
“The Grid” – Over Promise, Under Deliver, and the Lies Told by AI Startups - seibelj
https://medium.com/@seibelj/the-grid-over-promise-under-deliver-and-the-lies-told-by-ai-startups-40aa98415d8e#.77d37yd26
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kastnerkyle
The fact that even two or three years ago (pre 2012 for sure) tagging
_anything_ with AI outside academia was a surefire recipe for ridicule should
make anyone very wary of something that explicitly advertises as such. It is
convenient branding, but in research we are so far from something resembling
the "promise of AI" that it is a little bizarre to advertise with that
heading. Statistical learning techniques are great, but taking these tools
into production in any robust way is _hard_.

There are a few people I personally trust to talk reasonably about such things
(for example, OpenAI appears to be on the right track by and large), and as
far as I know Grid is not associated with any of these people.

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meemoo
(I work for the Grid.)

The Grid deserves criticism, but please focus what we actually promised and
are starting to deliver.

James Seibel claims that our product was marketed as a general purpose
thinking machine:

> It isn’t going to replace software developers, and it isn’t going to allow
> you to build tech startups without an engineering team.

Nothing in our crowdfunding marketing, site, or video claims that we’re
building Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). Before that line, he makes a
fair summary of what the Grid was actually pitched to be:

> Essentially a glorified Wordpress that easily integrates with social media
> and e-commerce, that auto-resizes for various screen sizes, and provides
> beautiful design automatically. Or at least this is the end goal, if they
> can work out all the bugs.

The challenge and potential in that are immense.

~~~
seibelj
Sorry to do a hit piece, I just have never seen such a difference between what
was promised and what was delivered. If you are just doing a wordpress clone
and never ACTUALLY promised to use AI, why dress it up in all this AI
nonsense? I seriously doubt you are auto resizing your CSS using neural
networks.

~~~
meemoo
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10141807](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10141807)

