This industry has lost its collective mind with this hype cycle. I'm not even against the technology, but this is all just shockingly reckless.
Building a proper product is still good advice. But if you think you can slip that and flip a feature into a quick sale, that’s a higher ROI.
I guess people can dress it up as business savvy and market timing or whatever pretentious lingo they want to make themselves feel better about it, but it's really just scamming by another name.
But we're in the Scam/Grift Economy now anyway so I guess everyone is trying to get theirs while they still can, and I guess that's what we're seeing.
That’s not how these businesses are best built. Instead, the founders tend to look at what an industry should be doing, but due to incumbent politics hasn’t been able to. You build the thing from the outside, bypassing those politics. Once you have it, you’re parachuted in.
> it's really just scamming by another name
There is plenty of this in bullshit-product companies, too. At the end of the day, a bolt-on exit strategy is absolutely legitimate. Most people can’t execute on it because it requires understanding both the economic niche and high-level corporate politics at a few major players. So there is probably more noise in feature-only startups than in the broader startup ecosystem. But again, most startups fail for good reason.
Those have been dead for at least a decade now, and AI was not the culprit. When you can sell useless stuff that nobody knew they wanted and still make ROI, why would you limit yourself?
The thing with AI is that there is no ROI (except for Nvidia) but when world dominance with total power is the putative reward, the gambling gets more reckless than ever before.
tl;dr: this AI cargo-culting is ultimately unsurprising to me.