>If you want to be any good at all in this industry, you have to develop enough technical skills to evaluate claims for yourself. You have to. It's essential.

This is an orthogonal off topic point. My or anyones skills don't have to do with the topic at hand. The topic at hand is AI.

>Because the dirty secret is a lot of successful people aren't actually smart or talented, they just got lucky. Or they aren't successful at all, they're just good at pretending they are, either through taking credit for other people's work or flat out lying.

Again orthoganol to the point. But I'll entertain it. There's another class of people who are delusional. They think they're good, but they're not good at all. I've seen plenty of that in the industry. More so then people who lie, it's people who lie to themselves and believe it. Engineers so confident in their skills, but when I look at them I think they're raw dog shit.

>I've run into more than a few startups that are just flat out lying about their capabilities and several that were outright fraud. (See DoNotPay for a recent fraud example lol)

Again so?

>Pointing to anyone and going "well THEY do it, it MUST work" is frankly engineering malpractice. It might work. But unless you have the chops to verify it for yourself, you're just asking to be conned.

Of course. But it's idiotic when there is a huge population of people who are smarter than you better than you and proven to be more capable than you saying they can do it. I need to emphasize it's not just one person saying it. Tons and tons and tons of people are saying it.

Fraud happens in the margins of society it rarely ever happens at a macro level, and if it does happen at a macro level the trend doesn't last long and will mostly die within a year at most.

So when multitudes of highly reputed people are saying one thing, and your on the ground self verification of that thing is directly opposite of what they are saying. Then you need to re-evaluate your OWN verification. You need to investigate WHY there is a discrepancy, because it is utter stupidity to deny what others have seen as fraud and believe that your own judgements and verifications are flawless.

No offense, my dude, but your philosophy on this topic embodies the delusional stupidity I am talking about. People lie to themselves. That is the key metric here.

I don't need to explain ANY of this to you. You know it, because every explanation I just gave is an OBVIOUS facet of life in general. It needs to be explained to someone like you despite it's obviousness because of self delusion.