Integrate it over time and you'll get a different result: JetBrains will still be with us 20 years from now, while these "AI" startups will go the way of NFTs and blockchain long before that.
I 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.
there 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.
Where 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.
Engineers 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.
The 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.
No, 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.
Nobody 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).
There 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.
Sure, 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.
Presumably, if you wanted to stick the boot in on Russia, a decent way to do that is to encourage smart, economically productive Russians to incorporate outside Russia and attract as many young capable Russians to come with them as possible.
It'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...
Most "AI" startups aren't building coding tools, and the utility of this tech goes down dramatically in industries that are less legible on the open internet than software is.
I didn't say I blindly trust generated code, it needs to be read through and covered by tests, but tasks like generate boilerplate code for some lib I never used before and which would take time to locate and read through documentation now are 10x faster.
There is huge utility in LLM outside generating complete working code.
