this post was submitted on 22 May 2024
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So this is scam right? Overpromise on a product that doesn't work then sell the company for some huge price because it's cutting edge technology? Because it feels like a scam.
Yeah, the product was a boondoggle. Trying to sell the company after that launch, with nothing else in the pipeline, is a scam.
remember how over the past few years almost everything brand new had the word "blockchain" shoehorned into it for no good reason?
This is the same kind of thing. It's an atrocious boondoggle. There must still be a serious amount of cocaine floating around Venture Capitalist parties, because one of those boys is gonna drop 500M on this company and think they bought the dip, when in fact they, themselves, are the dip.
I can't even remember the last time when some hot new technology changed our lives significantly. I'm inclined to say Android because it was a new mobile OS and now it's everywhere and various devices but even that is more than a decade old.
Bluetooth ANC IEMs/earbuds were rare a decade ago, and now I see half the people around me wearing them all day
I don't think "Blockchain" ever reached anywhere near this level of shoehornery.
oh, for a while there, it was close. things have changed even in the past 2 months since I wrote that comment.
Anything with "AI" in the title is a cash grab with very little actual technical worth except the models and training data.
Pretty much anything with AI on the tin is a scam. Because when an AI product gets a useful valuable application, it immediately changes name to something else.
They're all scams. This one's just more obvious.
It's just how the us economy works
Scam how? Selling pre-launch could have been a scam. Money taken from investors could have been a scam, depending on what they pitched. But selling after a complete and known flop of a release? There's no cards left on the table to be scammy about. "Here's our brand name. Here's our patent collection. We'd like to think our patents are worth a ton of money, but we know we'd be lucky getting twenty million."
My assumption is that, since they were always going to be about collecting, processing, and selling data (usually what AI is used for commercially) that they might have what they think is between 500m and 1b in data to sell.
This might be enough to start a company from or just to assimilate the data into your own company.
The price tag has to be over estimated though by quite a lot. If we read a story about the company selling for a few million, I dont think it would seem outrageous.