Yup. I once worked for a startup that claimed to be doing DeepLearning, AI and other hyped stuff. The "machine learning" guy, once he allowed us to look at his code (took two years to convince him to do that), was basically doing point and click with Matlab dialog wizards. It was some horribly contrived linear regression that took about a month(!) to train on a couple of millions of data points. But he had a PhD (non-CS) and he could bullshit the clients and management for hours... When he talked about ML models he called it "AIs" like: "So we have a couple of AIs in production that generate predictions based on blah, blah..."
Credentialism and lack of integrity are rampant throughout the economy. It's soul crushing to see it.
An example that springs to mind is (I believe a YC alum) [1]. CEO is quoted as saying, "The more data we have on what happens over the next few days is going to really accelerate our ability to retrain our AI systems and then help all of you accurately understand tenant risk moving forward into this new world."
A serious modeller would be able to forecast what happens over the next few days. That the company wasn't able to do so strongly suggests to me that the "AI system" didn't have macro factors to shock and that scenario analysis was not part of the system. To a trained eye, that can be a red flag for sloppy modelling (and therefore hype).
