They called it a 'genius' AI. It turned out to be two men simply writing things down

There is a story going around that I think sums up this whole "AI bubble" neatly.

- JAMES MOORE

It is about a startup that pitched itself as the developer of a “genius” AI that could write up meeting notes from video calls and send them to you afterwards.

That’s what they said it was. But what it actually was, at least in its early days, amounted to two blokes who would join that meeting on mute, take notes by hand themselves while sitting silently and send the “AI-generated” notes 10 minutes later.

“We told our customers that there’s an ‘AI that’ll join the meeting’. In reality, it was just me and my co-founder calling into the meeting, sitting there silently and taking notes by hand,” Fireflies AI co-founder Sam Udotong wrote on LinkedIn this week.

“After taking notes on 100+ meetings (and falling asleep in many), we were finally able to pay $750/month rent for a tiny SF living room. That was the point when we said, ‘Let’s stop and automate everything.’” That company is now worth $1bn (£760m) based on its latest fundraising.