alt Hacker NewsOpenAI to acquire Pierre Computer Company
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We need a term for an acquisition where you buy an entire company because it would be cheaper than paying a monthly subscription fee to use their product.
I read good things about their diffs library: https://diffs.com/
Whenever I see this acquires or hiring of successful products founders or teams by big labs I ask myself if, apart for the usual obvious reasons that any non ai model company would want them, they are also reusing this human talent to build the dataset of "how the sausage is made".
Cool. Pierre Computer is a company founded by original Bootstrap devs: Jacob Thornton and Mark Otto
>Git infrastructure at scale
>Code.Storage powers the largest agentic workloads in the industry to store code and other machine generated artifacts at scale using git.
>Lovable, Poke, Anything, Bolt, Amp, Parahelp, and many others rely on Code.Storage to store their generated code, memory files, design artifacts, legal documents, and other product files and resources that change over time.
I'm interested in knowing more about the company itself. How many people is/was it? Were they working all in an office together or local-remote, or fully globally distributed? Was the focus massive scale, or ultra-low latency (for agent iteration), or agent-first (but human in the loop) usecases that could be enabled by having core control of a git service and the wrappers around it?
I wish these "acquired by" announcements started with an explanation of what the startup was in the first place.
I had never heard of them before and have no clue what they do or why OpenAI wanted to buy them.
https://github.com/kohoj/codex-app-teardown they were using Pierre libs for a while, so only natural.
I like the name "Pierre Computer Company".
Remember when OpenAI bought a device company for 6 billion dollars, a company that had never made a device.
Remember when OpenAI bought a podcast that gets 500 views and no comments on Youtube for 100 million dollars?
(And they've never advertised on it either, their name isnt anywhere on the screen while theirs dozens of other sponsors)
Im convinced Sam is just passing money to his friends, bribing or something idk. Something seems off.
TIL the founders of the company are not all named Pierre :(
nooooo.
I mean good for the team, I'm sure they will make out quite nicely.
But it was really great to see high quality OSS being extracted from their enterprise-focused https://code.storage/ service. Not I imagine the oss updates and new libs will decline, maybe not right away, but eventually, especially as they get rolled into whatever the product-offering of the week is that altman cooks up.
Oh well. so it goes
OpenAI continues to do everything right, using their position to acquire as many companies as possible. If you don't take a peak at the horror show that is Anthropic everything would look good.
what else is left out there to build and get bought
Refreshing, compared to "our journey" and "our mission" slops
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Musk envy. Cursor was also building large scale git infrastructure. Pierre Computing does the same.
All these companies need success stories but only end up making dev tools, a notoriously unprofitable market. The corporate market is already saturated with LLMs/agents because of the dictatorial forced rollout, so there is actually no growth in sight at all.
Funny how small business is resembling product at a slave market, where they are trying to show nice teeth and muscles, hoping that AI master or another whale will buy them.
At least it is a signal AI is not good enough yet, so that they could clone it in one prompt.
I have to imagine this is related to: https://openai.com/index/scaling-git-at-openai/
And you'll see that mitchellh is a big fan of Pierre (and I think investor)
https://x.com/mitchellh/status/2036855931569651884?lang=en
For those who don't know Pierce, here's a demo from mitchellh:
https://x.com/mitchellh/status/2057229385963618787