Hacker News

'AI washing': firms are scrambling to rebrand themselves as tech-focused

47 points by Brajeshwar 2 hours ago | 35 comments

gum_wobble 35 minutes ago

> PR executives say UK companies are forcing them to present ordinary automation as artificial intelligence

What a time to be alive

Sharlin 6 minutes ago

To be fair, that’s not exactly a new thing, depending on the exact phase of the Great AI Freeze/Thaw Cycle. Particularly given that a lot of now-ordinary automation used to be "AI" until it become commonplace and no longer buzzword-worthy and thus no longer regarded as "AI".

Last time that AI was big before DL it was the "big data" fad and everything had to be big data. Marketing has never not been about how to disguise "what we already do" as the newest buzzword that customers want to hear.

The same goes, of course, for all the non-AI fads like "the cloud" or "NoSQL".

baxtr 8 minutes ago

Fun times. Although I find it hard to blame them tbh.

They’re incentived to do so because apparently investors don’t understand the difference.

robotswantdata 14 minutes ago

BPM is now agentic, don’t you know.

kjkjadksj 28 minutes ago

Yup. Also ML is called AI now too at least as far as hiring managers are concerned. Adjust your resume accordingly.

KennyBlanken 12 minutes ago

"now"? The appliance industry pretty much hit the "label everything AI" button...again...within months of ChatGPT taking off.

Last time around was when "fuzzy logic" came out, I think?

picsao 28 minutes ago

[dead]

throwoutway 47 minutes ago

Two past co's I know well rebranded themselves as "cloud" a decade ago with a narrow definition

jamwise 42 minutes ago

My favourite is Allbirds that pivoted from eco friendly shoes to AI infrastructure. How do you even make that decision?

root_axis 35 minutes ago

It's not really a pivot though, is it? As I understand it, the company went bust and sold their branding to a different company that wants to do AI infra.

dawnerd 9 minutes ago

Didn’t even sell the branding since that got sold to the same company that buys up all sorts of brands. The ai “pivot” was a blatant last ditch effort to milk some of the stock. It’s nothing more than fraud.

duttish 24 minutes ago

What I saw somewhere, don't know if it's true or a rumour, was that it was a wallstreet guy offering them $5M for if he could shift the strategy. So be bought a _lot_ of shares of the very cheap pre-pivot price, paid them $5M for the pivot, sold the shares at the now 600% stock increase. Netted a tidy profit after the $5M.

They didn't trade company fundamentals, they traded the market sentiment.

jknoepfler 13 minutes ago

a.k.a. textbook bubble behavior

kjkjadksj 26 minutes ago

Branding not used for its intended purpose is about as useful as calling your landscaping company four seasons.

SpicyLemonZest 21 minutes ago

To be clear, everything about Allbirds including the brand name and other IP was sold off. The shoe store will continue operating (unless or perhaps until the new owners choose to shut it down) under the name "Allbirds"; the public company doing AI infra with the stock ticker BIRD will be named "NewBird AI".

andai 8 minutes ago

So a company's success today may depend on how clickbaity their business model is.

rich_sasha 28 minutes ago

I just hope there's .ai domains for all of them.

A while back we ran out of .com domains and that burst the bubble. Or something like this.

solenoid0937 2 hours ago

I'd love to read the mind of an investor that actually falls for this shit. Who actually thinks that Allbirds will see much higher returns because they "have an AI graphics division?"

I like AI, but seriously, who actually invests on this basis? Where is the critical thinking? I don't feel sympathy for any investor that gets rug pulled on this stuff.

ch4s3 49 minutes ago

Allbirds sold their shoe business and is basically a SPAC that spun up an AI company under the existing publicly traded company. For all intents and purposes it’s just a new AI company.

estetlinus 22 minutes ago

AI graphics division: Putting in 100s of engineering hours to build and internal AI tool to produce AI-slopified marketing in order to save ~2h a month of human work.

rich_sasha 30 minutes ago

Or just investment quotas requiring AI in the portfolio. I suspect it's mostly this. Or getting included in more indices etc.

The more trendy boxes you tick, the broader the universe of people whose box you tick and who can thus invest.

arealaccount 15 minutes ago

Investors by nature lap up hype, and it seems to work for them

newaccountman2 40 minutes ago

https://youtu.be/oVItKzP6IBY

teeray 44 minutes ago

> Who actually thinks that Allbirds will see much higher returns because they "have an AI graphics division?"

Perhaps the investment is more on the “greater fool” theory. “I think this is complete nonsense, but there’s probably someone not as savvy who will buy into this garbage idea upon which I can profit.”

enraged_camel 2 hours ago

A lot of it is prisoner's dilemma and its variants. As an investor, even if you think a particular AI shift is bullshit, you have to take into account the possibility that other investors won't - and at that point you might miss out on the gains.

This is one of the reasons stock market is so disconnected from reality.

graemep 43 minutes ago

its greater fool theory https://moneyterms.co.uk/greater-fool/

somewhatgoated 46 minutes ago

But wouldn’t it be a failure if it’s bullshit and therefore no gains?

tokai 32 minutes ago

Not if you sell before the other fools.

SpicyLemonZest 30 minutes ago

A16Z's post on the Slack IPO (https://a16z.com/announcement/slack/) is a good pointer to the kind of thinking here. A pivot from an unprofitable game to laying off 80% of the company to a weird communication app could be fairly described as "bullshit", but when your business model is finding the rare exceptions where the stars align and a company ends up being worth billions, it's not a kind of bullshit you can afford to be entirely unreceptive to.

simianwords 11 minutes ago

>I like AI, but seriously, who actually invests on this basis? Where is the critical thinking? I don't feel sympathy for any investor that gets rug pulled on this stuff.

They don't and the people who are falling for this rhetoric are naive. Most investors _should_ invest more in AI companies. And most companies _should_ invest in AI. It is the rational move and it is exactly what we are seeing here. I don't know what the hysteria is about.

simianwords 24 minutes ago

There's this new misplaced belief that most how of stock market works is by fooling the stock market with short term plays like this rebranding and then cashing out. Its attractive and speaks to the cynic in us.

The article gives three examples

- Allbirds, a shoe company

- A genetics company marketing that it is using AI

- a property tech company using AI to create 3rd landscapes

The Allbirds one is just financial re-engineering. The others are reasonable?

halfcat 29 minutes ago

There was a line in one of The Walking Dead TV show spin-offs, something like:

”I've known men who inspire fear. Do you know what they have in common? They never say how frightening they are.”

And here we are.

”I’ve known companies that work on AI. Do you know what they have in common?...”

j45 54 minutes ago

It will be challenging for non-tech people to present themselves as tech.

Especially those who have not implemented software in businesses trying to suddenly boil the ocean with AI.

AI remains a great step forward to help businesses benefit from technology, with more than one competency around the table.

simianwords 16 minutes ago

I think a lot of people are secretly wishing for AI to be like the crypto grift but are in for a rude shock when it is definitely not going to end up like that. We will see more and more companies become AI driven and produce AI products.

To think otherwise is naive.

amanaplanacanal 6 minutes ago

No doubt we will see more companies. Will they be able to actually make enough profit to justify their valuations? That remains to be seen.

simianwords 5 minutes ago

Its part of the process - some will live and some will not. But larger parts of the economy are going to be AI weighted and it will only keep increasing.