Infosys co-founder Narayana Murthy’s recent concerns over the growing hype surrounding artificial intelligence (AI), wherein many systems being marketed as AI are merely traditional programming, resonate strongly with the venture capitalist community.
“I think somehow it has become a fashion in India to talk of AI for everything. I have seen several normal, ordinary programmes touted as AI,” Murthy remarked at a recent conference in Mumbai. Agreeing with Murthy, several VC firms told FE that they are increasingly encountering “AI washing” — a practice wherein startups inflate their AI credentials to attract funding. They said the problem is more prevalent than previously believed, with many startups falsely claiming to leverage AI in their products and services.
One such glaring example involved an early-stage SaaS startup pitching to VC firm Auxano Capital. The startup claimed to use AI-powered medical diagnosis, but upon further scrutiny, investors found that human experts were manually analysing the data, with no functional AI models in place.
Similarly, another startup claimed to use AI for automation, yet it was merely a basic rule-based system with no actual machine learning (ML) capabilities. Another AI-powered chatbot pitch turned out to be nothing more than manually programmed responses with no real natural language processing (NLP) or learning mechanism.
Content retrieved from: https://www.financialexpress.com/business/start-ups/investors-sound-alarm-on-startup-ai-washing/3786096/.
