Because AI is the current tech flavor of the month and everyone wants a slice of the pie even if they don't know anything about it themselves, just like crypto a few years ago.
Ask HN: Why call it an AI company if all it does is call open AI API?
31–40 of 62 posts
Re: Ask HN: Why call it an AI company if all it does is call open AI API?
#32If you trust a vendor's description of their product you're in for a world of hurt.
Why would you even care about hair splitting definitions rather than whether you need what the company offers?
The people that are making these silly distinctions aren’t the ones making meaningful buying decisions. And if they are, they’re very bad at their jobs.
Re: Ask HN: Why call it an AI company if all it does is call open AI API?
#33End users don't care who in your dependency stack is enabling NLP, but that your tool can do things the non-NLP tools cannot Likewise, that is key signaling for all stakeholders on what is to come. If using AI is part of the core identity & value prop, great. If not, great too, hopefully there is some other wow. Whether users, staff, investors, same deal. Ex: We do some custom graph neural network & custom auto featu…
This.
No different than how “email marketing” companies exist that are nothing more than a wrapper around AWS SES, etc.
Re: Ask HN: Why call it an AI company if all it does is call open AI API?
#34If I use AWS/GCP to build a SaaS product that runs in the cloud, I think it's fair to market as something running in the cloud. Especially if the customer isn't going to be able to buy it and run it on-prem. It wouldn't make sense to call myself a cloud provider though, that's what AWS/GCP are. AI companies aren't so clear with their naming.
Re: Ask HN: Why call it an AI company if all it does is call open AI API?
#35One can claim one's product possessing/powered by AI. It doesn't mean that one is building the AI algorithm oneself.
Just like one can claim to provide infinite scalability, uptime and redundancy, leveraging some public cloud infrastructure.
Once OpenAI and similar AI infra become firmly established like public clouds, products built on top of them will find it more attractive and compulsive to mention that their service is powered by so and so AI, and not some in-house random AI.
It's all marketing tactics IMO.
Re: Ask HN: Why call it an AI company if all it does is call open AI API?
#36Heroku is a hosting company built on top of a hosting company.
Re: Ask HN: Why call it an AI company if all it does is call open AI API?
#37AI is just a marketing term. Doesn't actually have a proper definitiom.
On the contrary, the reason it's a marketing term is because it means something to end users. It's just not what OP thinks it means. That said, successful marketing terms can lose a lot of their meaning and become very broad categories if a lot of companies/products adjacent to it are able to squeeze value out of the association.
Marketing terms are manufactured to make use of assumptions. They're rarely well defined and their meaning is invariably tortured.
Re: Ask HN: Why call it an AI company if all it does is call open AI API?
#38Those standing on the shoulders of giants are effectively very tall.
Re: Ask HN: Why call it an AI company if all it does is call open AI API?
#39Why call it a web company if you simply use web technology (http/2, html, css, reactjs, javascript) rather than develop web technology?
You're not a database company if you use a database. You're not a cloud company because you use the cloud.
Re: Ask HN: Why call it an AI company if all it does is call open AI API?
#40"My product is NOT an AI company. It’s a dev tool for app developers." and people will definitely NOT be interested. The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent.
So should I lie and say it’s an AI company? Just trying to understand this trend.
Sorry but you’re taking such an elitist tone about this whole thing, and it’s completely unjustified. The only reason yo see this as different is because you’re feeling sour and contrarian about the AI hype. Take that away, and it’s an incredibly common, accepted, and not even problematic marketing standard.
The customer does not care about your internal build vs buy decisions. It is utterly inconsequential to the value that your product brings. Making that distinction part of the marketing message would muddy things purely to please…who? I don’t even think that this is something that the typical puritan nerd cares about.