Comment by Buttons840 4 days ago
Once again the mask of "AI" is really just human labor underneath.
I've personally seen founders raise millions of dollars because of "AI" that is really just manual labor. I know, I wrote the code that enabled the manual laborers. This was like 10 years ago; the lie is even easier to tell now. And that is so so important in an economy where gaining favor from those who already have money is far better than just selling a good or service.
I've sat on many meetings and gotten to trial many "AI products", and a good portion of them do have actual LLMs attempting to perform work. Though most of them are brittle wrappers of the big AI labs, with an aspirational markup.
The AI of today can do more, yes. But the path to funding and success doesn't require actual AI use, just the appearance of AI. No need to actually sell a good or service in a profitable manner. Just convince those with money that you have some secret-scaling-AI-sauce, and you'll be a success without ever having to sell an actual product.
The founder I mentioned earlier sold the company and thanked us all for the amazing journey, and then started his next thing in his multi-million dollar house. All built on a lie that made the company look good.
Back when IBM Watson was a thing, the rumor I heard was that it was actually just a big team of data people and programmers who would bang out stuff in a hurry and then they would pretend like the AI came up with it.