because the vibes are good and we've got a good product and team.

sobellian• 2 years ago

I'd say it matters. Life becomes so much harder if you have to justify why your seed/pre-seed startup has a unique advantage, but you're just ripping off the competition. Maybe you have unique hustle. That's a fairly incredible claim - especially in a crowded space like AI.

I think it's at least a warning klaxon. We're entering this market by copying a competitor (not just in UI/UX, but literally byte-for-byte). How are we going to beat them? How do we ensure the same does not happen to us?

AI-powered coding is such a ridiculously crowded arena. I would be pretty apprehensive. Even if I was dead-set on doing an AI startup, I would still look for a different market.

oglop• 2 years ago

All good points. Problem is, they didn’t attribute after the copy. And that’s literally all they had to do. Now they stand in violation of that license which I admit I don’t know what that means, but it probably isn’t good. I mean, how do you fuck up piggy-backing off open source? I’ve had many companies piggy back off my own project and it’s whatever, because they attribute to the original codebase. But it’s all whatever. Most these discussions are gonna end up in the trash over the next 5 years anyway as rationalistic machines spread more and more.

piokoch• 2 years ago

"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".

kunley2• 2 years ago

"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?

dcchambers2• 2 years ago

The good news is "dawg I chatgpt'd the license" is not a valid legal defense. Any good lawyer would eat them alive in court if it came to that.

shombaboor• 2 years ago

i also think that's why this story sorta went viral, it blended the worst aspects of AI in the tech popular culture by bragging about theft and saying dawg unironically

Vanclief2• 2 years ago

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.

Roark662• 2 years ago

I would not be surprised if they got the funding precisely because of the controversy potential.

tomschwiha2• 2 years ago

Your profile mentions something with Blockchain? I'm not too sure, but are there any use cases except for Bitcoin stuff? From the solutions I heard there are offen more practicable solutions available compared to using Blockchain tech.

Vanclief2• 2 years ago

Could you share with me the link of the profile you saw? I did work with Blockchain in the past but this current SaaS has nothing to do with that.

shubhamjain• 2 years ago

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

ramraj072• 2 years ago

It’s not cloning if they don’t literally fork the code which isn’t possible for Roam research

keiferski• 2 years ago

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.

ayhanfuat• 2 years ago

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

spencerchubb5• 2 years ago

It's perfectly legal to relicense Apache 2.0 license

evanelias5• 2 years ago

Please point to the license provision that permits you to completely remove the license and replace it with a different one.

I'll save you time: there isn't one. Nor would that ever make sense in any license, because broadly granting that right in a license would completely defeat the purpose of having any license terms at all.

paxys6• 2 years ago

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.

TZubiri2• 2 years ago

"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

JackOfCrows• 2 years ago

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.

tway223• 2 years ago

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.

typeofhuman2• 2 years ago

while they clearly claimed they have 100 contributors which is totally false.

Here's the post from the founder:

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

You're absolutely right. This isn't a whoops, or nuance, or config/syntax/grammar error. It is a bold-face lie.

nubinetwork• 2 years ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41697032

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41690190

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41689217

micromacrofoot• 2 years ago

Well at least they don't make cruise missiles

65• 2 years ago

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

MangoCoffee2• 2 years ago

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.

tightbookkeeper4• 2 years ago

actually we don’t have to tolerate ripoffs and theft. That’s the principled and helpful response to both problems.

dvektor• 2 years ago

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

byyoung3• 2 years ago

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.

JumpCrisscross3• 2 years ago

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.

breck• 2 years ago

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

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

dcchambers2• 2 years ago

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.

braza• 2 years ago

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.

I noticed same thing with the latest batches (2019+) where founders sometimes with only a welcome page in the site, an e-mail list, and a blog going to Linkedin and doing a lot of self-promoting to generate steam in the company instead to deliver something good.

dncornholio2• 2 years ago

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

moomin• 2 years ago

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.

typeofhuman2• 2 years ago

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

sevensor• 2 years ago

On Hacker News, the site for programmers owned by YC

Oh are we?

dang2• 2 years ago

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)

thiel_is_hitler2• 2 years ago

This post has already been removed from the front page and my comment was flagged and I guarantee you have shadowbanned me already. Let's be real, you do this all the time Mr. Goebells. Your boys PG and Thiel are traitors who supported J6 and are actively trying to elect Donald Trump and JD Vance.

dang2• 2 years ago

I've unkilled your comment so readers can make up their own minds.

Pat_Murph• 2 years ago

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

ellis0n• 2 years ago

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

GPerson• 2 years ago

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.

purplezooey• 2 years ago

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

Oh my word.

adr1an• 2 years ago

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 ;/

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

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