Whether covered under fair use or not, the laws around copyright today did not anticipate this use case. Congress should pass laws that clarify how data is and isn’t allowed to be used in training AI models, how creators should or shouldn’t be compensated, etc - rather than speculating whether this usage technically does or doesn’t comply with the law as-is.
I make about $4,000 per million streams on Spotify for the tracks I’ve released independently. For label releases I make less, but the label promotes them so that sometimes results in more net revenue. I have a bit over 10M Spotify streams over the last 3 years.
Also, Spotify promotes my music via editorial playlists and algorithmic (eg Radio or Discover Weekly), so I’m probably making a lot more total revenue than I would have on iTunes.
Not sure if this is what you're implying, but I think it's a mistake to think of YC as a monolithic organization that makes decisions by saying, "idea X is good, we should fund teams doing it."
More likely, each of the teams doing each of these startups interviewed with completely different partners who had no idea of the other startups even existing, and in that interview, they thought the founders seemed solid and had thought through their idea well, and chose to fund it. It's even possible some of the people doing these ideas came up with the idea after they got into YC (i.e. they pivoted) - some of the most successful YC startups were companies that pivoted mid-batch (e.g. Brex).
In general YC doesn't want multiple shots on goal in a specific market area. They want as many shots on goal as possible among great founders in general.
And similarly to climate, many people who signed this letter are academics who do not appear to have any financial incentive to push for government regulation.
The richest person in the world, Elon Musk, is a climate entrepreneur who got there in part due to climate-driven government subsidies. Just because someone made money off it though does not mean that climate change is a fake concern.
(Airplane founder here) Airplane isn't YC backed. Though interestingly my prior startup, Heap, went through YC and has tons of YC-backed competitors (Amplitude, Mixpanel, Posthog, etc).
Personally I like that YC remains agnostic to the ideas and is willing to back competitors because it ultimately means more great startups get funded. Later-stage investors care more about conflicts because being involved at the level of taking a board seat matters a lot more for conflicts.
At this point they've backed 1000s of companies; if they had to vet that entire list for conflicts to back their next batch it would be incredibly difficult. Also, given the stage they're investing at, tons of companies pivot and end up competing even if they didn't start out that way.
Yes, Cowen argues against the idea we can anticipate consequences of technological change, and the specific consequence he focuses on is the idea of existential risk stemming from AI. He says because technology is unpredictable, we shouldn’t try to predict the type of risk imposed by AI, and we should mostly just accept that this change will happen and cope with it afterward. This stance is what I was arguing against in the post.
> But to wish to halt AI advancement requires an unhealthy mix of pessimism and overconfidence in your predictive powers.
That’s perfectly valid! No one is obligated to respond or engage with any specific argument. But my point was that if you do choose to engage, saying “the world didn’t end before so it will be fine now” is invalid.