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Joined 3 years ago
Cake day: June 13th, 2023
  • There are no words:

    It’s a particularly dismal time for a job hunt, especially in the layoff-ridden tech industry, and one San Francisco startup is getting flak online for a controversial hiring stunt meant to find committed talent.

    LemonLime, a Y Combinator-backed artificial intelligence startup for small businesses, offered company tattoos in exchange for an “instant interview” at a YC Startup School afterparty on Saturday, according to a now-deleted LinkedIn post from its co-founder Jordan Zietz. The post showed a woman sitting in front of a tattoo artist, appearing to prep for getting inked on her right forearm.

    Thankfully, the common person’s voice is heard:

    The post garnered plenty of attention on LinkedIn, with some people quick to criticize LemonLime’s antics.

    “Give people dignity and let them interview on the spot,” the most-like comment on the post read. “We are not your dance monkey who have to prove anything to you to be worth your time.”

    Others cited it as an example of how bad California’s job market is, and called the company’s move an exploitation of people’s desperation to get their foot in the door.

    “Influencing someone who is trying to find work to get your company’s logo tattooed is so evil spirited,” another comment said. “This isn’t edgy or innovative, it’s a disturbing abuse of power.”

    This is incredibly disturbing.

  • The article wastes no time getting to the underlying point in the very first paragraph:

    Top executives at leading Western AI companies are increasingly warning about the safety and national security risks posed by Chinese open-weight frontier models. What they tend not to mention is that these models are improving rapidly and, because they are freely available, pose a serious threat to Western labs’ business models.

    I found the following two paragraphs interesting:

    By mid-2026, however, open-weight frontier models from Chinese labs such as Alibaba, DeepSeek, and Moonshot AI had nearly matched the leading Western models in intelligence and performance. Many companies have already begun building their AI systems on top of these free models, avoiding the high cost of closed-model APIs.

    Because businesses can host open-weight models in their own private clouds, they can also avoid sending proprietary data to systems controlled by outside providers. Developers can fine-tune the models for specific needs, build applications and tools on top of them, and optimize them for their preferred infrastructure.