“The Grid” – Over Promise, Under Deliver, and the Lies Told by AI Startups

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.

(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.