Ask HN: Why call it an AI company if all it does is call open AI API?

"My product is NOT an AI company. It’s a dev tool for app developers."

and people will definitely NOT be interested. The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent.

Breaking: Marketing can turn snake oil into gold

Almost every question like this can be answered with the word "engagement"

It's the hot topic of the moment, people are searching it. Businesses market to what people are searching.

Is it lying? Sure, I could be convinced. Is it illegal? Nah. Will people do it no matter what we think about it? Forever.

I'd focus on your own marketing rather than worrying about whether other people are lying. You don't need to call yourself an AI company, just say you "utilise AI to xyz" or something if you want in on the AI marketing. Same keywords, no lies, sorted.

> It’s just like building on top of AWS or GCP.

Yes, but companies still use "hosted on the cloud" as a feature in enterprise SaaS.

Why call it an IT company when all it does is to use existing IT? I think it's fine.

To get investor bucks

End users don't care who in your dependency stack is enabling NLP, but that your tool can do things the non-NLP tools cannot

Likewise, that is key signaling for all stakeholders on what is to come. If using AI is part of the core identity & value prop, great. If not, great too, hopefully there is some other wow. Whether users, staff, investors, same deal.

Ex: We do some custom graph neural network & custom auto feature engineering to help ppl look at & analyze their event data more easily & intelligently. OTOH, our LLM work currently uses OpenAI/Azure, and we are deferring self-hosting and fine-tuning for when more useful, as we rather focus more now on bits like vector databases and UIs. In both cases, our users care more that they can get better results and a journey committed to doing more, vs precisely who is doing what & when.

This is nothing. During the dotcom boom there were companies owning only poultry farms in places like India that changed their names to sound like an IT company or a dotcom to so that the stock goes up. Atleast these "AI" companies are doing pass through AI, hopefully with some good user friendly and useful features on top of OpenAI's APIs, or targeting different verticals.

If you trust a vendor's description of their product you're in for a world of hurt.

Why call it a web company if you simply use web technology (http/2, html, css, reactjs, javascript) rather than develop web technology?

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It's similar to how many "media" and "video" companies just call FFmpeg

To me, an AI company would be a company that offers products with AI capabilities (regardless on if they are just calling an API).

We have plenty of web hosting companies that don't own a server, energy companies that don't own power generation or power infrastructure, mobile phone carriers that don't own cell-towers etc. so I don't see this being any different to any of these scenarios.

Sales guy last week: “We don’t use OCR. That’s 20-year old tech. We use Amazon Textract”

Annoyance of sales/marketing tactics aside, the problem is when you are the plug-in. They can screw you at any moment, raise the price, change the interface every month, kick you out of the App Store, or whatever. You have little to no leverage.

You have real value when people want to plug into you.

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AI is just a marketing term. Doesn't actually have a proper definitiom.

I once built a web app for a client that did not use any AI or machine learning at all. All it did was to make some well thought out SQL queries. They called it "advanced AI" on the marketing page and made lots of money. And I bet it made the end customers feel better to use such an advanced tool.

Why call it "OpenAI" when it is probably the biggest blackbox thing out there.

The word you're looking for is called marketing. If you don't like that part of a business as a developer, that's fine, but you'll soon find out why it is an essential skill when starting a company or building a product. To answer your question: No, it's not a lie even by more rigid developer community standards if AI is the core part of the product (so let it be API calls). Those companies are using AI Technology as perceived by the public.

Because AI is the current tech flavor of the month and everyone wants a slice of the pie even if they don't know anything about it themselves, just like crypto a few years ago.

If I use AWS/GCP to build a SaaS product that runs in the cloud, I think it's fair to market as something running in the cloud. Especially if the customer isn't going to be able to buy it and run it on-prem. It wouldn't make sense to call myself a cloud provider though, that's what AWS/GCP are. AI companies aren't so clear with their naming.

One can claim one's product possessing/powered by AI. It doesn't mean that one is building the AI algorithm oneself. Just like one can claim to provide infinite scalability, uptime and redundancy, leveraging some public cloud infrastructure.

Once OpenAI and similar AI infra become firmly established like public clouds, products built on top of them will find it more attractive and compulsive to mention that their service is powered by so and so AI, and not some in-house random AI.

It's all marketing tactics IMO.

Heroku is a hosting company built on top of a hosting company.

Those standing on the shoulders of giants are effectively very tall.

Marketing mostly (uses AI)