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.
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.
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.
Not the person you asked, but my nephews and mentees (all under 18), very plainly see it as the destruction of their own future careers (regardless of field), assimilation of everything meaningful humans have ever created into a copy machine , massive privacy violations, wrecking the environment and generally run by some of the biggest sociopaths in human history. When looking at it practically over the last few years, I think a lot of younger folk don’t see any upsides.
I’m very pro-AI myself, but think the kids are quite right in their perspective, and that the tech companies designing and pushing this tech are in for a bad time when this wave finally comes crashing down on them.
Personally I don't think the environment is a factor, because young people seem just fine with crypto. I also don't think the privacy issue is a factor because young people don't have much that can be stolen, and if anything they're the ones stealing (movies etc) without guilt.
That's an interesting point regarding crypto. My guess is that most young people have very low exposure to crypto, with it being kind of a niche subcultural thing at this point after its height of cultural relevance in 2021, whereas AI is simply everywhere and is inescapable.
Its perfectly fine to automate away everyone else's job...except their own and their immediate family's. Then we're supposed to be anti-tech and this site becomes a political one.
That is unless you bring up wars or fascism or genocide. Because politics is off limits.
this is a forum for a venture capital firm, everything here is political no matter how the average poster like to pretend it isn't and complaining won't override the financial incentives involved
You're being downvoted because you appear to be not asking genuinely and you're trying to cast doubt instead of seeking to understand.
Because at this point there's really no excuse for not having any idea why people are mad about AI. If you can't guess it's because you're intentionally ignorant of the problem. Because "just asking" is a specific strategy used do doubt and discredit anyone you disagree with.
So you... weren't... asking genuinely. You already came to a conclusion and just wanted to argue.
Even if it's "secretly" #2 for most people, is that even unreasonable?
It's so bizarre to me that people are acting like a supposedly existential threat on their livelihood is not a reasonable complaint or fear. Historically people, like, behead other people for that.
I don't know, I'm older so I have much less fear about my livelihood but I can't blame young people for being worried about it. And, if they are, for choosing not to use AI. In a way, you could argue that using AI is self-destructive.
The idea that building a hive machine world of ultimate efficiency is a moral imperative greater than creating a good and fair life for the living people of the world is psychotic. We could of course use AI to benefit everyone, but it's so incredibly obvious to everyone that's not going to happen and its hand waved. That's insulting.
I'm just saying I don't see that much here. Most of the negativity is something like "its just a token generator".
I don't care about downvotes. I'm just said that from my perspective anything positive about AI on this site will be met with them. What a twist for a tech site.
> from my perspective anything positive about AI on this site will be met with them. What a twist for a tech site.
Yes, people are hostile towards a crappy technology that doesn't work as advertised, and is looking like it will cause job shortages because companies are trying to lean on the tech even though it doesn't work. That shouldn't be remotely surprising.
>But I suspect it's a front because the posters don't want to admit #2. Hence my question.
And that's why you're getting reflexively downvoted. Because we can already tell by the way you telegraphed the question you aren't worth wasting time on. As it turns out, some of us don't think our youth shouldn't be able to have the same opportunities we did because a bunch of techies got the financial sector to go all in on greedmaxing. Those of us that actually believe in keeping society functional find very little to be recommended by blind "believer" types who just think you can yank the rug out from under your descendants, and force them to have to shape their life around choices you think are cool.
One can be a tech enthusiast and still see that AI is crack cocaine to the type of people who'd set society on fire given they can find someone to help them think through the implementation details, which before AI, was basically the last control the professional caste had over the Capital class. The kids can understand this. Strangely, there is a surprising number of adults who don't seem to ever make the jump to understanding not everyone has entirely benevolent intentions hidden behind their smile.
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.
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.
> 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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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)
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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'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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
> 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.”
>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.
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 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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> it was immediately dead to him
Can you elaborate on why he has such a negative view of AI? Genuinely curious.
Edit: downvoted already as expected. What a joke of a tech community this site is becoming.
Not the person you asked, but my nephews and mentees (all under 18), very plainly see it as the destruction of their own future careers (regardless of field), assimilation of everything meaningful humans have ever created into a copy machine , massive privacy violations, wrecking the environment and generally run by some of the biggest sociopaths in human history. When looking at it practically over the last few years, I think a lot of younger folk don’t see any upsides.
I’m very pro-AI myself, but think the kids are quite right in their perspective, and that the tech companies designing and pushing this tech are in for a bad time when this wave finally comes crashing down on them.
That makes sense and matches my perspective, thanks for answering.
I don't normally see anyone on this site admit they are afraid of losing their jobs.
My comment here repeats that: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48260369
Personally I don't think the environment is a factor, because young people seem just fine with crypto. I also don't think the privacy issue is a factor because young people don't have much that can be stolen, and if anything they're the ones stealing (movies etc) without guilt.
That's an interesting point regarding crypto. My guess is that most young people have very low exposure to crypto, with it being kind of a niche subcultural thing at this point after its height of cultural relevance in 2021, whereas AI is simply everywhere and is inescapable.
And I'm frequently amazed how tone deaf tech people are and how disconnected from the general population. ;)
OK got it.
Its perfectly fine to automate away everyone else's job...except their own and their immediate family's. Then we're supposed to be anti-tech and this site becomes a political one.
That is unless you bring up wars or fascism or genocide. Because politics is off limits.
this is a forum for a venture capital firm, everything here is political no matter how the average poster like to pretend it isn't and complaining won't override the financial incentives involved
You're being downvoted because you appear to be not asking genuinely and you're trying to cast doubt instead of seeking to understand.
Because at this point there's really no excuse for not having any idea why people are mad about AI. If you can't guess it's because you're intentionally ignorant of the problem. Because "just asking" is a specific strategy used do doubt and discredit anyone you disagree with.
> You're being downvoted because you appear to be not asking genuinely
I literally said I was asking genuinely.
It's either one of two reasons imo:
1. Their son hates "ai slop" and doesn't think AI is useful.
2. Their son is afraid of not being employable.
I see #1 the most here.
But I suspect it's a front because the posters don't want to admit #2. Hence my question.
I figured it's easier for someone to admit someone else is afraid than admit they are.
So you... weren't... asking genuinely. You already came to a conclusion and just wanted to argue.
Even if it's "secretly" #2 for most people, is that even unreasonable?
It's so bizarre to me that people are acting like a supposedly existential threat on their livelihood is not a reasonable complaint or fear. Historically people, like, behead other people for that.
I don't know, I'm older so I have much less fear about my livelihood but I can't blame young people for being worried about it. And, if they are, for choosing not to use AI. In a way, you could argue that using AI is self-destructive.
The idea that building a hive machine world of ultimate efficiency is a moral imperative greater than creating a good and fair life for the living people of the world is psychotic. We could of course use AI to benefit everyone, but it's so incredibly obvious to everyone that's not going to happen and its hand waved. That's insulting.
You're putting a lot of words in my mouth.
I shared my assumption.
I asked the question to get a real perspective from someone who was already sharing. I didn't know their answer before I asked and still don't.
Also I never said #2 was unreasonable. And I don't blame anyone for being fearful either.
But there is an anti-tech sentiment on this tech site, and I find ironic and disappointing.
Why would no one want to admit #2? I’m afraid.
Also it feels like you responded to “people are downvoting you because it feels like a gotcha” with “yes, it is in fact a gotcha”
I'm just saying I don't see that much here. Most of the negativity is something like "its just a token generator".
I don't care about downvotes. I'm just said that from my perspective anything positive about AI on this site will be met with them. What a twist for a tech site.
> from my perspective anything positive about AI on this site will be met with them. What a twist for a tech site.
Yes, people are hostile towards a crappy technology that doesn't work as advertised, and is looking like it will cause job shortages because companies are trying to lean on the tech even though it doesn't work. That shouldn't be remotely surprising.
>But I suspect it's a front because the posters don't want to admit #2. Hence my question.
And that's why you're getting reflexively downvoted. Because we can already tell by the way you telegraphed the question you aren't worth wasting time on. As it turns out, some of us don't think our youth shouldn't be able to have the same opportunities we did because a bunch of techies got the financial sector to go all in on greedmaxing. Those of us that actually believe in keeping society functional find very little to be recommended by blind "believer" types who just think you can yank the rug out from under your descendants, and force them to have to shape their life around choices you think are cool.
One can be a tech enthusiast and still see that AI is crack cocaine to the type of people who'd set society on fire given they can find someone to help them think through the implementation details, which before AI, was basically the last control the professional caste had over the Capital class. The kids can understand this. Strangely, there is a surprising number of adults who don't seem to ever make the jump to understanding not everyone has entirely benevolent intentions hidden behind their smile.
> PR executives say UK companies are forcing them to present ordinary automation as artificial intelligence
What a time to be alive
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.
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.
> 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 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.
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.
I think it is some sort of virtue signaling of being grifters and abusing the system for short term profit etc.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Yup. Also ML is called AI now too at least as far as hiring managers are concerned. Adjust your resume accordingly.
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.
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.
"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.
BPM is now agentic, don’t you know.
But it's completely different from companies adding ".com" to their name in the 90s!
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.
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)
I've been rejecting pitch decks like that for 2 years.
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
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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".
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?
Anyone remember Long Island Ice Tea?
I seriously thought "AI washing" was going to be scrubbing all references to AI in public-facing documents.
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.
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.
Every consultant at every consultancy firm is now suddenly an AI expert.
In actuality AI is the consultant.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
You have to realize rich people can be stupid too.
Investors by nature lap up hype, and it seems to work for them
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.
They're almost certainly hoping for a Greater Fool.
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.
its greater fool theory https://moneyterms.co.uk/greater-fool/
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.
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.
https://youtu.be/oVItKzP6IBY
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
The same investor who will buy SpaceX at 250 PE. They are all over the place, hence all the AI washing.
> 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.”
>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.
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.
So a company's success today may depend on how clickbaity their business model is.
Apparently since success=valuation and not profit.
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.
Funny how few companies are rebranding themselves as Blockchain companies anymore. Tech trends crack me up. Greed is shameless.
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.
Do you guys remember when everything tried to become blockchain too? :’)
Don't forget NFT :)
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.