> "Sitting in someone's meeting uninvited is violation of privacy. They wanted a bot in the meeting, not an uninvited person," said automation expert Umar Aftab. "This way you sabotage trust and could incur legal implications."
> "Good luck with all the lawsuits," added another. "This might read like a gritty founder hustle story," said software engineer Mauricio Idarraga. "But it's actually one of the most reckless and tone-deaf posts I've seen in a while."
> "We told our customers there's an 'AI that'll join a meeting'," said Udotong. "In reality it was just me and my co-founder calling in to the meeting sitting there silently and taking notes by hand."
They charged $100/month for this. If it were free then whatever, but lying to paying customers about the service is not okay.
lots of people joke about how their jobs is "just attending a bunch of meetings", but can you imagine how horrific your job would be if you were this guy and your job actually was just "attend a bunch of meetings"?
AND you didn't have context or interest in the content?
AND you were required to write an essay at the end proving that you paid attention?!
This is fraud. Their exposure here is not just being sued by clients, though there's that as well, but being charged with one or more crimes, convicted, and going to prison. This was an incredibly stupid scheme, made even more stupid by publicly confessing to it.
Expectation is that sensitive meetings run through a pipeline without being exposed to actual people (and if it is for very specific reasons, there are audit trails).
Here, they literally listen to sensitive information and can act on it.
How do you trust they won't do it again to "enhance summaries" or something in the future?
I think what PG meant by "do things that don't scale" is earnest effort in service of building a real product: talking to users, manually onboarding, hand-holding early customers so you can learn fast and iterate toward something that eventually does scale.
What this startup did isn't that, AFAICT. It wasn't manual work in service of learning...it was just fraud as a business model, no? Like, they were pretending the technology existed before it actually did. There's a bright line between unscalable hustle and misleading customers about what your product actually is.
Doing unscalable things is about being scrappy and close to the problem. Pretending humans are AI is just straight up deceiving people.
> this was for our first few beta customers from 2017 and we made it clear that there was a human in the loop of the service. LLMs didn't exist yet. It was like offering an EA for $100/mo - several other startups did that as well, but obviously it doesn't scale.
So not necessarily fraud unless they deceived investors. Or he’s covering up his mistake. Getting the popcorn!!
This strategy is often called a "concierge" MVP. You deliver the service you claim, but behind the scenes everything is incredibly manual. Once you've proved people like the service, you then go make the process less manual. Zappos and Amazon are both famous for doing this.
p.s. -- I already put this in a chain, but the majority of comments are just claiming this is fraud. Thought it might be worth posting something slightly more visible.
I can understand why people are incensed the founders sat in stealthily on meetings, but I don't understand why they don't feel the same level of mistrust for the company's bots.
Don't they realize the company will store their whole conversation in the cloud, and a rogue employee/founder can just as easily pull it up and listen after the fact?
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[ 5.1 ms ] story [ 47.6 ms ] thread> "Good luck with all the lawsuits," added another. "This might read like a gritty founder hustle story," said software engineer Mauricio Idarraga. "But it's actually one of the most reckless and tone-deaf posts I've seen in a while."
> "We told our customers there's an 'AI that'll join a meeting'," said Udotong. "In reality it was just me and my co-founder calling in to the meeting sitting there silently and taking notes by hand."
They charged $100/month for this. If it were free then whatever, but lying to paying customers about the service is not okay.
AND you didn't have context or interest in the content?
AND you were required to write an essay at the end proving that you paid attention?!
But when it’s a SaSS product it becomes an inspirational hustle culture story.
https://paulgraham.com/ds.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Holmes
Also, there was this, which also originally claimed to be AI:
https://spectrum.ieee.org/untold-history-of-ai-mechanical-tu...
Expectation is that sensitive meetings run through a pipeline without being exposed to actual people (and if it is for very specific reasons, there are audit trails).
Here, they literally listen to sensitive information and can act on it.
How do you trust they won't do it again to "enhance summaries" or something in the future?
What this startup did isn't that, AFAICT. It wasn't manual work in service of learning...it was just fraud as a business model, no? Like, they were pretending the technology existed before it actually did. There's a bright line between unscalable hustle and misleading customers about what your product actually is.
Doing unscalable things is about being scrappy and close to the problem. Pretending humans are AI is just straight up deceiving people.
Bias towards bullshit
> this was for our first few beta customers from 2017 and we made it clear that there was a human in the loop of the service. LLMs didn't exist yet. It was like offering an EA for $100/mo - several other startups did that as well, but obviously it doesn't scale.
So not necessarily fraud unless they deceived investors. Or he’s covering up his mistake. Getting the popcorn!!
p.s. -- I already put this in a chain, but the majority of comments are just claiming this is fraud. Thought it might be worth posting something slightly more visible.
I guess it just depends on your perspective...
Don't they realize the company will store their whole conversation in the cloud, and a rogue employee/founder can just as easily pull it up and listen after the fact?
CS courses really have to start placing a bit more emphasis on ethics.