Their current CEO was brought in to sell the company to private equity like he did with New Relic in his last job. Unfortunately for him, private equity is being selective in which SaaS companies they acquire right now with interest rates spiking and uncertainty over the future of SaaS as AI becomes more capable. Acquisition by an AI lab was probably their next best hope, but the labs seem to all be rolling their own developer platform instead. Maybe Bending Spoons will make a move if the stock revisits its lows.
Nothing is stopping anyone from suing them. In fact they are being sued by dozens of plaintiffs for various things already. The reality is the damage from these "rogue incidents" has been minimal.
> They should have access to as much Azure compute as necessary.
"Should" doesn't imply "does". GitHub is competing with all of the other Microsoft products that need Azure compute, in addition to Microsoft customers. If a customer is willing to buy the compute at a higher margin than the internal chargeback rate, it's definitely not a given that GitHub is getting that compute over the customer. It's hunger games for compute everywhere right now.
> valuations become increasingly dependent on future expectations
Valuations are always dependent on future expectations. What else would they be based on? That's one of the main functions of a stock market: providing price discovery via competing buyers and sellers placing bets on the expected future economic prospects of companies. Of course fraud interferes with price discovery, but again, where is the evidence of fraud?
Enron was massive accounting fraud. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Where is your evidence of accounting fraud? "Lots of companies investing lots of money into AI and it might not work out" isn't fraud.
People working multiple jobs in the western world have some reason beyond "basic survival". Supporting other people, living in a desirable location, or like the vast majority of people they want to make enough money to go beyond basic survival because basic survival is low status. Which is why the idea that all we have to do is give people enough money for a basic survival lifestyle and they'll be happy and spend the rest of their time on things with perceived aesthetic value like math research is the insane take.
It's very unlikely anyone with the intelligence to contribute to math research can't already find a non-hectic job that provides for their basic survival. People choose hectic jobs because they want to do better than basic survival.
The researcher in this case was doing a security review for their company who was a potential customer. Sending potential customers more than a token amount of cash is usually prohibited by corporate ethics rules for obvious reasons.
I see how it can be devastating to their ego, but no, I don't see a particular difference in a company spending money for clout vs. a person spending time for clout. The underlying motivation is the same.
Like the mathematicians working on famous problems in private until they could claim full credit for something interesting wasn't also a marketing exercise for their own careers. The commercial value (or lack thereof) of a proof doesn't depend on whether it was done by a human or a machine.
It could be as simple as Apple committed to a certain volume with Qualcomm before they were certain they could get mmWave working so they have to keep using Qualcomm modems somewhere while they burn down the commitment.
Not sure about that. Labor costs are lower in China and the CCP is strongly incentivized to keep enough jobs around for humans to maintain their own hold on power.
What frontier model did GitHub train? All of the frontier labs scraped GitHub like they scraped everything else. While GitHub has certainly tried to profit from AI, directing ire at GitHub for frontier labs training on public code seems misplaced.
Or API rates are their way of doing price discrimination and it's all profitable. Make sure Enterprises(tm) pay the Enterprise(tm) rate, but mop up the rest of the demand too at lower price points. This has been part of the software playbook for decades.
No one? Mutual funds have managed to attract $33 trillion trading once a day. The demand for millisecond-level trading is almost entirely from a very small group of firms profiting from it.
Yeah, the stock market may be positive sum over the long-term, but it's certainly zero sum over the millisecond-term. Whether it's "retail" or "institutional" that is paying for HFT profits, it's all retail in the end.
How does per-seat pricing work against bots? If anything it's a great deal because SaaS providers set per-seat pricing with the expectation that on average most seats are idle. Bots working 24x7 can get a lot more value out of a seat than humans working 9-5.
Presidents club is a standard way to reward top performing sales reps across many industries. It doesn't indicate anything other than the company is trying to reward and retain their top sales reps. Engineers who find it distasteful should be happy to know engineers typically get way more equity than sales reps.
Google was offering researchers the Bell Labs/Xerox PARC model of comfortable budgets and pay but capped upside. And just like with Bell Labs and Xerox PARC the inventions at Google got productized elsewhere by people chasing the uncapped upside. Google would have been happy to keep LLMs in the research lab forever and never productize any of it. ChatGPT forced their hand.