Ask HN: Thoughts on “AI-Powered” Branding?

To me, just browsing Show HN there seems to have been a fairly strong correlation between the increase in "AI-powered" apps and products and programmatic access to OpenAI (ChatGPT, Davinci, Whisper, DallE, ect). I don't mean to detract from those products at all since they're finding great use cases for obviously very powerful ML models. Even for applications with little relation to AI, a simple decision tree is enough to be "AI-powered".

However, I do wonder how old school "homemade" ML startups and products would differentiate themselves in this environment. If you trained your own model using a custom dataset that solves an industry-specific problem that can't be solved with an API call, would you still call it "AI-powered"? I can think of pros and cons.

Your core users probably won't care. You could call it vomit.ai and they would still use it because it solves their problem.

New users will probably not be impacted unless they're specifically looking for AI-powered things. The exception is the ability to show up in "New AI-powered products" listicles and Twitter threads which may or may not be important.

VC money might care. Having trendy buzzwords is probably more useful than not, and if it's the difference between getting an investment and not getting it, the rational choice is to jump on the bandwagon.

For larger companies, the label is also likely to attract eager developers looking to dip their toes into the field, even if the actual role has nothing to do with AI. Google Search doesn't have to advertise being AI-powered.

Based on these factors, there seems to be no downside to being "AI-powered" which probably explains the trend.

Is there anything I am missing?