
The Grid: Certainly Misguided, Probably a Scam - dlib
https://www.benhorrix.com/Read/the-grid-is-a-scam
======
dave_chenell
This post makes me sad.

I almost worked with The Grid about a year ago, from my experience everyone
there is nothing but kind and talented. From what I saw, the team really wants
to build a great product and is extremely passionate about what they do.

Sure they have flashy marketing and throw the word AI around a lot. Clearly
its working better than “Hey we use automated A/B testing, analytics, fluid
auto-changing layouts, dynamic color schemes, and whole bunch of cool photo
filters to tie together a unique website based on your content!”

Regarding the delays, I think the same would be true for any startup with
really good pre order sales, who is feeling the mounting pressure to meet the
bar they have set for themselves. This is called caring about your work.

I think the author is misguided here and took liberties on what The Grid is
actually promising. I don’t understand why people feel the need to blog
scathing reviews about startups they have researched for 20 minutes. Ignore
the haters Grid team.

~~~
aplummer
There is a line between (legal) puffery and the objective claim that they have
built "AI that allows websites to design themselves."

Is it AI that allows "websites to design themselves", obviously not, even
saying "a /unique/ website based on your content" (given the likelihood for
small scale repetition) is a massive stretch.

Is that still just puffery or can people argue over the definition of AI?
Obviously you and OP disagree but you can see his point.

------
segphault
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/](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
non-trivial engineering powering their service. They aren't peddling vaporware
and it's not a scam.

I don't think OP's knee-jerk reaction here is fair—and it certainly doesn't
seem to be based on an evaluation of the actual technology in question.

~~~
tedunangst
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?)

~~~
ricardobeat
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.

------
murukesh_s
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 library (Say, to find a good
colour contrast -
[http://harthur.github.io/brain/](http://harthur.github.io/brain/)),
developers claim they are using machine intelligence and the general public
might get a notion that they are doing some high-end research, while in
principle they might be using one or two generally available library that any
developer can use with 5-10 minutes of learning.. They really do not need to
be AI experts.

~~~
murukesh_s
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 adjusts itself based on the content that is provided.
All they claim is automatically crop the images, find out color contrasts and
adjust the typography to maximize legibility, automatically add an ecommerce
widget if they see a price info etc. All of these are certainly possible and
doable, even with 5-6 year old tech. Any YC level startup can do a basic,
minimal version of the stated features in few months.. But the idea is huge.

Do we have any product today for a non-developer/non-technical person to build
a personalized, static website without going through all the hassles? Even
WYSIWYG website generators like Wix.com or wordpress/other CMS can be too much
effort for a non-technical person. All they need is a randomized and
personalized website where they can throw their content at and will
automagically appear polished and most importantly unique, without them going
through all the settings. The advantages are endless, like the themes can auto
update when the industry trends change as the user never manages the design
elements directly.

The author probably mistook the product as a dynamic application generator and
not a static website generator, which is certainly doesn't look feasible until
we have really intelligent machines..

~~~
zapt02
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.

~~~
ploxiln
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.

~~~
azeirah
"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."

I suspect that is _exactly_ what the grid will do. It will know a few
heuristics, enough to make a site feel "personal" as in, it's not the exact
template like 20000 other sites, but you can most of the time easily spot a
"the grid" website.

Then again, if they can even pull that off, that's great, not at all stupid.

------
reilly3000
It seems to me that reacting to their marketing and reacting to their
implementation approach are two different transactions. I'm a backer and am
very impressed with their tech: noflo and constraint based style sheets and
not only novel, they are very functional. And the idea that web publishing
should abstract presentation away from content isn't new, but their
implementation is very clean and emphasizes minimal friction for authoring,
curating and sharing content with a self-hosted site. They have built a
platform like tumblr but automation around styling and image processing. They
store content as md files hosted in git and feed those into functions that do
a nice job of automating presentation of that content according to some best
practices and image processing that uses established AI technology. Take out
the AI for color processing and you really have just a nifty publishing
workflow that has built-in imagemagick support.

My understanding of their challenges in shipping have little to do with some
AI grand vision and more to do with color theory. They have trained their ANN
to pick the best color based on given inputs but the outputs doesn't always
yield pleasing color combinations. The challenge is making colors work well
with the supporting image of a content block while still being cohesive with
adjacent blocks and the overall site. They should probably try solving for
every style at the page level rather than trying to coordinate between blocks.

The flashy marketing video is doing its job: capturing interest and building
support that leads to conversion. AI means something to somebody who is tired
of wordpress and Facebook that is very different than a CS person that works
on machine learning.

I hope they pull it off. I would be pretty shocked if they didn't, given the
have come this far. I don't think that developers having thin social profiles
is any indication that the project isn't going to be successful.

~~~
tytso
They are basically asking people to pay $96 to buy a pig in a poke. So in
exchange for saving $204 (which is what a one year subscription is claimed to
be offered at) when the product is "done", you are putting $96 at risk against
the possibility that the product won't be right for you, or worse, that they
will declare that the product has reached "1.0" status with only the barest
bones feature set.

Sure, maybe the site will automagically "adapt" as you load more pictures, but
beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and you might think that it looks ugly.
And maybe how the site "optimizes" for particular goals is by using some
canned stock phrases that you don't like and you can't customize.

Or maybe it will do the job implied by the marketing video. There's no way to
know! No money-back guarantee (and if the company goes bankrupt, no recourse
in any case).

Is that really worth $96? I personally don't think so. I'd much rather wait
until it's done --- especially since they have VC funding --- and then decide
for myself whether the resulting product is fit for purpose.

------
apalmer
There seems to be some cognitive dissonance going on here. Almost all the
posts here are saying, to paraphrase:

'It looks like the Grid team are using templates and some algorithms to to
create websites while explicitly stating they are not using templates and
using vague allusions to revolutionary AI for marketing purposes to attract
investors and/or kickstarter funders. It is not a scam'

Misleading potential investors about what your going to deliver in order to
get money is a scam plain and simple.

~~~
tariqali34
I think there is a distinction between misleading marketing and scamming. If
you promise "revolutionary AI" and only give the customer templates and
algorithms, well, at least the customer have a program that can make websites.
That's useful.

A scam, on the other hand, would not deliver anything at all...period. That is
because, no matter how easy it is to produce the templates and algorithms,
it's just cheaper to take the money and run.

Obviously, it's scummy to mislead your consumers to get them to buy a product.
But I would say that misleading your consumers to buy a product that _doesn 't
even exist_ is even scummier.

~~~
titfn
Send me $10 and I promise that I'll send you back $20 shortly... I might
change my mind and only send you back $5 but it's definitely not a scam
because I sent something back

~~~
tariqali34
Yeah, okay, that's a fair enough point. I will need to probably figure out a
better dividing line between "false advertising" and "outright scam".

~~~
astine
False advertising is a scam, it's just one that lots of established companies
get away with. I guess there is a difference between that and one of those
confidence schemes where the entire organization is a fraud, but it's still a
scam.

------
Animats
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.

~~~
Animats
Thinking about it, I like the idea of using automated A/B testing to
automatically drive layout optimization. That would be fascinating to watch.
Provide the system with a supply of images and copy, maybe 5x as much content
as the site shows, and let it optimize for maximum clicks.

Someone could probably get VC funding for that.

~~~
tomadi
You just described exactly how the Amazon.com homepage works. I think they
even published a paper about it.

~~~
Animats
That's how most ad placement works, but it hasn't been applied to general
layout.

------
aaronbrethorst
The Grid's community evangelist published a video to YouTube about ten days
ago that purports to show a demo of The Grid in action:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7vDJZ-
QufBQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7vDJZ-QufBQ)

And here's the site whose content he's populating in the video:
[http://myothercamera.is](http://myothercamera.is)

My takeaway from this is that The Grid has a fantastic marketing team, and a
product that may be a decent competitor to Squarespace. Maybe.

~~~
vini
more than 3000 lines of inline css in the site source code, that's not a good
sign

~~~
ENGNR
They're probably using their own system to design/maintain the CSS classes,
and inline CSS is merely the output.

~~~
d23
Not exactly "no walled garden" then if the output can't be managed by anything
but the original program.

~~~
meemoo
The output is generated, but the content is not walled:
[https://github.com/the-domains/vizualiphone](https://github.com/the-
domains/vizualiphone)

------
reustle
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.

~~~
sago
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 even
backtracking best-first search qualifies as 80s-era symbolic AI. I don't think
you need to have an undergrad CompSci to do that. My AI textbook is used by
plenty of non-graduates, I certainly hope it contains enough to implement
those kinds of tools without my readers needing advanced degrees or research
credentials!

So I found the article overly cynical: I don't think they're claiming it will
translate your human language into a site. I didn't get that claim, at least.
I interpreted it as them using the inherent magicness of 'artificial
intelligence' as a marketing term, confusing together things that their tool
will do, with things that the AI code will do.

Overhyped product which is a big UX investment masquerading as technical IP?
Definitely! A scam with no intent to deliver? I don't think so.

My first reaction seeing the video a few months ago was 'clever'. Not 'clever'
as in 'clever AI or tech', but 'a neat use of very simple AI tools with a UX
focus to make blogging / portfolio software a bit more flexible.'

[edit: add last para]

~~~
plorkyeran
> So you choose a template

They explicitly say that it _doesn 't_ use templates in the video. If you
assume that part's bullshit then everything else is plausible, but if one of
the first things they say about the produce is a lie...

~~~
sago
Define 'template'. I'm sure there is a definition of 'template' such that they
aren't using them. They're not, for example, using templates in the Wordpress
sense of 'here is where blog post goes'. The video shows a selection of
'styles' which have clearly been designed, and shows the user selecting one.
If you want to s/template/style in my comment, I'm fine with that.

In marketing, things are very rarely true or false. You use words in a
particular sense to convey a message. You might say 'no templates', meaning
'no fixed structure templates', to convey the idea that it is very dynamic.
That doesn't mean 'there is no hand-authored structure at any point', or 'the
user does not chose from a range of design styles'.

So no, I don't assume 'no templates' is bullshit.

------
randy_s
Anyone remember n-generate? This looks to be about the same thing a decade
ahead. Honestly I kind of unironically miss that thing because with a little
nudging it made okay-decent CD-covers with absolutely no effort.
[https://web.archive.org/web/20031119211244/http://n-generate...](https://web.archive.org/web/20031119211244/http://n-generate.com/)

------
johnparkerg
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.

------
dunkelheit
Even if the OP is overreacting and this has some substance behind it I can
really relate to his disdain for the current trend of flashy landing pages
with only a "subscribe to our mailing list" box, youtube videos with hipster
guys extolling the virtues of a (nonexistent) product in "layman terms" and
overall modus operandi of "collect emails of potential customers, raise
funding and figure it out later".

------
asah
I worked with founder Brian Axe at Google. Unless he got a head transplant,
he's zero bullshit.

~~~
icelancer
Lots of "zero bullshit" guys outsource their marketing to firms who add in a
ton of bullshit, and they end up listening to them since they know best.

~~~
aeze
Like who?

------
futhey
What's far more likely is that they are stuck working out the kinks in the
long-tail of a very complex problem, missing ship dates, and arguably not
explaining this to their backers as well as they could be.

------
nailer
I don't use the grid, but got intrigued by their ads, and it's tech that
exists now applied well. Add a photo? They'll crop it unevenly to keep the
subject in the picture. Using it as a background? They'll make it less
attention gathering using filters.

Yes, the term AI is overused, but they're not say, Redding University lying
about the turing test. They're describing computers anticipating a need and
taking measures to help meet that need, which to lay persons is very much
'artificial intelligence'.

~~~
pavlov
_Add a photo? They 'll crop it unevenly to keep the subject in the picture.
Using it as a background? They'll make it less attention gathering using
filters._

Aren't these usually called "presets" rather than "artificial intelligence"?

~~~
nailer
I don't think they're called anything right now because other websites haven't
done them before.

------
killwhitey
Watching the latest video[0] on their youtube channel, it looks very similar
to Squarespace or Medium. There doesn't seem to be any kind of AI or anything
like that. Just an app to make blog posts with.

[0] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7vDJZ-
QufBQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7vDJZ-QufBQ)

Edit: and here is the final result
[http://myothercamera.is/](http://myothercamera.is/)

------
stijlist
curious. I thought "the grid" was about using a constraint solver + A/B
testing to optimize websites for arbitrary metrics - pageviews or sales or
whatever. the "AI" marketing makes some sense in that context, at least.

~~~
mrmcq2u
This is not a scam, it is making use of a lot of the work done porting gimp
filters to gegl/opencl.
[http://www.jonnor.com/tag/gegl/feed/](http://www.jonnor.com/tag/gegl/feed/)

------
datashovel
Of all the companies out there in the world that could use some heat like this
blog post generates, IMO TheGrid does not appear to be one of them.

------
abhgh
As with most problems that can use Machine Learning (I am assuming this
specific subfield of AI since they talk of the website 'adapting') the
objective needs to be have a reasonable and realistic scope. The video is too
vague/high-level to understand what that is.

------
dangrossman
Not to be confused with the YC-backed "Grid", which is apparently a
spreadsheet app for iOS. I thought I had heard the name on this site before.

[http://grid.binarythumb.com/](http://grid.binarythumb.com/)

------
niccaluim
Did anyone else notice that the bearded guy in the video is from the Coin
promo?

~~~
blandinw
He's the founder of Sandwich Videos, I believe:
[http://sandwichvideo.com/people/](http://sandwichvideo.com/people/). They
make pretty cool stuff :)

------
merb
btw. you don't need any knowledge of machine learning today to do machine
learning. most clouds provide that feature. you only need to feed data to it.

~~~
abhgh
Thats a sweeping statement which, in many contexts, is in error. A given ML
algorithm is not effective with any kind of data or problem. Typically you
need to understand the domain to pick the right algorithm and/or features and
to tweak it right.

Of course, a case could be made for a product where prediction is just one
not-so-significant feature, and here you can use something off-the-shelf
without worrying too much about performance. But where predictions are the
driver, you would need to put in some serious work to get good results. (not
talking about Grid here - this is a general statement)

------
gavinh
_Currently, the absolute pinnacle of AI technology are programs which, in the
highly specific contexts for which they were explicitly programmed, trick 33%
of people into thinking they have the language skills of a 13 year old._

No.

~~~
x1798DE
Yeah, anyone describing anything that Kevin Warrick is involved in as the
pinnacle of anything* obviously wouldn't know a scam if it bit them on the
face.

*Other than possibly hype generation

~~~
nailer
For anyone else reading 'Kevin Warwick' is Captain Cyborg's real name.

------
minimaxir
The Grid has received $4.6M in venture capital:
[https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/the-
grid](https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/the-grid)

Clearly the venture capitalists would have uncovered if the product was a scam
during due diligence.

Right? :P

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

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

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

Yes.

------
woodylondon
i am sure so sure its a scam - check out the FB page and videos of the demo
etc. An ex member of the team that got fired and now causing problems ? or
maybe I am the ever optimist :-)

------
tomc1985
Are there any websites out there made with The Grid for us to peruse?

------
nateabele
I don't know this guy, and I haven't read any of his other stuff, so this
isn't a judgement of him, it's just how I interpret the tone and content of
the article itself, but...

It sounds like a rant by a corporate code-pusher who's never done anything
particularly complex or sophisticated, and feels defensive about the security
of his career.

Maybe that's just me. Again, I don't know this guy. I'm not passing judgement.
That's just what I pick up when I read between the lines.

~~~
unethical_ban
"I'm not judging, but here's my judgement"

It sounds like there's a Kickstarter, which is targeted often to the general
public, asking for money to develop a technology that eludes the pinnacle of
AI research at the most well-funded organizations on the planet.

~~~
nateabele
A simple layout engine and iPhoto-like automatic image correction elude the
pinnacle of AI research? Maybe try re-watching the video.

Also, it's called perception. My comments were in reference to the tone of the
article, not the author.

