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Comment by tkgally | Hacker News Reader

> Our team is ex-OpenAI, Anthropic, and Asana research scientists and AI engineers

The page includes the logos of those companies. Is it normal to do that for companies one used to work for?

I've seen plenty of startups who's single-page includes the pitch, and the founders section which has big logos of their alma mater (almost always Ivy leaguers + Stanford) and whatever FAANG or consulting job gig they had previously.

Easier to land investors and customers if you have the "correct" pedigree.

Private pitch decks aren’t the same as public product websites.

It seems this team is using the old scammy marketing trick of using logos of every company you can claim any possible relationship with as a way of building trust. Plastering giant logos on a product website implies some endorsement or affiliation to most casual readers. It’s not until you read all of the text that you realize this is just a list of companies they worked at.

This is the kind of behavior that earns a sternly worded letter from corporate council. You shouldn’t expect to be able to leave a company and then put their logo on your product page.

Good point! We are just very early and our experience is our main selling point. We plan to remove it.

No it's not! These are probably imposters anyway. Apparently, you can buy HN upvotes... I find it hard to believe that honest researchers from frontier labs would behave like crypto scammers.

It’s also weird that there is no about page naming the founders.

https://x.com/karpenoid/status/1670723794544263170

https://x.com/karpenoid/status/1873281722613400002

This might be linked.

It says they WILL fine tune a model.

Sounds fishy

At Asana we did not do any fine-tuning because it was too complicated even for our AI org of 40 engineers. We believe we can do it by setting up and cleaning data correctly.

There's a reason why you don't see frontier-grade AI researchers throwing around meaningless numbers to go with the most layman idea of a product in the field imaginable. The whole thing stinks. I reckon this is some kind of extortion scam intended to trick people into compromising IP.

I understand the concern but we don't need anyone's IP. Unfortunately, it is hard to provide fine-tuning solution without access to the codebase. We just think that using a large general-purpose model for a highly specific codebase with a lot of internal frameworks is not the best solution and want to try to improve it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com