[warrenronsiek]

Most companies aren't interesting enough to invest in without some kind of secret sauce. Claiming that they are going to use 'AI and ML' is a way of saying that 'yes, we are a company with tons of competition and little competitive advantage, but we will have a secret sauce eventually. We don't know what that is yet, so we are using jargon as a placeholder.'

Call me a cynic, but I think the talk of building a data moat is mostly nonsense. Of the companies that make these claims, how many of them are actually hiring expensive data engineers to build the moat? If don't have a team working on it, then its a ruse.

Unless the startup is founded by people with deep experience in ML and have been working on using it extensively from day 0, it is unlikely that they will be able to deliver on this vision. They won't be collecting the data correctly if they are doing it at all. If they are collecting it correctly (they aren't), they won't be able to get it to a useable form. If they get that far (they won't), they then need to build out the ML Ops to deliver their models. Now, finally, they can `from tensorflow import *`. Engaging this process post hoc takes YEARS.