Even in the midwest I've seen this a lot in the last year or two. A couple months ago I was suspicious about the CEO of a startup's claims of "machine learning"

Even in the midwest I've seen this a lot in the last year or two. A couple months ago I was suspicious about the CEO of a startup's claims of "machine learning", so I pressed him on it; turns out it was much less ambitious than his pitch made it sound. On the part of that CEO, he was probably making a smart pitch because most investors, _especially_ around here, aren't going to know enough to call this out, and are going to fully believe the company pitching has a magical ML-black-box giving them a significant edge over the competition.