AI Company Accused of Using Humans to Fake Its AI
A poorly-kept secret in Silicon Valley is that many "AI startups" started over the last few years are actually using humans, with a long-term plan to slowly decrease the amount of work the humans do using algorithms (generally based on machine learning, but not always) as well as more basic automation.  In some cases they don't actually do any "AI" work for the company's first few years, and if they do, it's more likely a quick-and-dirty logistic regression than what most people think of as "interesting AI".<p>The actual approach is a perfectly reasonable business strategy, because (A) it's really hard to work on machine learning without a lot of data, and it's often hard to get that data without actual users using the product in roughly the way it's supposed to work, and (B) the company can prove there's commercially significant demand for the user experience that they hope to be able to eventually do with some algorithms/AI technology, and thus can attract investor capital for making the thing actually work (potentially years later).  In some cases, the human-powered product might actually be really good, and the economics might work in.<p>But it really sucks that the general hype around AI has generated a whole category of "AI companies" that don't actually use any AI technology.  The dishonesty is really poor (I have a friend who's actually a machine learning expert start a job at one of these companies, and only then discover that the company did not use machine learning and no technical plans to do in the next year and actually just wanted another web developer... which obviously resulted in my friend quitting).<p>That said, I expect the trend to continue as long as companies get lots of extra press and investor attention for claiming to be an AI company.