> Herd doubled down on these claims in a lengthy New York Times interview last month.
Seriously, what is wrong with these people?
https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/BMBL/
Most of the dumb AI pitches share that basic goal: someone is starting from what investors want to be true and using “AI” like it’s a magic spell which can make that possible, just as we’ve seen going back to the dawn of the web. Sober voices don't get attention because it’s boring to repeat a 10% performance improvement or reduction in cost.
Is this also why Bumble has undergone so many drastic changes in recent times? I always thought they must hired some new & overzealous product managers that didn't actually understand the secret sauce that had made their product so successful in the first place. Either way, it seems the usual enshittification has begun.
It's kind of hard to tell with some ideas that they are actually dumb ideas until they have been tried an failed. A few ideas that seem dumb when suggested turn out to be reasonable when tried. Quite a few are revealed to be just as dumb as they looked.
Thinking about it like that actually more comfortable with the idea of investors putting money into dumb ideas, They have taken responsibility for deciding for themselves how dumb they think something might be. It's their money (even if I do have issues with the mechanisms that allowed them to acquire it), let them spend it on things that they feel might possibly work.
I think there should be a distinction made between dumb seeming ideas and deception though. Saying 'I think people will want this' or 'I think AI can solve this problem' is a very different thing to manufacturing data to say "people want this", or telling people a problem has been solved when it hasn't. There's probably too much of this, and I doubt it is limited to AI startups, or even Startups of any kind. There are probably quite a few 'respectable' seeming companies that are, from time to time, prepared to fudge data to make it seem that some of the problems ahead of them are already behind them.
Edit: It’s not that wild of an idea anyways, there’s a good black mirror episode about it.