Comment by shafyy | Hacker News Reader

Comment by shafyy | Hacker News Reader

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Regardless of the TOS saying that or not (I haven't read them), I can think of at least two reasons why your statement doesn't hold:

1) AI startups usually don't have a lot of value to potential acquirers based on their data, but based on other things (e.g., talent, customers, business model, platform, brand). That's like saying you shouldn't use AWS because Amazon can just steal and commercialize all your data.

2) There are other companies than Google that acquire startups

Having said that, I highly doubt that Google can just use all the training data to on GCloud to launch their own products with that. They can surely look at it and maybe do stuff with them internally, but I am pretty sure that they can't use them commercially.

>They can surely look at it and maybe do stuff with them internally, but I am pretty sure that they can't use them commercially.

How would you ever know if they did? People who worked at Google have been accused, by Google, of stealing the entire self driving car program and taking it to a competitor.

That is just not true, the suit was about LIDAR.

It's also vastly different. Of course someone working at at google on a project has access to that project. It doesn't mean they have access to your stuff.

Because you do not stay in business if you operate in such a manner. Plus it is not good from an employee standpoint in retaining. Most people prefer to conduct themselves in an ethical manner.

Hard to get employees to not steal from you if you are stealing from your customers.

First of all, that's wrong (as another comment pointed out). Of course, the probability of them stealing your stuff is non-zero, but it's very rare. Even if you use all your own hard and software, people still can steal your stuff :-)

I can be hacked by malware which can leak secrets from air gapped, Faraday caged machines. Therefore, I should put my billion dollar idea on the public cloud and just trust Google.

I shiggy diggy.

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