This post makes me sad.<p>I almost worked with The Grid about a year ago, from my experience everyone there is nothing but kind and talented. From what I saw, the team really wants to build a great product and is extremely passionate about what they do.<p>Sure they have flashy marketing and throw the word AI around a lot. Clearly its working better than “Hey we use automated A/B testing, analytics, fluid auto-changing layouts, dynamic color schemes, and whole bunch of cool photo filters to tie together a unique website based on your content!”<p>Regarding the delays, I think the same would be true for any startup with really good pre order sales, who is feeling the mounting pressure to meet the bar they have set for themselves. This is called caring about your work.<p>I think the author is misguided here and took liberties on what The Grid is actually promising. I don’t understand why people feel the need to blog scathing reviews about startups they have researched for 20 minutes. Ignore the haters Grid team.
The people behind TheGrid are also the same people behind Grid Stylesheets, which uses an implementation of the cassowary constraint system to facilitate web layout: <a href="https://gridstylesheets.org/" rel="nofollow">https://gridstylesheets.org/</a><p>Grid Stylesheets are actually a pretty compelling approach and it was well-received here when they first shared it with HN. While the claims about machine learning and AI are arguably eyeroll-worthy, there's definitely some non-trivial engineering powering their service. They aren't peddling vaporware and it's not a scam.<p>I don't think OP's knee-jerk reaction here is fair—and it certainly doesn't seem to be based on an evaluation of the actual technology in question.
As a person who is building something similar, I do know this is certainly possible with today's technology. And most probably not a scam. The team is the same team behind noflojs.org, so they do have some credibility.<p>But there is a misconception about Artificial Intelligence in general and its kind of true that the term is being overused. Putting couple of If/Else statement nowadays or using a Machine Learning library (Say, to find a good colour contrast - <a href="http://harthur.github.io/brain/" rel="nofollow">http://harthur.github.io/brain/</a>), developers claim they are using machine intelligence and the general public might get a notion that they are doing some high-end research, while in principle they might be using one or two generally available library that any developer can use with 5-10 minutes of learning.. They really do not need to be AI experts.
It seems to me that reacting to their marketing and reacting to their implementation approach are two different transactions. I'm a backer and am very impressed with their tech: noflo and constraint based style sheets and not only novel, they are very functional. And the idea that web publishing should abstract presentation away from content isn't new, but their implementation is very clean and emphasizes minimal friction for authoring, curating and sharing content with a self-hosted site. They have built a platform like tumblr but automation around styling and image processing. They store content as md files hosted in git and feed those into functions that do a nice job of automating presentation of that content according to some best practices and image processing that uses established AI technology. Take out the AI for color processing and you really have just a nifty publishing workflow that has built-in imagemagick support.<p>My understanding of their challenges in shipping have little to do with some AI grand vision and more to do with color theory. They have trained their ANN to pick the best color based on given inputs but the outputs doesn't always yield pleasing color combinations. The challenge is making colors work well with the supporting image of a content block while still being cohesive with adjacent blocks and the overall site. They should probably try solving for every style at the page level rather than trying to coordinate between blocks.<p>The flashy marketing video is doing its job: capturing interest and building support that leads to conversion. AI means something to somebody who is tired of wordpress and Facebook that is very different than a CS person that works on machine learning.<p>I hope they pull it off. I would be pretty shocked if they didn't, given the have come this far. I don't think that developers having thin social profiles is any indication that the project isn't going to be successful.
There seems to be some cognitive dissonance going on here. Almost all the posts here are saying, to paraphrase:<p>'It looks like the Grid team are using templates and some algorithms to to create websites while explicitly stating they are not using templates and using vague allusions to revolutionary AI for marketing purposes to attract investors and/or kickstarter funders. It is not a scam'<p>Misleading potential investors about what your going to deliver in order to get money is a scam plain and simple.
This seems like a good idea, and certainly do-able. Whether the people doing it can bring it off is a separate issue.<p>It looks like they like grid layouts. Everything is a rectangle. (On their site, a flat-shaded rectangle, like Windows 8+.) That simplifies things. You have some text and some pictures, and probably some action blocks (buttons, forms, zooms, etc.), and need a layout.<p>View this as an optimization problem under constraints. Use a heat map of where people usually look on screens as a basis for where the first things to be seen should go, and what needs to be on the screen at the same time. Use information about color and contrast psychology to select colors and decide how to emphasize images. They have face popout and smart cropping already, they say.<p>Then deliver different web site designs to different users as A/B testing, watch what happens, and feed that back into the optimization calculation. That would be fun. I wonder what would happen if you optimized for clicks. Cat videos?<p>Right now, there's a huge gap between the incredible complexity of CSS and what people actually do with it on most web sites. This may be a way to manage that complexity. Look at Wordpress; it doesn't do all that much, but it satisfies the needs of millions of site owners.
The Grid's community evangelist published a video to YouTube about ten days ago that purports to show a demo of The Grid in action: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7vDJZ-QufBQ" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7vDJZ-QufBQ</a><p>And here's the site whose content he's populating in the video: <a href="http://myothercamera.is" rel="nofollow">http://myothercamera.is</a><p>My takeaway from this is that The Grid has a fantastic marketing team, and a product that may be a decent competitor to Squarespace. Maybe.
Seeing so many ads for them was an immediate red flag for me. Clearly they were trying to milk more sign ups out of their promise before people started to realize it was a joke.
Anyone remember n-generate? This looks to be about the same thing a decade ahead. Honestly I kind of unironically miss that thing because with a little nudging it made okay-decent CD-covers with absolutely no effort. <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20031119211244/http://n-generate.com/" rel="nofollow">https://web.archive.org/web/20031119211244/http://n-generate...</a>
Having some experience with AI, I would also be suspicious of The Grid as it is described in this article. The most inconsistent part is the natural language interpretation stated by the author, which is both very hard to achieve successfully (see Siri, Cortana and Google Now) but also never directly promised by The Grid.<p>There is some ambiguity of what they mean by "Throw pictures at your website and it creates a gallery" (vaguely paraphrasing) but it is a leap to say this implies language processing.
Even if the OP is overreacting and this has some substance behind it I can really relate to his disdain for the current trend of flashy landing pages with only a "subscribe to our mailing list" box, youtube videos with hipster guys extolling the virtues of a (nonexistent) product in "layman terms" and overall modus operandi of "collect emails of potential customers, raise funding and figure it out later".
What's far more likely is that they are stuck working out the kinks in the long-tail of a very complex problem, missing ship dates, and arguably not explaining this to their backers as well as they could be.
I don't use the grid, but got intrigued by their ads, and it's tech that exists now applied well. Add a photo? They'll crop it unevenly to keep the subject in the picture. Using it as a background? They'll make it less attention gathering using filters.<p>Yes, the term AI is overused, but they're not say, Redding University lying about the turing test. They're describing computers anticipating a need and taking measures to help meet that need, which to lay persons is very much 'artificial intelligence'.
Watching the latest video[0] on their youtube channel, it looks very similar to Squarespace or Medium. There doesn't seem to be any kind of AI or anything like that. Just an app to make blog posts with.<p>[0] <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7vDJZ-QufBQ" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7vDJZ-QufBQ</a><p>Edit: and here is the final result <a href="http://myothercamera.is/" rel="nofollow">http://myothercamera.is/</a>
curious. I thought "the grid" was about using a constraint solver + A/B testing to optimize websites for arbitrary metrics - pageviews or sales or whatever. the "AI" marketing makes some sense in that context, at least.
As with most problems that can use Machine Learning (I am assuming this specific subfield of AI since they talk of the website 'adapting') the objective needs to be have a reasonable and realistic scope. The video is too vague/high-level to understand what that is.
Not to be confused with the YC-backed "Grid", which is apparently a spreadsheet app for iOS. I thought I had heard the name on this site before.<p><a href="http://grid.binarythumb.com/" rel="nofollow">http://grid.binarythumb.com/</a>
btw. you don't need any knowledge of machine learning today to do machine learning. most clouds provide that feature. you only need to feed data to it.
<i>Currently, the absolute pinnacle of AI technology are programs which, in the highly specific contexts for which they were explicitly programmed, trick 33% of people into thinking they have the language skills of a 13 year old.</i><p>No.
The Grid has received $4.6M in venture capital: <a href="https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/the-grid" rel="nofollow">https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/the-grid</a><p>Clearly the venture capitalists would have uncovered if the product was a scam during due diligence.<p>Right? :P
i am sure so sure its a scam - check out the FB page and videos of the demo etc. An ex member of the team that got fired and now causing problems ? or maybe I am the ever optimist :-)
I don't know this guy, and I haven't read any of his other stuff, so this isn't a judgement of him, it's just how I interpret the tone and content of the article itself, but...<p>It sounds like a rant by a corporate code-pusher who's never done anything particularly complex or sophisticated, and feels defensive about the security of his career.<p>Maybe that's just me. Again, I don't know this guy. I'm not passing judgement. That's just what I pick up when I read between the lines.