"Demand for coding environments is so high that we believe defunct startups are getting acquired specifically for the value of another private GitHub repo to make environments out of."
In the RL scaling boom, RL environments are the scarce thing.
Does this mean this is the golden age of startups being bought up?
https://newsletter.semianalysis.com/p/rl-environments-and-rl-for-science
In the past, a big tech company might buy a struggling startup just to get its engineers (an acqui-hire). This claims we might see the rise of "acqui-data" or "acqui-environment" deal. The value is in the intellectual property of the code itself, which can be used to generate synthetic training data indefinitely.
Or it's to eliminate a potential market threat before it comes to fruition. Also a very common corpo play.
The way I read Meta's acquisition of Scale AI as they summarize it is insane. They acquired it and wiped out a 1.4B business because none of the customers (all the other labs) wanted Meta to be their data provider.
I lack words to describe that.
"Can't beat them? Buy them..."