All you need to know is that he labeled himself as a consultant. Which reminds me of this joke.
Once upon a time there was a shepherd tending his sheep at the edge of a country road. A brand new Jeep Grand Cherokee screeches to a halt next to him.
The driver, a young man dressed in a Brioni suit, Cerrutti shoes,
Ray-Ban glasses, Jovial Swiss wrist watch and a BHS tie gets out and
asks the shepherd: "If I guess how many sheep you have, will you give me one of them?" The shepherd looks at the young man, then looks at the sprawling field of sheep and says: "Okay."
The young man parks the SUV, connects his notebook and wireless modem, enters a NASA site, scans the ground using his GPS, opens
a database and 60 Excel tables filled with algorithms, then prints a 150
page report on his high tech mini printer. He then turns to the shepherd and says:"You have exactly 1,586 sheep here. "
The shepherd answers: "That's correct, you can have your sheep."The
young man takes one of the animals and puts it in the back of his
vehicle. The shepherd looks at him and asks: "Now, if I guess your
profession, will you pay me back in kind?"
The young man answers: "Sure."
The shepherd says: "You are a consultant."
"Exactly! How did you know," asks the young man?
Very simple, answers the shepherd.
"First, you came here without being called.
Second, you charged me a fee to tell me something I already knew.
Third, you do not understand anything about my business and I'd
really like to have my dog back."
From my experience working for a management consulting firm. It's more like everyone knows what the problems are and how to fix them, but they are too scared of screwing up to do something about it.
So they hire a consultancy company to tell them what they already knew and take the blame if something goes wrong.
A brand new Jeep Grand Cherokee screeches to a halt next to him. The driver, a young man dressed in a Brioni suit, Cerrutti shoes,
Ray-Ban glasses, Jovial Swiss wrist watch and a BHS tie
I do NOT miss being yelled at by some middle management Kevin about how I'm charging them $275 per hour to justify their getting whatever crazy shit isn't in the purchase agreement. I wish I made $275/hour. That'd be amazing.
As someone who studied CS at uni for 3 years I saw first hand how there's plenty of idiots in this field. Two of my classmates identified as Nazis and thought that the holocaust didn't happen, besides a significant chunk leaning to the right more generally.
There's plenty of really smart people working in the field of AI, but there's also plenty of people who just think they're smart.
I think this pretty much applies to all fields. Everything looks complicated and hard to outside people, but once you get into the field, you realize that most people are just average.
Alternate take: this is the same sort of mark self-sorting that scam artists use.
A reasonable person isn’t gonna reply to a typo-ridden email from a Nigerian prince. But those few who do are going to be easy to get everything from.
Imagine you’re an executive at the company your dad founded. You’re an idiot. Everyone knows you’re an idiot. But you think you’re smart. This guy is willing to consult with you about how your company will use AI (for a modest fee, of course). You don’t understand AI, but you think you do, and you just need someone to help with the details. And everyone has to nod their heads and agree to pay him because they’re afraid of getting fired.
I have watched those exact guys eat an organization I worked for alive. At the end, they had like... 10 business consultants and 1 junior engineer. At an electronics engineering company.
I can still hear the penny dropping in my mind when I went from ‘How can anyone fall for that—it’s so obviously a scam…’ to ‘Oh, right…’ It sounded too Machiavellian to be true. I wonder if it was so carefully designed from the start, or a process of natural selection?
Business homps trying to do math with no understanding or background smacks of clergy trying to do philosophy or athletes composing a symphony, sure you can try it but practically nobody is interested in your uninformed amateur gibberish nonsense.
This implies that either A, I, or both are zero. So A*I means that anything artificial can not be intelligent and anything intelligent can not be artificial.
There's currently a ton of hype around LLMs, so companies are willing to spend a lot of money. And where there's money to be made, scammers aren't far away.