Questions to ask: will they eventually deliver something that roughly satisfies their claims? (Yes?) will they eventually deliver something akin to what their backers expected? (No?)

Have you backed the project, and what are your expectations? I don't agree with the author that what they promise is out of reach of today's tech, they are relatively simple optimisation problems.

I think the OP is saying he can't evaluate the actual technology in question because there is nothing to see. You are asked to take the word of thegrid folks that they have something and that they have 100 people testing it.

Yes, but OP is wrong when he says that there is nothing to see. He just didn't take the time to even look. The source code of the underlying layout engine is published on GitHub: https://github.com/gss/engine

But that's not the commercial asset that "The Grid Co" is demonstrating. They are abstracting that underlying framework, to make a more usable asset to non-technical people, akin to a SquareSpace. The people who have bought into this notion (i.e. the "founding backers") have seen almost little to no substance to establish the latter. The argument is that they are essentially being tricked. The resulting question ("is it OK to start a company this way?") is probably much more ethical in nature than anything.

Much of our platform is still closed-source. GSS is one of many libs we've open-sourced & there are many more to come... We're also the guys behind http://noflojs.org/ http://www.imgflo.org/ & flowhub.io. You can see some of our open repos here: https://github.com/the-grid/