carabinerDelve Removed from Y Combinator
While I do think Delve and the leadership there should be held responsible, it's a bit weird to see YC and others take shots at them for breaking the law when so many of their prized unicorns achieved what they did by being willing to just ignore laws and deal with the consequences later.
There's a sliding scale between fake it `till you make it and fraud.
Ignoring a law is different from knowingly and intentionally breaking the law, especially when that law is actual intentional fraud.
Also, there was no “endgame.” They weren’t trying to change the law; they were exclusively breaking it for profit.
Let me more clearly instead say that many successful startups knowingly and intentionally broke the law.
But I agree that Delve is a special case and should naturally be held to a higher standard here because their whole business is around being compliant with the law. When most other startups break the law, they do it to get an advantage over competition. Delve did it in a way that sacrificed their core value towards customers.
> Ignoring a law is different from knowingly and intentionally breaking the law
Huh? In a legal sense I'm pretty sure they're the same thing.
> Ignoring a law is different from knowingly and intentionally breaking the law
This is something Airbnb has facilitated for a very long time, no? And Uber, back when it started.
From a legal perspective I don’t see that it matters whether you’re trying to change the law or not. You’re either following it or breaking it.
Sure, most companies could add an About section and probably put this behind them pretty quickly. They could have even hired someone like Delve to assure this kind of thing wouldn’t happen again.
But Delve themselves can’t really do any of that. They’ve screwed up on a fundamental piece of their own business model. Their core offering *is* Compliance as a Service!
How could I trust their word that they’ll ensure my company is compliant? How could I trust their word that a company I’m doing business with is compliant? They can’t even handle their own Apache 2.0 licensed works, and that’s child’s play- relatively speaking. I’m supposed to trust that they can handle PCI and HIPPA and all the rest for other companies?
This is like having a dentist who doesn’t brush and floss their own teeth. Or a building inspector working out of a moldy office suite with exposed rebar. Or an editor with a personal website full of typos and grammatical errors. It’s a dealbreaker to anyone with common sense.
"By combining the evidence I collected together with what the sim.ai team provided, I will show that Delve has stolen an open-source company’s tech by violating their license and then making a lot of money with it."
->
You mean like OpenAI, Anthropic and all these other 'unicorns'?
I'm happy we're all clear on how bad Delve is but in essence what they were doing is exactly the same as what these AI companies do.
While I despise the sham commercial LLMs have made out of intellectual property, I think Delve is one step worse than that. The technology behind LLMs is innovative, even if the data used to train them have ethically and legally dubious origins. Delve doesn’t even have the ability to claim anything they’ve done as original, unless you count fraud as a service.
The only thing that makes delve worse in my book is that they're selling compliance, they have zero excuses. But the likes of OpenAI and Anthropic even if they don't sell compliance do whitewash bulk copyright violations and they have valuations far in excess of Delve. Too big to fail I guess.
> Delve doesn’t even have the ability to claim anything they’ve done as original, unless you count fraud as a service.
I'd wager there's some prior art...
Fraud as a service! The next big thing!!!
I'm getting the impression that a lot of people in this thread think this is because they violated an open-source license and saying things to the effect of, "they're just the ones who got caught". I also thought that was the scandal initially. (And when it comes to license violations, yes, there's absolutely more where that came from.)
But that's just the cherry on top. I don't think they're being thrown out because they violated a license. There are really serious fraud allegations. Allegedly they were rubber-stamping noncompliant customers, leaving them exposed to potential criminal liability under regulations like HIPPA.
https://deepdelver.substack.com/p/delve-fake-compliance-as-a...
I've only skimmed this so I do not endorse these allegations, but I think it's context missing from this discussion.
