“The Grid” AI website builder disappears with millions of dollars in member fees | Hacker News Reader

“The Grid” AI website builder disappears with millions of dollars in member fees

40 pointsseibelj11 comments

Remember "The Grid"? It was a much-hyped website builder that supposedly used AI to automatically design websites. All that remains now is a landing page https://thegrid.io/

All of the websites people created are locked, the founders disappeared on social media, and no one who paid hundreds of dollars for "lifetime" memberships are being refunded. What a disaster!

Twitter Drama, conversations about people filing class action: https://twitter.com/search?q=%40thegrid%20%20&src=typed_query&f=live

Reddit Drama: https://www.reddit.com/r/theGrid_io/hot/

Summary of the saga: https://www.pagecloud.com/blog/what-happened-to-the-grid

View on HN

Checking at - https://plans.thegrid.io/lifetime/, this caught my attention

>>You are among the top 10% of our members, hand picked for this once-in-a-lifetime offer

Over to Micheal..

"When the son of the deposed King of Nigeria e-mails you directly asking for help, you help"

The office..

Office reference got me in. I was a paying member. I asked for a refund as soon as I got “beta” access. At the time I wanted an esay way to make an illustration portfolio.

My experience with their software was awful. I ended up making a basic website myself.

So glad I got a refund years ago.

>>and no one who paid hundreds of dollars for "lifetime" memberships are being refunded.

Lifetime means as long as they are in business. No doubt a horrible move but I doubt anyone can do anything legally: "we're working on it...and when we're ready we'll release whatever we have designed."

It looks like no one even cares about the drama of this.

Probably the wrong crowd? This is a forum for developers and such, many people here wouldn’t look at a website builder with their ass.

alright, I'll attempt to make a substantive comment on this.

Aside from the drama, I think their approach did not work well because visual design is fundamentally not a constraint satisfaction problem. If it were, it would be possible to design something aesthetically pleasing by mechanistically following a few "design rules" (eg. balance, repetition, contrast etc) yet this is generally not the case, barring limited exceptions (eg. templates). The general rules behind visual and color design are sort of intentionally vague and in most cases requires some intuition to apply properly. We're certainly a lot closer to automating this intuition now than 2010, but there's still a long way to go.

Visual design is about messaging. You can have a page look messy, professional, punk, clean, etc. You can accomplish that all with templates, no need for ai.

The grid was a content manager at its core, with prebuilt templates. It basically just lost to squarespace.

right, but templates are just.. templates. Someone had to have designed those templates in the first place.

Based on my understanding of thegrid's approach, the problem was that they did try to automate the design process itself and it just didn't work very well. If they just used templates they may well have succeeded.

I do think it is possible to automate certain aspects of the design process, now that we have convnets.

I agree with you, I think if you look past the marketing all they really did was make templates with parameters that computers tried to play with.

I think their approach tended to not work better then humans picking the templates and parameters, but the bigger problem was just that they weren't as good as squarespace and their marketing hype wasn't enough for them to compete.

> “The Grid” AI website builder disappears with millions of dollars in member fees

Not sure you have proven this, I would think since they have been around since 2014 that's barely wages.

But why is this different to Open AI that also lies to the public for money? At least these guys are a small crooked business.

It was clear they were fake <==> normal AI from the beginning, I'm not even sure I'd feel sorry for investors. It's like naturopathy for cancer, it's clear what's going on.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OXA4-5x31V0 (2014)

Who even needs to spin up websites in 10 seconds and do so often enough to buy a "lifetime" membership?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com