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Saw this on Quora the other day:

Ok, now the biggest ones. Gonna stretch “big data” a bit but — the current investment wave in AI startups is going to have a really hard landing. Turns out that a lot of “AI startups” are just… using cheap labor behind an API:
The company claims its AI tools are “human-assisted,” and that it provides a service that will help a customer make more than 80 percent of a mobile app from scratch in about an hour, according to claims Engineer.ai founder Sachin Dev Duggal, who also says his other title is “Chief Wizard,” made onstage at a conference last year. However, the WSJ reports that Engineer.ai does not use AI to assemble the code, and instead uses human engineers in India and elsewhere to put together the app.
This report (link at source) suggests that 40% of “AI startups” in Europe actually use… no AI whatsoever:
“In 40 percent of cases we could find no mention of evidence of AI,” MMC head of research David Kelnar, who compiled the report, told Forbes. Kelnar says that this means “companies that people assume and think are AI companies are probably not.”
Tons of “AI-first” startups have raised millions upon millions of dollars using this untried-and-untrue business plan:
Raise money
Spend money on interns who pretend to be an AI
Wait for AI to be invented
Profit
AI is going to come. But it’s going to come from research labs at Google / Deepmind or Baidu. Or maybe even some MIT research lab. But it’s not going to come from three dudes fresh out of Y Combinator, who split their time between fundraising, talking about AI, and fundraising again because they spent all their money on interns who get paid to pretend to be AIs.
But eh, I’m not going to cry for burnt VC capital. VCs should have known better, and sunk their money into hard, traditional research instead. Like blood testing. Can’t go wrong there.

Here's a link to the page this material was on: Who are some of the largest big-data frauds out there right now?