Lightspeed Venture Partners is a venture capital firm whose partners post on startups, market trends, and investing.
HN links it for posts on private equity buying competitors and on startup trends; commenters cite its piece on Circle Labs and AI-powered friends.
Correct me if I'm wrong but didn't they say they were basically gonna train their LLMs of message data?
I know that there was a post here: https://medium.com/lightspeed-venture-partners/circle-labs-the-shape-of-ai-powered-friends-to-come-ffda00400f70
Which states: "What’s more, community members have already interacted with Shapes enough to trigger millions of messages over the short, several month duration that the product has been in beta. We believe this head start in an emergent market will further enrich the conversation datasets which power Circle’s NPCs, and serve as a competitive moat over time."
This is an old post though, so it's philosophy could've changed, but even back then stating something like that is concerning. I do feel like it's worth calling out that the Discord developer policy did not explicitly state this until the 2024 policy, but it's been in effect since July 8th, 2024...so they had plenty of time to stop training their "shapes" on the user data before this happened and it seems they've been in contact with them before too so they could've just gotten clarification on it or just asked for permission.
Complete side-note it bothers me how they're using all these examples of people who use these "shapes" as emotional support and basically therapists as a way to "strengthen" their argument when IMO it weakens it. If so many people are reliant on robots and code for emotional support then they need to seek help or seek real, human connection. It's…
I agree this since private equity investments and buyouts seem to be accelerating and it is important to understand their motivations.
I thought this post covered the differences versus VCs, angels, etc well: https://medium.com/lightspeed-venture-partners/what-happens-when-private-equity-buys-your-competitor-6095cb3c43#.qdshh68qp