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Comment by simple10 | Hacker News Reader

I'm always a bit surprised when startups come out of stealth mode with no product demo videos and only a press release. My guess is they're either wanting to raise more money before official launch, or just wanting to grab a press cycle ahead of competitor announcements to build the waitlist. Is there any strategic reason in 2024 to not include more details on the website?

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also, why be in stealth for such an obvious product? There are dozens of recently launched well funded competitors in addition to all the incumbents that have added similar features.

Right? I wonder what this will offer?

Marginal improvement over GitHub CoPilot or Cursor?

Is there any product that allows me to plug in my own Open source LLM and run it locally?

Yep. Continue.dev with ollama. Works but the suggests tend to be short. Like a smart auto complete

Needs a gpu though not a big vram one given that using smaller models for this is better due to speed

Tabby.ml also works well

Rubber duck does.

In case they failed.

your hit rate as an investor/ entreprenuer goes up if your poor investments stay in the dark

For LLM stuff, one upside to “stealth” is you might obfuscate your GPU demand. Now that the GPU market knows there’s another player with over $200m to burn, the market is going to want to take every last penny of that funding.

Good point

Who cares what a startup is doing, they want to rent cloud GPU or buy GPU it’s volume discounts

They aren’t getting a better or worse deal because they are in the autocomplete business or the avocado business

That isn't how markets work, like at all. Will another buyer with money to spend help drive the price up? Maybe, Maybe not. It depends on where that buyer spends their money and whether the supply forces that buyer to compete against other buyers for the same gpu. Supply and Demand curves drive the price.

the investments in GPUs and datacenters is in the hundreds of billions, if the market even worked like this, that 200m would be a drop in the bucket

Possibly to create hype.

“We’re going to create hype by… *checks notes* …not talking about our product.”

If you're truly doing difficult things there's no need for stealth, you just need to protect the trade secrets and not issue patents. That's what stealth should mean. If stealth just means you haven't advertised and you asked your employees to not update linkedin, that's just you and your investors having an ego and pretending that you're doing cool stuff because you want to say the word "stealth". Like paying more for something that says "tactical" even without any purpose.

Your next Linkedin Bio Company.

Tactical Stealth Alpha. Launching in 2025.

They raised 277M. I hope they don't need to raise more money: https://www.augmentcode.com/blog/augment-inc-raises-227-mill...

It's AI. They'll likely end up raising a lot more money if for no other reason than acquisitions and building a financial mote. The AI companies with the most money in the bank will likely win.

I ask that you look at the last 20 years of venture capital and tell me if they're going to be able to stop.

Sure, but not right now (since they just raised their B).

My guess is it was the second reason:

> wanting to grab a press cycle ahead of competitor announcements to build the waitlist.

Not to belabor the point, but for comparison sake, here's another launch on HN today for an AI tool[1] that can create frontend code. When I asked to make a landing page with Augment's value proposition, it created a decent looking site that included a demo video section and testimonials. I'm eager to try out Augment to see if it can create it's own landing page. lol

https://langcss.com/

I'm happy to show you the demo and discuss. Email me: dominic@augmentcode.com

I feel like this response is the exact opposite of what HNers expect - a random reply claiming they can only show a private demo.

Gives me the same energy as those"schedule a demo" forms that I close immediately...

Take one for the team and let us know your thoughts after...

I thought you guys were out of stealth? Just make a public demo already.

The "stealth" of today is like wearing a 1975 Stones concert tour T-shirt.

It's a both external and internal hype play so everybody knows we "are changing the World", they just don't know it yet.

It's whatever, doesn't mean anything. The only hook I found is the "we got money from Eric Schmidt and got some hyper-local celebs from big companies like Google" line.

All I see is a small constellation of "big" names and an uninspiring "fine-tuned “industry-leading” model". Not poo-pooing anything, I'll just wait for the actual product.

Here's why: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BzAdXyPYKQo

Thank me later.

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