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> Whitney Wolfe Herd, the founder of the dating app Bumble, proclaimed last year that the platform may soon allow users to automate dating itself, disrupting ol

by pmdr 1y ago

> Whitney Wolfe Herd, the founder of the dating app Bumble, proclaimed last year that the platform may soon allow users to automate dating itself, disrupting old-fashioned human courtship by providing them with an AI “dating concierge” that will interact with other users’ concierges until the chatbots find a good fit. > Herd doubled down on these claims in a lengthy New York Times interview last month. Seriously, what is wrong with these people?

quickthrowman 1y ago
Well, her specific problem is she was a billionaire but isn’t one now so she’ll say damn near anything to regain that third comma. Nothing more than greed. Match just keeps Bumble around to avoid antitrust legislation, similar to Google and Mozilla’s position. Edit: It’s not that wild of an idea anyways, there’s a good black mirror episode about it.
jajko 1y ago
if it works (from their perspective), it ain't stupid
acdha 1y ago
Her problem is that BMBL is down 92% and they need to tell investors that they’ll all be rich again: https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/BMBL/ https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/BMBL/ Most of the dumb AI pitches share that basic goal: someone is starting from what investors want to be true and using “AI” like it’s a magic spell which can make that possible, just as we’ve seen going back to the dawn of the web. Sober voices don't get attention because it’s boring to repeat a 10% performance improvement or reduction in cost.
- codethief 1y ago
  > Her problem is that BMBL is down 92% and they need to tell investors that they’ll all be rich again Is this also why Bumble has undergone so many drastic changes in recent times? I always thought they must hired some new & overzealous product managers that didn't actually understand the secret sauce that had made their product so successful in the first place. Either way, it seems the usual enshittification has begun.
  - acdha 1y ago
    I don’t have any inside knowledge but that’d be my working theory for anything like that: some PM has been told that their job depends on making a number go from X to 2X by the end of the year.
- Lerc 1y ago
  I haven't seen any measure of how frequent these dumb ideas are. Certainly they exist, but what proportion of AI startups are like these cases that turn up in the media as AI disasters. It's kind of hard to tell with some ideas that they are actually dumb ideas until they have been tried an failed. A few ideas that seem dumb when suggested turn out to be reasonable when tried. Quite a few are revealed to be just as dumb as they looked. Thinking about it like that actually more comfortable with the idea of investors putting money into dumb ideas, They have taken responsibility for deciding for themselves how dumb they think something might be. It's their money (even if I do have issues with the mechanisms that allowed them to acquire it), let them spend it on things that they feel might possibly work. I think there should be a distinction made between dumb seeming ideas and deception though. Saying 'I think people will want this' or 'I think AI can solve this problem' is a very different thing to manufacturing data to say "people want this", or telling people a problem has been solved when it hasn't. There's probably too much of this, and I doubt it is limited to AI startups, or even Startups of any kind. There are probably quite a few 'respectable' seeming companies that are, from time to time, prepared to fudge data to make it seem that some of the problems ahead of them are already behind them.
sh34r 1y ago
I’ve been asking myself that question regarding dating app companies for 10 years. The status quo is so dystopian already. Sure, go ahead, put an LLM in it. How much worse could it get than a glorified ELO rating?

by pmdr 1y ago

quickthrowman 1y ago

Well, her specific problem is she was a billionaire but isn’t one now so she’ll say damn near anything to regain that third comma. Nothing more than greed. Match just keeps Bumble around to avoid antitrust legislation, similar to Google and Mozilla’s position. Edit: It’s not that wild of an idea anyways, there’s a good black mirror episode about it.

jajko 1y ago

if it works (from their perspective), it ain't stupid

acdha 1y ago

Her problem is that BMBL is down 92% and they need to tell investors that they’ll all be rich again: https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/BMBL/ https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/BMBL/ Most of the dumb AI pitches share that basic goal: someone is starting from what investors want to be true and using “AI” like it’s a magic spell which can make that possible, just as we’ve seen going back to the dawn of the web. Sober voices don't get attention because it’s boring to repeat a 10% performance improvement or reduction in cost.

codethief 1y ago
> Her problem is that BMBL is down 92% and they need to tell investors that they’ll all be rich again Is this also why Bumble has undergone so many drastic changes in recent times? I always thought they must hired some new & overzealous product managers that didn't actually understand the secret sauce that had made their product so successful in the first place. Either way, it seems the usual enshittification has begun.
- acdha 1y ago
  I don’t have any inside knowledge but that’d be my working theory for anything like that: some PM has been told that their job depends on making a number go from X to 2X by the end of the year.
Lerc 1y ago
I haven't seen any measure of how frequent these dumb ideas are. Certainly they exist, but what proportion of AI startups are like these cases that turn up in the media as AI disasters. It's kind of hard to tell with some ideas that they are actually dumb ideas until they have been tried an failed. A few ideas that seem dumb when suggested turn out to be reasonable when tried. Quite a few are revealed to be just as dumb as they looked. Thinking about it like that actually more comfortable with the idea of investors putting money into dumb ideas, They have taken responsibility for deciding for themselves how dumb they think something might be. It's their money (even if I do have issues with the mechanisms that allowed them to acquire it), let them spend it on things that they feel might possibly work. I think there should be a distinction made between dumb seeming ideas and deception though. Saying 'I think people will want this' or 'I think AI can solve this problem' is a very different thing to manufacturing data to say "people want this", or telling people a problem has been solved when it hasn't. There's probably too much of this, and I doubt it is limited to AI startups, or even Startups of any kind. There are probably quite a few 'respectable' seeming companies that are, from time to time, prepared to fudge data to make it seem that some of the problems ahead of them are already behind them.

sh34r 1y ago

I’ve been asking myself that question regarding dating app companies for 10 years. The status quo is so dystopian already. Sure, go ahead, put an LLM in it. How much worse could it get than a glorified ELO rating?