EDIT: note that VCs just contacted them. That is far from signing a deal.
If there were any term sheets offered to RocketAI, that would be different. It's completely unsurprising that VCs reached out to a company touted by top AI researchers, wanting a meeting.
Since when has that stopped startups? /s
Why did Google beat all the search directories? The latter used keywords on pages to figure out relevance, which was easily gamed by sites putting up thousands of keywords. Google weighed (still weighs) both the number of links and the quality of each referrer. The SEO vs search relevance war continues to this day, but PageRank gives Google a long term advantage.
The attractiveness of an investment has many variables with the two most important team quality and traction. Many VCs are on record saying they'll fund a pre-product company if the team is worth it.
If a number of high quality referrers are recommending the team, then the team quality variable might override the others. The hype's substance here was the referrer quality.
First, which VCs? There is a very wide range. And second, which people at those VCs? A lot of associates will reach out speculatively whenever some company or project makes headlines, but there's a ton more diligence and vetting that would go into getting a partner meeting let alone all the way to an investment decision.
I see no reason the VCs shouldn't keep some technical experts on staff to make these kinds of evaluations.
Perhaps the VCs who reached out were reaching out so that their technical experts could learn about the product. If you can't find information about a startup anywhere, asking them is a great way to find out. Yet the implied attitude of the article and some comments here is that when VCs are missing a critical piece of information, they should just give up, rather than reaching out to gather that critical information. Am I missing something? Reaching out to a startup to gather more information sounds like typical VC hustle.
I think as people who know things about AI that other people don't, we need to be careful about using our knowledge to trick others and then feel smugly arrogant about their ignorance. My opinion, at least.
I do think it's funny that they spent around $600 bucks and got way more attention than they would have if they bought a NIPS sponsorship for 10k.
If you're building a new sneaker brand and you spend $1000 leveraging your contacts to get Drake wearing your shoes at a concert, it'll beat an orders-of-magnitude more expensive advertising campaign.