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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

This is purely a positioning thing. Customers will understand "AI company" to mean "a business that uses AI to solve my problem," and nothing more. The insider perspective matters extremely little (, unfortunately.)

It's like McDonalds positions themselves as a food company while their majority revenue comes from real estate[1]. It doesn't matter to the consumer that their business internals involve the renting of property to their franchisees. What people see are the broken ice cream machines and the burgers.

A two-minute UI that makes a call to OpenAI is just as sellable of a product as someone offering social media templates written by a Llama instance running on their own servers. And during the gold rush, that's all that matters. H sure hope we'll see more nuanced descriptions later down the road: AI-powered, AI-integrating, and AI-adjacent :)

[1]: https://www.wallstreetsurvivor.com/mcdonalds-beyond-the-burg...

It makes perfect sense - if you reorient your thinking.

AI companies come in two flavors.

(1) Build a novel AI for a pre-existing purpose

(2) Use a pre-existing AI for novel purpose.

It's "I didn't realize _AI_ could do that!" vs. "I didn't realize AI could do _that_!"

Engineers found company type 1. Product people found company type 2. Both are valuable, but for different reasons.

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

"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.

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

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.

> 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.

I am working on an AI-related project that isn't "making AI" but rather leveraging the APIs. I did a little soul-searching about whether to use a .ai domain (which of course is actually an Anguilla domain) or a .com, and my inner nerd beat my inner marketer but maybe only temporarily.

When I launch, I will absolutely describe it as an "AI thing" -- because it's using "AI" tech to do stuff you couldn't do otherwise.

Is your product a dev tool that happens to do something with OpenAI sometimes? Or is it a specialized interface to OpenAI? In the latter case, I would say it's misleading to not describe it as an "AI" product, because people (should) want to know whether they're going to be interacting with our new Insect Overlords.

Your case may be different, but that's my thinking as someone doing AI-adjacent work who is by no means an AI researcher.

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

To get investor bucks

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.

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.

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.

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.

LLMs open up a new means of accomplishing complex tasks. How ere, there’s still a lot of work that happens to ensure input and output behaviors align with user needs and expectations.

Technically, most of your users could build your tool themselves. They don’t because they want someone else to solve the problem for them.

Same thing with LLMs. Pay someone who specializes in a specific task to build it well.

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.

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

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

If you applied your logic to the use of cloud services then companies like Vercel shouldn’t call themselves a hosting provider because they use AWS. “It’s just a UI that calls the AWS API”

It's marketing hype. Calling yourself an "AI" company when you just query ChatGPT and a simple prefix prompt gets you more attention and makes the uninitiated think its your chatbot.

Thanks for the responses I appreciate the marketing and other reasons. I think I’m going to include AI in my tagline and other marketing materials.

Why call it cloud when you're just using AWS? Build your own redundant data center.

If you build using AWS you are a cloud company. You are not a cloud provider.

It’s fine.

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

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

Breaking: Marketing can turn snake oil into gold

Marketing mostly (uses AI)

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