I'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.
'AI washing': firms are scrambling to rebrand themselves as tech-focused
81–90 of 177 posts
Re: 'AI washing': firms are scrambling to rebrand themselves as tech-focused
#82> PR executives say UK companies are forcing them to present ordinary automation as artificial intelligence What a time to be alive
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.
Or, investors do understand the difference, but think they're buying low to sell high to "greater fools."
If the market can remain irrational longer than a fundamentals-driven investor can remain solvent, is it irrational to bet on the market remaining irrational?
Re: 'AI washing': firms are scrambling to rebrand themselves as tech-focused
#83> PR executives say UK companies are forcing them to present ordinary automation as artificial intelligence What a time to be alive
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.
Re: 'AI washing': firms are scrambling to rebrand themselves as tech-focused
#84I'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.
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.
Re: 'AI washing': firms are scrambling to rebrand themselves as tech-focused
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 h…
I understand why companies try to brand themselves as the latest and greatest tech innovation. What I don't understand is why it works or who falls for it. It's quite trivial to determine whether or not this is e.g. transformer-based AI. I remember in the years before the pandemic that I would joke that all you had to do was "sprinkle in some blockchain" to your VC pitch and your valuation would automatically go up b…
VCs, PE and investors in general. Not all, but enough. Watch CNBC or Yahoo News for even 10 minutes—the sheer stupidity and mania around AI right now is frankly terrifying.
Re: 'AI washing': firms are scrambling to rebrand themselves as tech-focused
#86Around 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.
Re: 'AI washing': firms are scrambling to rebrand themselves as tech-focused
#872 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.
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.
Re: 'AI washing': firms are scrambling to rebrand themselves as tech-focused
#88I'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.
You have to realize rich people can be stupid too.
Re: 'AI washing': firms are scrambling to rebrand themselves as tech-focused
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 h…
I understand why companies try to brand themselves as the latest and greatest tech innovation. What I don't understand is why it works or who falls for it. It's quite trivial to determine whether or not this is e.g. transformer-based AI. I remember in the years before the pandemic that I would joke that all you had to do was "sprinkle in some blockchain" to your VC pitch and your valuation would automatically go up b…
I think it is some sort of virtue signaling of being grifters and abusing the system for short term profit etc.
Re: 'AI washing': firms are scrambling to rebrand themselves as tech-focused
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
I understand why companies try to brand themselves as the latest and greatest tech innovation. What I don't understand is why it works or who falls for it. It's quite trivial to determine whether or not this is e.g. transformer-based AI. I remember in the years before the pandemic that I would joke that all you had to do was "sprinkle in some blockchain" to your VC pitch and your valuation would automatically go up b…
> It's quite trivial to determine whether or not this is e.g. transformer-based AI. The people who are being marketed to with the AI term don't have any idea what that mean and AI, as a marketing term (the only way it's ever been, so far, commercially used) means a lot more than transformers. My dishwasher has "AI" because it has sensors that can detect where the most dishes are. The marketing term really just means…
The continuous/tracking/predictive AF modes of Canon’s EOS (D)SLR cameras were famously called "AI Servo" and "AI Focus", terms coined somewhere in the late 80s I believe. The early implementations were simple dead-reckoning-based control systems, hardly "AI" even by the standards of that time.
Slightly ironically, now in the mirrorless era, and AF algorithms actually based on DL subject recognition and complex predictive algorithms, Canon has retired the "AI" label.