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They're a great company but geopolitics is working against them. Also AI should not be lumped together with literal fraud, that's lazy.
by nsonha 1y ago
They're a great company but geopolitics is working against them.
Also AI should not be lumped together with literal fraud, that's lazy.
- bitwize 1y agoIt's not us lumping AI together with fraud. It's the companies employing, for example, Actually Indians to do things they claim are done by machine. Or the ones marketing ChatGPT with various agentic hookups as a replacement for developers. Or...
- devmor 1y agoI believe that's why the comment author put "AI" in quotation marks. There's a massive amount of fraud around "AI" right now, as there always is in the startup scene with a hot new technology.
- nsonha 1y agothere is still a distinction as the field itself is not a hoax, which I can't say the same about NFT. Unless you prefer to think of the AI field as representable by a bunch of Indians actually behind software, as the sibling (insincerely and again lazily) reduces it to.
- bitwize 1y agoWhere am I reducing an entire field to anything? If one truthfully says there's a bunch of companies doing this or that, that associate AI with fraud, that's not the same as reducing an entire field to fraud.
- immibis 1y agoEngineers that want to run startups need to stop denouncing fields they don't like as "fraud". Some people made more money than you. Learn from them and it could be you next time.
- echelon 1y ago> geopolitics is working against them. Do most people even know they're a Russian company? Do businesses decide not to invest for that reason?
- rsynnott 1y agoThey’re _not_; the founders are Russian but it was founded in the Czech Republic and no longer has Russian operations or sells to Russia.
- momocowcow 1y agoThere are no native Czech speakers in their management. It's a similar story as the Yandex guys going off to Nebius Group in the Netherlands after the invasion.
- shuuzo 1y agoDo you know how many founders in Silicon Valley are not native English speakers? What are you even talking about?
- rsynnott 1y agoSure, but they're not a Russian legal entity and as far as I can see never have been (unlike Yandex). So, to the point that their being a Russian entity might be a problem for investors, it's moot, as they are not one.
- mananaysiempre 1y agoNobody in Russia who valued their business chose to incorporate it—or at least its parent company—in Russia. After Yukos, the writing was on the wall. (And now, of course, everybody who values their business takes pains to point out their chosen country of incorporation as though it wasn’t originally just a saner jurisdiction. As you’ve shown, everybody does it because it works.) JetBrains specifically did employ a fair number of both Russians and Ukrainians, though, and unlike Yandex or mobile carriers, was not prominent enough to be forced to split immediately after 2014, so it was inevitable they would have to move out of Russia (and they did so pretty gracefully).
- bakugo 1y agoThe hundreds of AI startups desperately trying to convince management that they can replace entire teams of skilled humans with AI are, by definition, a scam. Maybe a different type of scam than crypto rugpullers, but still a scam.
- immibis 1y agoIn capitalism, a scam is when investors lose money because you broke a law. Which law is being broken here?
- grues-dinner 1y agoNo, that's fraud. A scam can be legal. Timeshares, "Winter Wonderlands", many extended warranties, planned obsolescence, weaselly technically-correct advertising (overpromising to investors is sort of this) pretty much everything hidden in ToC screeds, some MLM schemes, basically all cryptocurrency (and a lot of normal finance to be fair), etc etc. Many graduate into criminality, but it's not required.
- immibis 1y agoOh, well the whole economic system is a scam then, so as long as you're stuck inside a scam system, you succeed in the system by scamming.