If negative perception towards AI grows, either because of negative experiences after having it forced on them, or as people's utility bills skyrocket, or as the environmental impact becomes more apparent, they might find that what appeals to shareholders doesn't impress the people who usually pay for their products.
My kid was an excited Duolingo user who immediately cut it off entirely as soon as he heard that they were doing something with AI. That was all it took. He heard "Duolingo's AI now" on some YouTube video, and it was immediately dead to him.
I don't think people understand just how viscerally negative the perception of AI is for the youth.
Duolingo is a game, they publish papers studying the addictive properties of their product I comparison to slot machines. They are incentivized heavily to not produce fluent learners. If he's being pushed in another direction to learn, for whatever reason, all the better for him.
Yep, I noticed recently that on their official research portal they stopped publishing anything publicly in I think 2021. The last couple of articles before that were along these lines:
I wouldn’t call them effective as much as motivating. I think for people who would not be motivated otherwise, this methodology is fine actually, as the alternative is probably nothing. However if you are motivated, almost any other method is more effective then DuoLingo (or alternatives), including more effective then the old DuoLingo with the forums and everything.
It's been a little over a year, but back when I was using the app, Duolingo advertised their own AI features within the app itself. I wonder if they still do, and if so, why it took watching a YouTube video for it to sink in...
I see AI marketing as a negative indicator. Because everyone should be doing AI it’s not a differentiator. It implicitly means you don’t know what value you provide. It’s like advertising you’re cloud powered because you use AWS. Which makes recall a bunch of companies doing. What value do you provide, not what tech do you use.
It's funny how many of the startup-pilled HN crowd have completely abandoned the widely accepted principles like "solve a real problem" or "make something people want" in favor of solution-first thinking "how can I shove AI into something" which was always looked down upon.
This industry has lost its collective mind with this hype cycle. I'm not even against the technology, but this is all just shockingly reckless.
I'm not advocating for being this way... but if you're starting a company primarily so you can have an "exit strategy", then it is natural to primarily virtue-signal to Wall St (instead of "solve a real problem")
tl;dr: this AI cargo-culting is ultimately unsurprising to me.
To be fair, there is a lot of acquisition capital looking for plays to throw at a wall and see if it sticks. The set of start-ups explicitly built as features, not standalone products, has always legitimately been non-zero. And when you get concentrations of acquisition capital, like we have now among the AI majors, you’ll see preference for that—versus the traditional product mode-of start-up.
Building a proper product is still good advice. But if you think you can slip that and flip a feature into a quick sale, that’s a higher ROI.
I dunno, making a "feature" that provides dubious-at-best value in hopes that potential buyers are currently so blinded by the hype they'll fall for a wider range of bullshit than normal so I can slip one by them and leave them holding the bag while I ride off into the sunset with millions seems like it could be pretty accurately described as a scam.
I guess people can dress it up as business savvy and market timing or whatever pretentious lingo they want to make themselves feel better about it, but it's really just scamming by another name.
But we're in the Scam/Grift Economy now anyway so I guess everyone is trying to get theirs while they still can, and I guess that's what we're seeing.
> making a "feature" that provides dubious-at-best value in hopes that potential buyers are currently so blinded by the hype
That’s not how these businesses are best built. Instead, the founders tend to look at what an industry should be doing, but due to incumbent politics hasn’t been able to. You build the thing from the outside, bypassing those politics. Once you have it, you’re parachuted in.
> it's really just scamming by another name
There is plenty of this in bullshit-product companies, too. At the end of the day, a bolt-on exit strategy is absolutely legitimate. Most people can’t execute on it because it requires understanding both the economic niche and high-level corporate politics at a few major players. So there is probably more noise in feature-only startups than in the broader startup ecosystem. But again, most startups fail for good reason.
"How can I shove AI into something" is just seeing if a new technology can be used to solve a problem that's already solved. It's low effort high value compared to solving a new problem. Although I agree that people are being reckless and shoving it in when it doesn't make a significant improvement.
> principles like "solve a real problem" or "make something people want"
Those have been dead for at least a decade now, and AI was not the culprit. When you can sell useless stuff that nobody knew they wanted and still make ROI, why would you limit yourself?
The thing with AI is that there is no ROI (except for Nvidia) but when world dominance with total power is the putative reward, the gambling gets more reckless than ever before.
The reason the term "machine learning" was even invented was because it was one of the AI winters and an euphemism was needed because "AI" was more of a swearword than a buzzword.
which used to be called “math” or maybe “applied science.”
Obviously the underlying tech and research changed along the way… but not as much as it would seem. We’re still doing matrix operations and gradient descent and softmax, all of which has been around for a while.
This is not true because many older AI disciplines were not machine learning. A lot of work was put into tree search, logic programming, etc that we don’t count as ML. Older NLP work had little or no machine learning either.
Or, investors do understand the difference, but think they're buying low to sell high to "greater fools."
If the market can remain irrational longer than a fundamentals-driven investor can remain solvent, is it irrational to bet on the market remaining irrational?
I have seen both. I have heard some talking on live television about how it is a bubble, but it isn’t popping yet, so keep investing. Everyone seems to just be trying to get theirs while the party is still happening.
To be fair, that’s not exactly a new thing, it’s just sensitive to the exact phase of the Great AI Freeze/Thaw Cycle. A lot of now-ordinary automation used to be "AI" until it become commonplace and no longer buzzword-worthy and thus no longer regarded as "AI", and/or an AI winter hit.
Last time that AI was big before DL it was the "big data" fad and everything had to be big data. Marketing has never not been about how to disguise "what we already do" as the newest buzzword that customers (or investors) want to hear.
The same goes, of course, for all the non-AI fads like "the cloud" or "NoSQL".
I understand why companies try to brand themselves as the latest and greatest tech innovation. What I don't understand is why it works or who falls for it. It's quite trivial to determine whether or not this is e.g. transformer-based AI.
I remember in the years before the pandemic that I would joke that all you had to do was "sprinkle in some blockchain" to your VC pitch and your valuation would automatically go up by tens of millions. It seemed dumb to me then and it seems dumb to me now.
> It's quite trivial to determine whether or not this is e.g. transformer-based AI.
The people who are being marketed to with the AI term don't have any idea what that mean and AI, as a marketing term (the only way it's ever been, so far, commercially used) means a lot more than transformers. My dishwasher has "AI" because it has sensors that can detect where the most dishes are.
The marketing term really just means that the product changes it's behavior without user input. A simple "if...then" is AI.
AI has been used as a marketing term for at least a decade now but LLMs are poisoning the brand because they're, largely, implemented in almost exclusively user hostile ways.
The continuous/tracking/predictive AF modes of Canon’s EOS (D)SLR cameras were famously called "AI Servo" and "AI Focus", terms coined somewhere in the late 80s I believe. The early implementations were simple dead-reckoning-based control systems, hardly "AI" even by the standards of that time.
Slightly ironically, now in the mirrorless era, and AF algorithms actually based on DL subject recognition and complex predictive algorithms, Canon has retired the "AI" label.
> The people who are being marketed to with the AI term don't have any idea what that mean and AI
To clarify, I'm mainly talking about B2B-type businesses where the marketing is to investors or other large enterprises. Despite the fact that it's popular and in vogue to think of VCs and business leaders as idiots, most of them actually do understand what AI is and the difference between "modern" AI and basic automation.
And even if you're talking about end consumers, I feel like there is a growing backlash against AI and people will think of a business that touts their "AI dishwasher" or whatever as obvious bullshit and see it as a net negative.
VCs, PE and investors in general. Not all, but enough. Watch CNBC or Yahoo News for even 10 minutes—the sheer stupidity and mania around AI right now is frankly terrifying.
Well I think most investors are dumb as rocks. I'm not sure most even know what a transformer is, or what LLM stands for.
Same thing with blockchain. I talked to many, many non-tech people who were very excited about blockchain. Most could not explain what, exactly, blockchain is.
Before the iPhone was the iPod, and before the iPod I had an iRiver mp3 player. There was certainly a trend and only Apple's product survived that one.
My favorite was block chain. A company I used to work for that was not a tech company, suddenly going on about the block chain. I saw former, non technical colleagues that were still there write long authoritative LinkedIn posts about the advantages of the block chain and it was incredibly cringey because I am not sure what they thought the block chain was, but I am confident they didn’t understand it at all.
various other examples. One really annoying thing is this has also happened in open source projects too - generic things that, sure, help out with AI tasks are now "AI" things.
2 yrs ago I saw some company raise a million dollars by saying they used AI, when what they did could easily be done with an algorithm. Many things can be algorithms, regex filters, logic or heuristics (spam detection is an example) but nowadays people want the llm to do it first, without even thinking.
Lol yes, I was at a real estate company and their "AI tech" was scraping commercial listings and putting in Elastic Search. CEO really thought the query was AI
> Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
In the sense that it doesn’t matter if it’s AI or Algorithms. All that matters is people think it could be AI. If yes, then it is. Doesn’t matter what’s actually going on behind the scenes.
(Not that I love this reality, I don’t advocate for it, but this is how things are)
My favorite example is how Google implemented "AI" in their search console, because it just shows how completely worthless "AI" is even when used by a company that should have all the resources in the world and all the expertise to do it right.
One of the sample prompts is "How is my traffic compared to last month?" So if you type all of this text, click send, wait for Google servers to burn a liter of water to calculate a probable answer, what it gives you isn't even the answer, but an option that you can "apply." If you click on "apply," it refresh the page with a filter using the functionality that already existed in the search console. In other words, this entire LLM can't do more than you can already do by clicking on the extremely simplified buttons of the existing UI. How do you do the same thing via the UI? Click "More -> Compare -> Apply". A whole LLM to replace 3 clicks with 2 clicks + typing the prompt.
By the way, just think: if we gave people an LLM in this analytics thing, what is the number 1 question people would ask? The answer is obviously "how do I increase my clicks?" or "how do I become number 1 on Google?" You don't even need to be a product person to figure that out. That's obvious. Just completely obvious. And of course, the Google's chatbot can't answer that. Because they probably realized, instantly, that is going to be a lawsuit if they said "do X to get more clicks" and you did X and you didn't get more clicks.
I think the worst part of all this is AI managed to make software cool again while also attacking software developers for no reason at all. Instead of claiming that AI will automate everything (like hello what do you think software does?). They could have said this will create millions of new jobs by giving access to tooling that lets you create whatever you want inside of a computer and offer it up to others. I guess people just like being negative about things.
It's more profitable to eliminate employee costs than make new products. There's a reason layoffs make stock prices soar far more than product announcements.
it is somewhat sad that a company already profitable would devote it's time and energy and profits to becoming more profitable instead of doing cool shit. doing cool shit always seems to be a better idea than anything else when one has profit.
Depends on which company you are, if Nvidia announced a layoff US stock market will collapse. If Microsoft did, then they will be lauded.
Layoffs aren't indicators of success or failure, just some theoretical tea leaf reading style signal for future profits of a company. So if a company is already growing unbelievably fast layoffs are a bad sign, if a company is slowing in growth apparently having employees on business units not working out is equally a bad sign.
And for many companies these layoffs are the modern version of Roman public executions with the audience(investors) cheering it on.
Around 2013, yahoo news interviewed one of the executives at my company. You could literally see my team in the background when he said we did "Big Data". I still don't know what it was supposed to mean. Anyway, a $1.1 billion exit followed shortly after.
It's not really a pivot though, is it? As I understand it, the company went bust and sold their branding to a different company that wants to do AI infra.
To be clear, everything about Allbirds including the brand name and other IP was sold off. The shoe store will continue operating (unless or perhaps until the new owners choose to shut it down) under the name "Allbirds"; the public company doing AI infra with the stock ticker BIRD will be named "NewBird AI".
What I saw somewhere, don't know if it's true or a rumour, was that it was a wallstreet guy offering them $5M for if he could shift the strategy. So be bought a _lot_ of shares of the very cheap pre-pivot price, paid them $5M for the pivot, sold the shares at the now 600% stock increase. Netted a tidy profit after the $5M.
They didn't trade company fundamentals, they traded the market sentiment.
Didn’t even sell the branding since that got sold to the same company that buys up all sorts of brands. The ai “pivot” was a blatant last ditch effort to milk some of the stock. It’s nothing more than fraud.
They should make an app that can identify any bird. Then they will be able to justify it: we always wanted to live up to our name, the shoes were a side quest.
We live in an age when a guy who designed overblown mass-market "luxury" handbags and zero tech industry experience ends up in charge of software and hardware UX at the world's most successful mobile and computer hardware company. And be grossly incompetent, but still manage to last nearly a decade.
They didn't pivot. Their company is worthless, they sold whatever meager assets were left until they were left with only their name, and then they made an AI investment announcement to pump and dump their stock.
I'd love to read the mind of an investor that actually falls for this shit. Who actually thinks that Allbirds will see much higher returns because they "have an AI graphics division?"
I like AI, but seriously, who actually invests on this basis? Where is the critical thinking? I don't feel sympathy for any investor that gets rug pulled on this stuff.
A lot of it is prisoner's dilemma and its variants. As an investor, even if you think a particular AI shift is bullshit, you have to take into account the possibility that other investors won't - and at that point you might miss out on the gains.
This is one of the reasons stock market is so disconnected from reality.
A16Z's post on the Slack IPO (https://a16z.com/announcement/slack/) is a good pointer to the kind of thinking here. A pivot from an unprofitable game to laying off 80% of the company to a weird communication app could be fairly described as "bullshit", but when your business model is finding the rare exceptions where the stars align and a company ends up being worth billions, it's not a kind of bullshit you can afford to be entirely unreceptive to.
Allbirds sold their shoe business and is basically a SPAC that spun up an AI company under the existing publicly traded company. For all intents and purposes it’s just a new AI company.
> Who actually thinks that Allbirds will see much higher returns because they "have an AI graphics division?"
Perhaps the investment is more on the “greater fool” theory. “I think this is complete nonsense, but there’s probably someone not as savvy who will buy into this garbage idea upon which I can profit.”
AI graphics division: Putting in 100s of engineering hours to build and internal AI tool to produce AI-slopified marketing in order to save ~2h a month of human work.
>I like AI, but seriously, who actually invests on this basis? Where is the critical thinking? I don't feel sympathy for any investor that gets rug pulled on this stuff.
They don't and the people who are falling for this rhetoric are naive. Most investors _should_ invest more in AI companies. And most companies _should_ invest in AI. It is the rational move and it is exactly what we are seeing here. I don't know what the hysteria is about.
You think an investor gives a shit past "if they say this, the numbers will go up"? And the numbers mostly go up because everyone has the same mentality.
No one cares about the product any more. And that will be the end of all of this.
It’s the latest version of the meme stock craze. Nobody bought Gamespot stock because they thought it was a good long term investment. They bought it because they thought they could quickly double or triple their money and leave someone holding the bag
You might have an investment management firm that has a "tech" portfolio and a separate "clothing" portfolio. By framing themselves as a tech company they'll be put into investors' "tech" portfolio. Clients will say "I think technology is the future; invest in tech companies for me" and the money manager will buy a bunch of shares from the tech portfolio. See how it works?
The truth is that if you get in early enough on a hype train and cash out in time, you will make money. That's enough of a rational basis to participate. The ostensible purpose of it all is basically irrelevant, except as a signal to participate.
> Long Blockchain Corp., formerly known as Long Island Iced Tea Corp... Its wholly owned subsidiary Long Island Brand Beverages, LLC produced ready-to-drink iced tea and lemonade under the "Long Island" brand.
I heard an anecdote from a good friend about the opposite side of this. He manages a pub/restaurant and has a neat story about how this has changed.
At the height of COVID, food photography was very important. Because of distancing requirements and his kids health, he didn’t really have access to hiring photographers and so he invested in a good camera and a tripod, and started to learn to be restaurant’s photographer. Six years later and he’s still the photographer but he’s back to using an iPhone and he’s forgotten a lot about composition because obviously not AI generated has become a differentiator.
This has been pathetic to watch in general and first hand at the companies I've been at lately. Management scrambling to find anything to throw AI to, resulting without exception in embarrassing demos. I'm excited about AI but not this whole circus.
I'm seeing the exact same thing with colleagues past and present on LinkedIn. They know how to use Claude, so their titles are now "AI tech lead" or "Lead AI engineer" or whatever, even though they're still just building the same basic CRUD they've built their entire careers.
I think a lot of people are secretly wishing for AI to be like the crypto grift but are in for a rude shock when it is definitely not going to end up like that. We will see more and more companies become AI driven and produce AI products.
Its part of the process - some will live and some will not. But larger parts of the economy are going to be AI weighted and it will only keep increasing.
We will see more and more companies become genuinely AI driven and produce products which are actually AI. We'll also see a boom and bust cycle in companies which put an AI label on things which are not AI in any meaningful sense, and companies which build up beyond any plausible value estimate because investors desperately want anything they can call "early stage AI" in their portfolios.
I mean, frankly, no one really gets hurt by starting to use the technology only once it is in its well tested phase and known. The situations where you need to be early adopter are quite rare.
All those threats of "maximize token spend or else something unspecified horrible happens to you in the future" are super weird.
There's this new misplaced belief that most how of stock market works is by fooling the stock market with short term plays like this rebranding and then cashing out. Its attractive and speaks to the cynic in us.
The article gives three examples
- Allbirds, a shoe company
- A genetics company marketing that it is using AI
- a property tech company using AI to create 3rd landscapes
The Allbirds one is just financial re-engineering. The others are reasonable?
What the source article says is that it's a "property company" generating a "floor plan". The PR account director quoted is skeptical that their tool to do this actually is AI in a meaningful sense, but he feels that he must advertise it as AI anyway because everyone's doing it.
This is important not just for cynical reasons, but to calibrate exactly what it means when we look around and see that "everyone" is using AI these days.
Oh, come on. The specific use that the genetics company is marketing is "AI blood tests", which is obviously crap and also works to remind the reader of Theranos, which I'm sure is why you didn't mention that.
In the same paragraph as the genetics company, they also mention an "AI-powered basketball hoop" and "AI-powered lasers that – somehow – protect women from predators on crowded underground platforms." Very reasonable stuff that you forgot to mention.
I hope these companies aren't in for a shock when the younger generation rejects their brands https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/920401/g...
If negative perception towards AI grows, either because of negative experiences after having it forced on them, or as people's utility bills skyrocket, or as the environmental impact becomes more apparent, they might find that what appeals to shareholders doesn't impress the people who usually pay for their products.
My kid was an excited Duolingo user who immediately cut it off entirely as soon as he heard that they were doing something with AI. That was all it took. He heard "Duolingo's AI now" on some YouTube video, and it was immediately dead to him.
I don't think people understand just how viscerally negative the perception of AI is for the youth.
Duolingo is a game, they publish papers studying the addictive properties of their product I comparison to slot machines. They are incentivized heavily to not produce fluent learners. If he's being pushed in another direction to learn, for whatever reason, all the better for him.
Duolingo used to be a very effective gamified language learning system.
Then they decided they cared more about profits than providing a quality product.
Now they are best known for their dark patterns.
Yep, I noticed recently that on their official research portal they stopped publishing anything publicly in I think 2021. The last couple of articles before that were along these lines:
https://research.duolingo.com/papers/yancey.kdd20.pdf
I assume all the research after this point is too revealing to publish.
I wouldn’t call them effective as much as motivating. I think for people who would not be motivated otherwise, this methodology is fine actually, as the alternative is probably nothing. However if you are motivated, almost any other method is more effective then DuoLingo (or alternatives), including more effective then the old DuoLingo with the forums and everything.
It's been a little over a year, but back when I was using the app, Duolingo advertised their own AI features within the app itself. I wonder if they still do, and if so, why it took watching a YouTube video for it to sink in...
Apparently Samsung sells washing machines with AI. Yeah...
I see AI marketing as a negative indicator. Because everyone should be doing AI it’s not a differentiator. It implicitly means you don’t know what value you provide. It’s like advertising you’re cloud powered because you use AWS. Which makes recall a bunch of companies doing. What value do you provide, not what tech do you use.
> everyone should be doing AI
I don't understand this at all. I'd consider a no AI message a positive signal. Like what bandcamp is doing.
I spoke indelicately.
It's funny how many of the startup-pilled HN crowd have completely abandoned the widely accepted principles like "solve a real problem" or "make something people want" in favor of solution-first thinking "how can I shove AI into something" which was always looked down upon.
This industry has lost its collective mind with this hype cycle. I'm not even against the technology, but this is all just shockingly reckless.
I'm not advocating for being this way... but if you're starting a company primarily so you can have an "exit strategy", then it is natural to primarily virtue-signal to Wall St (instead of "solve a real problem")
tl;dr: this AI cargo-culting is ultimately unsurprising to me.
To be fair, there is a lot of acquisition capital looking for plays to throw at a wall and see if it sticks. The set of start-ups explicitly built as features, not standalone products, has always legitimately been non-zero. And when you get concentrations of acquisition capital, like we have now among the AI majors, you’ll see preference for that—versus the traditional product mode-of start-up.
Building a proper product is still good advice. But if you think you can slip that and flip a feature into a quick sale, that’s a higher ROI.
I dunno, making a "feature" that provides dubious-at-best value in hopes that potential buyers are currently so blinded by the hype they'll fall for a wider range of bullshit than normal so I can slip one by them and leave them holding the bag while I ride off into the sunset with millions seems like it could be pretty accurately described as a scam.
I guess people can dress it up as business savvy and market timing or whatever pretentious lingo they want to make themselves feel better about it, but it's really just scamming by another name.
But we're in the Scam/Grift Economy now anyway so I guess everyone is trying to get theirs while they still can, and I guess that's what we're seeing.
> making a "feature" that provides dubious-at-best value in hopes that potential buyers are currently so blinded by the hype
That’s not how these businesses are best built. Instead, the founders tend to look at what an industry should be doing, but due to incumbent politics hasn’t been able to. You build the thing from the outside, bypassing those politics. Once you have it, you’re parachuted in.
> it's really just scamming by another name
There is plenty of this in bullshit-product companies, too. At the end of the day, a bolt-on exit strategy is absolutely legitimate. Most people can’t execute on it because it requires understanding both the economic niche and high-level corporate politics at a few major players. So there is probably more noise in feature-only startups than in the broader startup ecosystem. But again, most startups fail for good reason.
"How can I shove AI into something" is just seeing if a new technology can be used to solve a problem that's already solved. It's low effort high value compared to solving a new problem. Although I agree that people are being reckless and shoving it in when it doesn't make a significant improvement.
> principles like "solve a real problem" or "make something people want"
Those have been dead for at least a decade now, and AI was not the culprit. When you can sell useless stuff that nobody knew they wanted and still make ROI, why would you limit yourself?
The thing with AI is that there is no ROI (except for Nvidia) but when world dominance with total power is the putative reward, the gambling gets more reckless than ever before.
> Because everyone should be doing AI
Why? WHY? Give me a reason that isn't "productivity", because we're not being paid more for me being more "productive".
> PR executives say UK companies are forcing them to present ordinary automation as artificial intelligence
What a time to be alive
Yup. Also ML is called AI now too at least as far as hiring managers are concerned. Adjust your resume accordingly.
"now"? The appliance industry pretty much hit the "label everything AI" button...again...within months of ChatGPT taking off.
Last time around was when "fuzzy logic" came out, I think?
I guess the appliance industry has dibs on the name AI anyway.
ML is, obviously, AI. But not all AI is ML.
The reason the term "machine learning" was even invented was because it was one of the AI winters and an euphemism was needed because "AI" was more of a swearword than a buzzword.
Every AI generation has been useful. No AI generation has been AI, including this one.
AI used to be called ML
which used to be called Statistics
which used to be called “math” or maybe “applied science.”
Obviously the underlying tech and research changed along the way… but not as much as it would seem. We’re still doing matrix operations and gradient descent and softmax, all of which has been around for a while.
This is not true because many older AI disciplines were not machine learning. A lot of work was put into tree search, logic programming, etc that we don’t count as ML. Older NLP work had little or no machine learning either.
BPM is now agentic, don’t you know.
Fun times. Although I find it hard to blame them tbh.
They’re incentived to do so because apparently investors don’t understand the difference.
Or, investors do understand the difference, but think they're buying low to sell high to "greater fools."
If the market can remain irrational longer than a fundamentals-driven investor can remain solvent, is it irrational to bet on the market remaining irrational?
I have seen both. I have heard some talking on live television about how it is a bubble, but it isn’t popping yet, so keep investing. Everyone seems to just be trying to get theirs while the party is still happening.
Fair point. Reminds me of the Warren Buffet quote:
If you've been playing poker for half an hour and you still don't know who the patsy is, you're the patsy.
To be fair, that’s not exactly a new thing, it’s just sensitive to the exact phase of the Great AI Freeze/Thaw Cycle. A lot of now-ordinary automation used to be "AI" until it become commonplace and no longer buzzword-worthy and thus no longer regarded as "AI", and/or an AI winter hit.
Last time that AI was big before DL it was the "big data" fad and everything had to be big data. Marketing has never not been about how to disguise "what we already do" as the newest buzzword that customers (or investors) want to hear.
The same goes, of course, for all the non-AI fads like "the cloud" or "NoSQL".
I understand why companies try to brand themselves as the latest and greatest tech innovation. What I don't understand is why it works or who falls for it. It's quite trivial to determine whether or not this is e.g. transformer-based AI.
I remember in the years before the pandemic that I would joke that all you had to do was "sprinkle in some blockchain" to your VC pitch and your valuation would automatically go up by tens of millions. It seemed dumb to me then and it seems dumb to me now.
> It's quite trivial to determine whether or not this is e.g. transformer-based AI.
The people who are being marketed to with the AI term don't have any idea what that mean and AI, as a marketing term (the only way it's ever been, so far, commercially used) means a lot more than transformers. My dishwasher has "AI" because it has sensors that can detect where the most dishes are.
The marketing term really just means that the product changes it's behavior without user input. A simple "if...then" is AI.
AI has been used as a marketing term for at least a decade now but LLMs are poisoning the brand because they're, largely, implemented in almost exclusively user hostile ways.
The continuous/tracking/predictive AF modes of Canon’s EOS (D)SLR cameras were famously called "AI Servo" and "AI Focus", terms coined somewhere in the late 80s I believe. The early implementations were simple dead-reckoning-based control systems, hardly "AI" even by the standards of that time.
Slightly ironically, now in the mirrorless era, and AF algorithms actually based on DL subject recognition and complex predictive algorithms, Canon has retired the "AI" label.
> The people who are being marketed to with the AI term don't have any idea what that mean and AI
To clarify, I'm mainly talking about B2B-type businesses where the marketing is to investors or other large enterprises. Despite the fact that it's popular and in vogue to think of VCs and business leaders as idiots, most of them actually do understand what AI is and the difference between "modern" AI and basic automation.
And even if you're talking about end consumers, I feel like there is a growing backlash against AI and people will think of a business that touts their "AI dishwasher" or whatever as obvious bullshit and see it as a net negative.
VCs, PE and investors in general. Not all, but enough. Watch CNBC or Yahoo News for even 10 minutes—the sheer stupidity and mania around AI right now is frankly terrifying.
I think it is some sort of virtue signaling of being grifters and abusing the system for short term profit etc.
Well I think most investors are dumb as rocks. I'm not sure most even know what a transformer is, or what LLM stands for.
Same thing with blockchain. I talked to many, many non-tech people who were very excited about blockchain. Most could not explain what, exactly, blockchain is.
I think just the co opting of the word intelligence is the bigger con.
It doesn't make sense though. If a company builds automation and I need a company to build automation for me, that's good to market yourself that way.
If a company says "we build automation using AI", ehh, I'd probably cut out the middleman and use AI myself...
This is different from marketing around the cloud or big data.
Remember when crypto was hot and everything had crypto.
Remember the Internet was first hot and everything was iThis or Active That. iPhone still has i.
Remember… well not, me, I wasn’t alive… when radiation was cool and Radioactive was in.
Everyone always wants to be cool.
Before the iPhone was the iPod, and before the iPod I had an iRiver mp3 player. There was certainly a trend and only Apple's product survived that one.
Because the trend started with the iMac.
i<Something>.com was very common during the first dot-com boom. "e" prefixes were also common but I think "i" was more prevalent.
My favorite was block chain. A company I used to work for that was not a tech company, suddenly going on about the block chain. I saw former, non technical colleagues that were still there write long authoritative LinkedIn posts about the advantages of the block chain and it was incredibly cringey because I am not sure what they thought the block chain was, but I am confident they didn’t understand it at all.
E-something was the big trend before i-something and we still have ebay and email (although only the former is a brand name).
Oracle is the hilarious version of this -
9i - "internet"
10g - "grid"
11g - "also grid"
12c - "cloud"
26ai - "ai"
various other examples. One really annoying thing is this has also happened in open source projects too - generic things that, sure, help out with AI tasks are now "AI" things.
reminds me of the long blockchain corporation
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Blockchain_Corp.
2 yrs ago I saw some company raise a million dollars by saying they used AI, when what they did could easily be done with an algorithm. Many things can be algorithms, regex filters, logic or heuristics (spam detection is an example) but nowadays people want the llm to do it first, without even thinking.
Lol yes, I was at a real estate company and their "AI tech" was scraping commercial listings and putting in Elastic Search. CEO really thought the query was AI
I think this quote is relevant:
> Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
In the sense that it doesn’t matter if it’s AI or Algorithms. All that matters is people think it could be AI. If yes, then it is. Doesn’t matter what’s actually going on behind the scenes.
(Not that I love this reality, I don’t advocate for it, but this is how things are)
My favorite example is how Google implemented "AI" in their search console, because it just shows how completely worthless "AI" is even when used by a company that should have all the resources in the world and all the expertise to do it right.
One of the sample prompts is "How is my traffic compared to last month?" So if you type all of this text, click send, wait for Google servers to burn a liter of water to calculate a probable answer, what it gives you isn't even the answer, but an option that you can "apply." If you click on "apply," it refresh the page with a filter using the functionality that already existed in the search console. In other words, this entire LLM can't do more than you can already do by clicking on the extremely simplified buttons of the existing UI. How do you do the same thing via the UI? Click "More -> Compare -> Apply". A whole LLM to replace 3 clicks with 2 clicks + typing the prompt.
By the way, just think: if we gave people an LLM in this analytics thing, what is the number 1 question people would ask? The answer is obviously "how do I increase my clicks?" or "how do I become number 1 on Google?" You don't even need to be a product person to figure that out. That's obvious. Just completely obvious. And of course, the Google's chatbot can't answer that. Because they probably realized, instantly, that is going to be a lawsuit if they said "do X to get more clicks" and you did X and you didn't get more clicks.
I've been rejecting pitch decks like that for 2 years.
but too many others have not
I think the worst part of all this is AI managed to make software cool again while also attacking software developers for no reason at all. Instead of claiming that AI will automate everything (like hello what do you think software does?). They could have said this will create millions of new jobs by giving access to tooling that lets you create whatever you want inside of a computer and offer it up to others. I guess people just like being negative about things.
It's more profitable to eliminate employee costs than make new products. There's a reason layoffs make stock prices soar far more than product announcements.
it is somewhat sad that a company already profitable would devote it's time and energy and profits to becoming more profitable instead of doing cool shit. doing cool shit always seems to be a better idea than anything else when one has profit.
Depends on which company you are, if Nvidia announced a layoff US stock market will collapse. If Microsoft did, then they will be lauded.
Layoffs aren't indicators of success or failure, just some theoretical tea leaf reading style signal for future profits of a company. So if a company is already growing unbelievably fast layoffs are a bad sign, if a company is slowing in growth apparently having employees on business units not working out is equally a bad sign.
And for many companies these layoffs are the modern version of Roman public executions with the audience(investors) cheering it on.
But it's completely different from companies adding ".com" to their name in the 90s!
Two past co's I know well rebranded themselves as "cloud" a decade ago with a narrow definition
Spin up a VM at some hosting company... "we're a cloud company now."
Around 2013, yahoo news interviewed one of the executives at my company. You could literally see my team in the background when he said we did "Big Data". I still don't know what it was supposed to mean. Anyway, a $1.1 billion exit followed shortly after.
I'm doing Quantum Crypto AI next.
My favourite is Allbirds that pivoted from eco friendly shoes to AI infrastructure. How do you even make that decision?
It's not really a pivot though, is it? As I understand it, the company went bust and sold their branding to a different company that wants to do AI infra.
Branding not used for its intended purpose is about as useful as calling your landscaping company four seasons.
To be clear, everything about Allbirds including the brand name and other IP was sold off. The shoe store will continue operating (unless or perhaps until the new owners choose to shut it down) under the name "Allbirds"; the public company doing AI infra with the stock ticker BIRD will be named "NewBird AI".
What I saw somewhere, don't know if it's true or a rumour, was that it was a wallstreet guy offering them $5M for if he could shift the strategy. So be bought a _lot_ of shares of the very cheap pre-pivot price, paid them $5M for the pivot, sold the shares at the now 600% stock increase. Netted a tidy profit after the $5M.
They didn't trade company fundamentals, they traded the market sentiment.
a.k.a. textbook bubble behavior
Didn’t even sell the branding since that got sold to the same company that buys up all sorts of brands. The ai “pivot” was a blatant last ditch effort to milk some of the stock. It’s nothing more than fraud.
why not Aibirds then, it's almost like Allbirds?
They should make an app that can identify any bird. Then they will be able to justify it: we always wanted to live up to our name, the shoes were a side quest.
We live in an age when a guy who designed overblown mass-market "luxury" handbags and zero tech industry experience ends up in charge of software and hardware UX at the world's most successful mobile and computer hardware company. And be grossly incompetent, but still manage to last nearly a decade.
So.... Who's is it then?
Are you referring to Joanie or Alan Dye? I still can’t understand why an adult chose to go by Joanie in their professional career.
Don’t believe his lies, Jony rhymes with bony, Jonny rhymes with bonny.
They didn't pivot. Their company is worthless, they sold whatever meager assets were left until they were left with only their name, and then they made an AI investment announcement to pump and dump their stock.
The house of cards is falling already, if you are an user/consumer, more and more are rejecting anything with AI in it.
Once that affects people taking the blue pill, and that is happening fast, products and services with AI in it will have no public interest.
I remember stores in the 1990s about the "internet-compatible mouse pad" and the lumbar company that changed its name to "lumbar.com."
Granted, I can't find anything with quick Google searches, so I don't know if these are true or just jokes about the hype back then.
https://www.nytimes.com/1998/05/18/business/from-oil-to-fish...
The more things change, the more they stay the same :)
I seriously thought "AI washing" was going to be scrubbing all references to AI in public-facing documents.
I assumed it was laundering bad ideas, as in "it wasn't us being incompetent, we trusted the LLM!"
That'll depend on which way public sentiment goes
I'd love to read the mind of an investor that actually falls for this shit. Who actually thinks that Allbirds will see much higher returns because they "have an AI graphics division?"
I like AI, but seriously, who actually invests on this basis? Where is the critical thinking? I don't feel sympathy for any investor that gets rug pulled on this stuff.
A lot of it is prisoner's dilemma and its variants. As an investor, even if you think a particular AI shift is bullshit, you have to take into account the possibility that other investors won't - and at that point you might miss out on the gains.
This is one of the reasons stock market is so disconnected from reality.
But wouldn’t it be a failure if it’s bullshit and therefore no gains?
Not if you sell before the other fools.
A16Z's post on the Slack IPO (https://a16z.com/announcement/slack/) is a good pointer to the kind of thinking here. A pivot from an unprofitable game to laying off 80% of the company to a weird communication app could be fairly described as "bullshit", but when your business model is finding the rare exceptions where the stars align and a company ends up being worth billions, it's not a kind of bullshit you can afford to be entirely unreceptive to.
its greater fool theory https://moneyterms.co.uk/greater-fool/
Allbirds sold their shoe business and is basically a SPAC that spun up an AI company under the existing publicly traded company. For all intents and purposes it’s just a new AI company.
> Who actually thinks that Allbirds will see much higher returns because they "have an AI graphics division?"
Perhaps the investment is more on the “greater fool” theory. “I think this is complete nonsense, but there’s probably someone not as savvy who will buy into this garbage idea upon which I can profit.”
https://youtu.be/oVItKzP6IBY
Or just investment quotas requiring AI in the portfolio. I suspect it's mostly this. Or getting included in more indices etc.
The more trendy boxes you tick, the broader the universe of people whose box you tick and who can thus invest.
AI graphics division: Putting in 100s of engineering hours to build and internal AI tool to produce AI-slopified marketing in order to save ~2h a month of human work.
Investors by nature lap up hype, and it seems to work for them
>I like AI, but seriously, who actually invests on this basis? Where is the critical thinking? I don't feel sympathy for any investor that gets rug pulled on this stuff.
They don't and the people who are falling for this rhetoric are naive. Most investors _should_ invest more in AI companies. And most companies _should_ invest in AI. It is the rational move and it is exactly what we are seeing here. I don't know what the hysteria is about.
They're almost certainly hoping for a Greater Fool.
You think an investor gives a shit past "if they say this, the numbers will go up"? And the numbers mostly go up because everyone has the same mentality.
No one cares about the product any more. And that will be the end of all of this.
The same investor who will buy SpaceX at 250 PE. They are all over the place, hence all the AI washing.
It’s the latest version of the meme stock craze. Nobody bought Gamespot stock because they thought it was a good long term investment. They bought it because they thought they could quickly double or triple their money and leave someone holding the bag
You might have an investment management firm that has a "tech" portfolio and a separate "clothing" portfolio. By framing themselves as a tech company they'll be put into investors' "tech" portfolio. Clients will say "I think technology is the future; invest in tech companies for me" and the money manager will buy a bunch of shares from the tech portfolio. See how it works?
The truth is that if you get in early enough on a hype train and cash out in time, you will make money. That's enough of a rational basis to participate. The ostensible purpose of it all is basically irrelevant, except as a signal to participate.
You have to realize rich people can be stupid too.
> I'd love to read the mind of an investor that actually falls for this shit
Investment is mostly gambling with a coat of paint. It just feels slightly more serious than blackjack.
Nothing new
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Blockchain_Corp.
> Long Blockchain Corp., formerly known as Long Island Iced Tea Corp... Its wholly owned subsidiary Long Island Brand Beverages, LLC produced ready-to-drink iced tea and lemonade under the "Long Island" brand.
Every consultant at every consultancy firm is now suddenly an AI expert.
In actuality AI is the consultant.
Of course most companies can't effectively surf the wave of an extremely rapidly evolving technology. They all want to look like they are, though.
In 2005 there was one particular cyber security company that comes to mind that had AI claims on their front page. It was a perl script.
When I read the title, I thought companies were trying to hide the fact that they are using AI due to backlash.
Anyone remember Long Island Ice Tea?
So a company's success today may depend on how clickbaity their business model is.
Apparently since success=valuation and not profit.
I heard an anecdote from a good friend about the opposite side of this. He manages a pub/restaurant and has a neat story about how this has changed.
At the height of COVID, food photography was very important. Because of distancing requirements and his kids health, he didn’t really have access to hiring photographers and so he invested in a good camera and a tripod, and started to learn to be restaurant’s photographer. Six years later and he’s still the photographer but he’s back to using an iPhone and he’s forgotten a lot about composition because obviously not AI generated has become a differentiator.
Funny how few companies are rebranding themselves as Blockchain companies anymore. Tech trends crack me up. Greed is shameless.
This has been pathetic to watch in general and first hand at the companies I've been at lately. Management scrambling to find anything to throw AI to, resulting without exception in embarrassing demos. I'm excited about AI but not this whole circus.
I'm seeing the exact same thing with colleagues past and present on LinkedIn. They know how to use Claude, so their titles are now "AI tech lead" or "Lead AI engineer" or whatever, even though they're still just building the same basic CRUD they've built their entire careers.
I just hope there's .ai domains for all of them.
A while back we ran out of .com domains and that burst the bubble. Or something like this.
Do you guys remember when everything tried to become blockchain too? :’)
Don't forget NFT :)
There was a line in one of The Walking Dead TV show spin-offs, something like:
”I've known men who inspire fear. Do you know what they have in common? They never say how frightening they are.”
And here we are.
”I’ve known companies that work on AI. Do you know what they have in common?...”
The Geto Boys shared a similar sentiment in their song Damn It Feels Good To Be A Gangsta.
A genuine gangster doesn't feel a need to flex their power, because such gauche displays only highlight one's own insecurities and weaknesses
I learned about that song from "Office Space!"
It will be challenging for non-tech people to present themselves as tech.
Especially those who have not implemented software in businesses trying to suddenly boil the ocean with AI.
AI remains a great step forward to help businesses benefit from technology, with more than one competency around the table.
I think a lot of people are secretly wishing for AI to be like the crypto grift but are in for a rude shock when it is definitely not going to end up like that. We will see more and more companies become AI driven and produce AI products.
To think otherwise is naive.
No doubt we will see more companies. Will they be able to actually make enough profit to justify their valuations? That remains to be seen.
Its part of the process - some will live and some will not. But larger parts of the economy are going to be AI weighted and it will only keep increasing.
We will see more and more companies become genuinely AI driven and produce products which are actually AI. We'll also see a boom and bust cycle in companies which put an AI label on things which are not AI in any meaningful sense, and companies which build up beyond any plausible value estimate because investors desperately want anything they can call "early stage AI" in their portfolios.
I mean, frankly, no one really gets hurt by starting to use the technology only once it is in its well tested phase and known. The situations where you need to be early adopter are quite rare.
All those threats of "maximize token spend or else something unspecified horrible happens to you in the future" are super weird.
Well, we saw more and more shitcoins and companies releasing NFTs too.
That's how the hype cycle works.
There's this new misplaced belief that most how of stock market works is by fooling the stock market with short term plays like this rebranding and then cashing out. Its attractive and speaks to the cynic in us.
The article gives three examples
- Allbirds, a shoe company
- A genetics company marketing that it is using AI
- a property tech company using AI to create 3rd landscapes
The Allbirds one is just financial re-engineering. The others are reasonable?
What the source article says is that it's a "property company" generating a "floor plan". The PR account director quoted is skeptical that their tool to do this actually is AI in a meaningful sense, but he feels that he must advertise it as AI anyway because everyone's doing it.
This is important not just for cynical reasons, but to calibrate exactly what it means when we look around and see that "everyone" is using AI these days.
Oh, come on. The specific use that the genetics company is marketing is "AI blood tests", which is obviously crap and also works to remind the reader of Theranos, which I'm sure is why you didn't mention that.
In the same paragraph as the genetics company, they also mention an "AI-powered basketball hoop" and "AI-powered lasers that – somehow – protect women from predators on crowded underground platforms." Very reasonable stuff that you forgot to mention.