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'AI washing': firms are scrambling to rebrand themselves as tech-focused
- solenoid0937 5mo agoI'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.
- enraged_camel 5mo agoA 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.
- somewhatgoated 5mo agoBut wouldn’t it be a failure if it’s bullshit and therefore no gains?
- tokai 5mo agoNot if you sell before the other fools.
- SpicyLemonZest 5mo agoA16Z's post on the Slack IPO (https://a16z.com/announcement/slack/ 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.
- graemep 5mo agoits greater fool theory https://moneyterms.co.uk/greater-fool/ https://moneyterms.co.uk/greater-fool/
- ch4s3 5mo agoAllbirds 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.
- teeray 5mo ago> 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.”
- newaccountman2 5mo agohttps://youtu.be/oVItKzP6IBY https://youtu.be/oVItKzP6IBY
- rich_sasha 5mo agoOr 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.
- estetlinus 5mo agoAI 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.
- arealaccount 5mo agoInvestors by nature lap up hype, and it seems to work for them
- simianwords 5mo ago>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.
- cyphar 5mo agoThey're almost certainly hoping for a Greater Fool.
- cryo32 5mo agoYou 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.
- jgalt212 5mo agoThe same investor who will buy SpaceX at 250 PE. They are all over the place, hence all the AI washing.
- brewdad 5mo agoIt’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
- nish__ 5mo agoYou 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?
- lifeformed 5mo agoThe 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.
- etempleton 5mo agoYou have to realize rich people can be stupid too.
- surgical_fire 5mo ago> 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.
- j45 5mo agoIt 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.
- throwoutway 5mo agoTwo past co's I know well rebranded themselves as "cloud" a decade ago with a narrow definition
- SoftTalker 5mo agoSpin up a VM at some hosting company... "we're a cloud company now."
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- jamwise 5mo agoMy favourite is Allbirds that pivoted from eco friendly shoes to AI infrastructure. How do you even make that decision?
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- root_axis 5mo agoIt'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.
- kjkjadksj 5mo agoBranding not used for its intended purpose is about as useful as calling your landscaping company four seasons.
- SpicyLemonZest 5mo agoTo 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".
- kjkjadksj 5mo agoSo all this ai company wanted was the stock ticker?
- duttish 5mo agoWhat 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.
- gum_wobble 5mo ago> PR executives say UK companies are forcing them to present ordinary automation as artificial intelligence What a time to be alive
- picsao 5mo ago[dead]
- kjkjadksj 5mo agoYup. Also ML is called AI now too at least as far as hiring managers are concerned. Adjust your resume accordingly.
- KennyBlanken 5mo ago"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?
- bee_rider 5mo agoI guess the appliance industry has dibs on the name AI anyway.
- Sharlin 5mo agoML 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.
- croon 5mo agoEvery AI generation has been useful. No AI generation has been AI, including this one.
- shermantanktop 5mo agoAI 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.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- halfcat 5mo agoThere 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?...”
- Rebelgecko 5mo agoThe 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
- runamuck 5mo agoI learned about that song from "Office Space!"
- rich_sasha 5mo agoI 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.
- simianwords 5mo agoThere'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?
- SpicyLemonZest 5mo agoWhat 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.
- miyoji 5mo agoOh, 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.
- simianwords 5mo agoI 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.
- amanaplanacanal 5mo agoNo doubt we will see more companies. Will they be able to actually make enough profit to justify their valuations? That remains to be seen.
- simianwords 5mo agoIts 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.
- SpicyLemonZest 5mo agoWe 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.
- watwut 5mo agoI 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.
- surgical_fire 5mo agoWell, we saw more and more shitcoins and companies releasing NFTs too. That's how the hype cycle works.
- andai 5mo agoSo a company's success today may depend on how clickbaity their business model is.
- ngruhn 5mo agoApparently since success=valuation and not profit.
- b3ing 5mo ago2 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.
- gedy 5mo agoLol 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
- cj 5mo agoI 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)
- AlienRobot 5mo agoMy 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.
- 65 5mo agoFunny how few companies are rebranding themselves as Blockchain companies anymore. Tech trends crack me up. Greed is shameless.
- regexorcist 5mo agoThis 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.
- alansaber 5mo agoOf course most companies can't effectively surf the wave of an extremely rapidly evolving technology. They all want to look like they are, though.
- hluska 5mo agoI 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.
- mnky9800n 5mo agoI 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.
- fnimick 5mo agoIt'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.
- mnky9800n 5mo agoit 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.
- minraws 5mo agoDepends 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.
- autoexec 5mo agoI hope these companies aren't in for a shock when the younger generation rejects their brands https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/920401/gen-z-ai 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.
- CobrastanJorji 5mo agoMy 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.
- thunky 5mo ago[flagged]
- cyclopeanutopia 5mo agoAnd I'm frequently amazed how tone deaf tech people are and how disconnected from the general population. ;)
- thunky 5mo agoOK 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.
- wu2Fe7sp 5mo ago
- kylehotchkiss 5mo agoDo you guys remember when everything tried to become blockchain too? :’)
- kkotak 5mo agoDon't forget NFT :)
- HlessClaudesman 5mo agoEvery consultant at every consultancy firm is now suddenly an AI expert. In actuality AI is the consultant.
- seattle_spring 5mo agoI'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.
- firefoxd 5mo agoAround 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.
- cm2187 5mo agoBut it's completely different from companies adding ".com" to their name in the 90s!
- baking 5mo agoI seriously thought "AI washing" was going to be scrubbing all references to AI in public-facing documents.
- mherkender 5mo agoI assumed it was laundering bad ideas, as in "it wasn't us being incompetent, we trusted the LLM!"
- jamwise 5mo agoThat'll depend on which way public sentiment goes
- _pdp_ 5mo agoIn 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.
- hermitcrab 5mo agoAnyone remember Long Island Ice Tea?
- startpage_com 5mo ago[dead]
- gwbas1c 5mo agoI 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.
- Esophagus4 5mo agohttps://www.nytimes.com/1998/05/18/business/from-oil-to-fish-to-the-internet-zapata-tries-another-incarnation.html https://www.nytimes.com/1998/05/18/business/from-oil-to-fish... The more things change, the more they stay the same :)
- shepherdjerred 5mo agoNothing new https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Blockchain_Corp 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.
- aussiegreenie 5mo agoWhen I read the title, I thought companies were trying to hide the fact that they are using AI due to backlash.
- h4kunamata 5mo agoThe 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.
- kaluga 5mo ago[dead]
- shanewei 5mo ago[dead]