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.

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".

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.

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.

BPM is now agentic, don’t you know.

Yup. Also ML is called AI now too at least as far as hiring managers are concerned. Adjust your resume accordingly.

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.

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.

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

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.

Spin up a VM at some hosting company... "we're a cloud company now."

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.

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.

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.

You have to realize rich people can be stupid too.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

https://youtu.be/oVItKzP6IBY

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.

Apparently since success=valuation and not profit.

Don't forget NFT :)

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

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.

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.

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.