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In 2010, web developers and designers Dan Tocchini, Brian Axe, Leigh Taylor, and Henri Bergius set out to build perhaps the world’s first AI-based site builder. Just one and a half years later, Facebook offered USD 10-15 million to acquire The Grid– though they had no commercial product. In 2014, the team launched a crowdfunding campaign to raise USD 70,000.
“We’ve spent the last few years building a form of artificial intelligence that functions like your own personal graphic designer, able to think about your brand and present it in the best way possible,” said Dan, CEO and co-founder of The Grid. “The design adapts to your content, not the other way around.”
For a brief moment, all was well. The team was gearing up for a Spring launch in 2015 after raising USD 4.6 million in Series A.
But when the time came, only 100 of the 50,000+ backers from the crowdfunding got access to a Beta product. A year later, the company launched the final product and chaos ensued.
“AI is definitely over-hyped. Don’t buy into it or fall for it. AI is the cure-all tonic of the 21st century. It solves everything or could kill everything. At least that’s what science fiction would lead you to believe. Like the cure-all tonics of the early 20th century, AI won’t solve every problem or come close any time soon,” said Josh Greig, software developer at Next Healthcare Technologies.
“Elon Musk is quite brilliant but overestimates the speed and quality of software Tesla can produce for autonomous driving. Tesla has frequent delays and fatal car accidents related to its Autopilot technology as a result of this wishful thinking and rushed deployment. The hype pushes advertisers to use “AI” whenever anything software-related is used to solve a problem now,” he added.
Hyped much?
As per IDC’s latest reports, the global AI market is expected to cross the USD 500 billion mark in 2023. “AI, over the past few years, has become a critical addition for enterprise toolkits. Across industry surveys, and from our own experience, we are noticing that companies are reporting benefits of AI adoption on their bottom line. While researchers and many companies are experimenting with some exciting technologies, enterprise software is certainly among the most successful use cases for proving the utility of AI technologies,” said Onnivation’s founder & CEO Saket Agarwal.
According to Bert Labs’ Executive Chairman and CEO Rohit Kochar, AI is a general-purpose technology– just like electricity–reshaping the future.
“Currently, machines are intelligent enough to replace some mundane tasks, and automate some level of data processing and recognition. But they aren’t intelligent enough to make business decisions. So far, commercially available tech in the market provides machines (AI) that are able to process large amounts of data and identify and sort them, but aren’t capable of providing actionable insights,” said Dinesh Varadharaj, CPO, Kissflow Inc.
