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The Grid: Certainly Misguided, Probably a Scam

benhorrix.com

31–40 of 81 posts

Re: The Grid: Certainly Misguided, Probably a Scam

#31
This seems like a good idea, and certainly do-able. Whether the people doing it can bring it off is a separate issue.

It looks like they like grid layouts. Everything is a rectangle. (On their site, a flat-shaded rectangle, like Windows 8+.) That simplifies things. You have some text and some pictures, and probably some action blocks (buttons, forms, zooms, etc.), and need a layout.

View this as an optimization problem under constraints. Use a heat map of where people usually look on screens as a basis for where the first things to be seen should go, and what needs to be on the screen at the same time. Use information about color and contrast psychology to select colors and decide how to emphasize images. They have face popout and smart cropping already, they say.

Then deliver different web site designs to different users as A/B testing, watch what happens, and feed that back into the optimization calculation. That would be fun. I wonder what would happen if you optimized for clicks. Cat videos?

Right now, there's a huge gap between the incredible complexity of CSS and what people actually do with it on most web sites. This may be a way to manage that complexity. Look at Wordpress; it doesn't do all that much, but it satisfies the needs of millions of site owners.

Re: The Grid: Certainly Misguided, Probably a Scam

#32

As a person who is building something similar, I do know this is certainly possible with today's technology. And most probably not a scam. The team is the same team behind noflojs.org, so they do have some credibility. But there is a misconception about Artificial Intelligence in general and its kind of true that the term is being overused. Putting couple of If/Else statement nowadays or using a Machine Learning libr…

By looking at thegrid.io's claimed features, I do not see anything impossible stated there. Like said by others, it's classic AI marketing by (over)using the term AI.. But the idea is brilliant though. What they are using behind the scenes are probably few algorithms to detect faces, adjust color contrast and let the user choose from a couple of fluid layout templates (formal, casual etc). The template then further a…

You are right on the money when it comes to how this works. They will deliver, but it will be this, not what the blog author claims they should deliver.

Re: The Grid: Certainly Misguided, Probably a Scam

#33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure how I feel about the mix of VC and CF.

Is it useful to inform us of your non-feelings?

Would be I be interested in hearing hn views on mix of venture capital and crowd sourcing?

Yes.

Re: The Grid: Certainly Misguided, Probably a Scam

#34
post #15
post #2

Seeing so many ads for them was an immediate red flag for me. Clearly they were trying to milk more sign ups out of their promise before people started to realize it was a joke.

I don't think it is a joke. It is classic AI marketing. From what I can tell their 'AI' chooses colors, and fonts and does some basic layout. All three bits can be done very simply. So you choose a template, it stores a few basic qualities, then uses those qualities later to choose how to parameterise its tools for adding new content to your site. It's not strong AI, you might want to claim it isn't AI at all. But ev…

Couldn't have said it better..

Re: The Grid: Certainly Misguided, Probably a Scam

#35
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By looking at thegrid.io's claimed features, I do not see anything impossible stated there. Like said by others, it's classic AI marketing by (over)using the term AI.. But the idea is brilliant though. What they are using behind the scenes are probably few algorithms to detect faces, adjust color contrast and let the user choose from a couple of fluid layout templates (formal, casual etc). The template then further a…

You are right on the money when it comes to how this works. They will deliver, but it will be this, not what the blog author claims they should deliver.

Did you watch the video?

"a template isn't for you. A facebook page isn't for you." ... "you could build one yourself, but designing, developing, dragging and dropping, these are all full time jobs." ... "Wouldn't it be better if websites just made themselves?" "Now they do. It's called The Grid. No templates, no coding" ... and the kicker ...

"Just tell The Grid what you want and it uses artificial intelligence to build a tailor-made home for your content."

"And tell The Grid what you want to do. Looking for more customers, more followers, higher sales, just make your selection."

The point is that the people who really understand what some silly automated website engine could do wouldn't be interested in it (they can actually make their own website as they like) and people who fund this thing don't have any idea how limited it will be, given this super slick video, which has smoothly animated layout evolution on well composed and lit three dimensional planes, and stuff like an old image of a girl playing being analyzed, points found, objects identified and then titled "Childhood", which suggests to people that The Grid will literally do that.

Of course we understand that's figurative, it won't really do any of those things... but that doesn't excuse the success of its false marketing with the wider population.

Re: The Grid: Certainly Misguided, Probably a Scam

#36
Having some experience with AI, I would also be suspicious of The Grid as it is described in this article. The most inconsistent part is the natural language interpretation stated by the author, which is both very hard to achieve successfully (see Siri, Cortana and Google Now) but also never directly promised by The Grid.

There is some ambiguity of what they mean by "Throw pictures at your website and it creates a gallery" (vaguely paraphrasing) but it is a leap to say this implies language processing.

Re: The Grid: Certainly Misguided, Probably a Scam

#38

The people behind TheGrid are also the same people behind Grid Stylesheets, which uses an implementation of the cassowary constraint system to facilitate web layout: https://gridstylesheets.org/ Grid Stylesheets are actually a pretty compelling approach and it was well-received here when they first shared it with HN. While the claims about machine learning and AI are arguably eyeroll-worthy, there's definitely some n…

Questions to ask: will they eventually deliver something that roughly satisfies their claims? (Yes?) will they eventually deliver something akin to what their backers expected? (No?)

Have you backed the project, and what are your expectations? I don't agree with the author that what they promise is out of reach of today's tech, they are relatively simple optimisation problems.
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