Repeating my other comment in this thread:

> This is a tired trope, that “business people” are brainless and gullible. Almost as tired as the “VCs are so dumb they’ll throw money at anything-AI” idea repeated in the article.

> Maybe, just maybe, the people running multi-billion-dollar companies, and multi-billion-dollar investment funds, are not stupid?

> It would be much more interesting and productive to discuss what they see in AI and why they feel so much urgency, rather than dismissing them as fools falling for magic.

VCs only need one big winner out of every ten investments. You are looking at their nine failures and calling them stupid and naive.

I agree that saying all VC's are dumb, all the time, is silly. On the other hand, things like Theranos and Ubeam do prove that some investments that some VC's make are spectacularly dumb. One out of every ten still requires basic due diligence, or at least questioning business plans that require setting physics or other basic knowns aside.

I'm only saying what I saw during the hype bubble. People were looking for a reason to use blockchain (or just be able to say blockchain in relation to their company) rather than letting the problem drive the technology choice. This behaviour suddenly disappeared when the bubble burst. There is lots of smart money in VC and the dumb money follows it. Mostly it seems to be from laziness and herd mentality rather than actually being stupid. If you invest a little in everything you're bound to pick a winner. The ratio is skewed way out past 1 in 10 in this scenario.

> It would be much more interesting and productive to discuss what they see in AI and why they feel so much urgency, rather than dismissing them as fools falling for magic.

I can answer that question without asking. People can see the potential to do more work with less people and make truckloads of cash. Everyone is scared of being the stupid one and be left holding their dick whilst everyone else gets rich. When you have cash to spend it's a small risk to take.

Experienced VCs are not the only business people who give out money.

My problem is with the generalization. The article and some comments in this thread paint all VCs and business people as dummies falling for shiny objects.

I don’t think anybody would argue with an article that said some percentage of any population makes stupid decisions for stupid reasons. But then again, nobody would read that article, either.

Ahh, yes, the motivation is somewhat similar here. It's internal projects at a big company. The people proposing wouldn't get money per se, but they want the reputational thing of doing something cool and newsworthy. I'm the first person they have to get past with their (usually) bad idea.