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Comment by blagie | Hacker News Reader

> All we want to do is innovate.

That's very clear. That's why we have spyware, ad tech, WWII-era German chemical weapons, the East India Company, Oracle's business model, fintech, ...

Ask anyone 40 years older. Regrets focus on time with family and meaningful work. Few people think: "Did I innovate enough?"

> We simply can't open source this because we're rewriting and rebuilding it every day.

I don't quite see the logical connection in this sentence.

Everything I've worked on in the past 15 years is open-source. I suspect you'd:

- Be able to find modest amounts of funding to do this in the open space (e.g. within the academy, as a teaching professor, adjunct, or similar) -- enough to sustain yourself, but without a promise of riches

- Be able to "innovate," make more E($), and do less harm in corporate America

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First, I need to make my startup successful so I can continue innovating over the next 15 years. Open-sourcing our work could be a distraction at this stage. Maintaining an open-source project requires significant time and effort.

It would also make it easier for competitors to build products that compete directly with us, such as https://studio.academa.ai. That would make it harder for my startup to succeed.

I'm not building this for the sake of making money. I simply need enough protected space to innovate competitively and give the company the best chance to succeed. If it does, I'll be able to keep building and pushing education forward for years to come.

Don't pay too much attention to the naysayers if they don't have constructive advice to offer (but do try to collect what signal you can from the noise). There are a lot of people who viscerally hate AI for a ton of different reasons, or maybe are perfectionists about the subject matter. Even if these AI technologies are currently imperfect, they solve Bloom's Two Sigma problem - students tutored to mastery one-on-one perform two standard deviations better than students taught in traditional classroom settings. Imagine a world where everyone is 30 IQ points smarter just from better education technology!

Personally, I just used chatgpt the other day to _finally_ understand why a dot product of vectors is equivalent to cosine similarity. Mathacademy's lesson is very good but the explanation wasn't enlightening for me, it took chatgpt breaking it down into tiny bite-sized chunks, patiently re-explaining what a cosine actually is and where it disappears to in the dot product, making little animations of vectors with sliders that I could move myself to try stuff with differently shaped and rotated triangles, for me to _actually and viscerally understand it_ and after spending probably 2 hours on this simple concept, now I _actually_ feel like I understand it rather than having just memorized it. So I feel much more confident that I can build deeper understanding on top of that.

Thank you!

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