Insightful, and scary! Imitating an imitation machine... even if no one is trying to intentionally do so, McLuhan's "we become what we behold" is inescapable.
I'm so sorry to read about your experience in this thread.
I will comment, that once you left, the next person who joined won't have the benefit of your experience, allowing them to be similarly exploited... and the cycle continues.
I'm not advocating for being this way... but if you're starting a company primarily so you can have an "exit strategy", then it is natural to primarily virtue-signal to Wall St (instead of "solve a real problem")
tl;dr: this AI cargo-culting is ultimately unsurprising to me.
I love this too! What do you think of the "halfway faked" devices like the Yoto player [0]? My kid uses it to listen to audiobooks -- it has no actual content on the card, just rfid telling the device (now set this as the current album for playback).
I'm loving the Wodehouse references in this thread.
In case there are folks unaware of it, there is an excellent TV series called "Jeeves and Wooster" (Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie) -- highly recommended!
Right, I've also heard your (1) above expressed as "she basically stole from the wrong set of people -- rich and powerful".
Kinda-sorta off-topic (but not really), it reminds me of Charlie Javice. She sold a database of college loan applicants to JP Morgan for $175 million -- it later turned out that she had fabricated most of that data.
I often think "I should get me one of those" (MNT Pocket, or similar form-factor), but with my visual acuity getting worse (got my reading glasses in the past year), my X1 carbon might just remain my mainstay.