Buying Hype

Seems like every day now there’s a new article talking about the great advances of AI transcription. Notice in what I just linked, the author is “Wire Contributor,” which to me means that it’s probably a Trint employee. The September 2019 article goes on to link an April 2017 article where the Wire apparently said something they did was unprecedented.

If you’re not looking at dates and glancing over it, it looks like AI transcription is making leaps and bounds. It’s coming. Their app is to be released at the end of 2019! What will we do? I am here to hopefully get everyone thinking critically. Why are these articles always sporting a technology that’s critically acclaimed but not ready to be publicly released? Because it’s a pitch. It’s an effort to get more investors. It’s a bid to get more people to throw money at it.

Not to get too controversial, but I’ve long watched a YouTuber scientist named ThunderF00t (Phil Mason). He’s made many videos to raise consumer awareness on products including inventions like the Free Electric, Solar Roadways, Zero Breeze, Fontus. All of these amazing things have a common theme: They sound cool. The media doesn’t understand the concepts behind them. Their creators make positive claims about them. These inventions have had millions of dollars put into them only for kickstarters and stakeholders to be let down. This is despite walls of positive press from various sites and media forums.

What can we learn? Sellers sell. That’s what they do. When there’s millions of dollars to be made, does the seller really care if the product only meets 90, 80, or 70 percent of the buyer’s needs? Will most buyers spend more time and money holding the seller accountable, or will they eat the loss or attempt to justify the purchase to themselves? That’s why you see claim after claim and never a bad word unless you have colossal levels of fraud, like Theranos. What else can we learn? These things can raise millions of dollars and never hurt a market, Solar Roadways raised over a million dollars and never threatened existing energy companies.

Buying hype can only serve to dampen our morale and make us cede market share. It can only serve to silence us. You don’t have to be a computer scientist to investigate claims about computer science. Let’s start selling facts and raising consumer awareness. If nothing else, remember: If their product worked, you would be using it.