Peter Girnus’ satirical piece exposes the madness behind the AI boom through an exaggerated yet seemingly real case. Just by connecting APIs, packaging loading screens, and faking backgrounds, millions of dollars can be raised from blindly trusting venture capitalists. It hints that from cryptocurrencies to AI, the terminology changes, but the “same old” speculative tactics and pump-and-dump nature remain constant.
(Background: At London Hackathon, he met OpenClaw founder, who was busy using AI for these schemes)
(Additional context: a16z founder: The combination of OpenClaw and Pi is considered one of the “Top 10 Software Breakthroughs in History”)
Peter Girnus (@gothburz) is a cybersecurity expert working at Trend Micro. Besides revealing technical flaws hidden behind flashy products, he is best known on X for his sharp satire on the tech industry bubble.
Earlier this week, he wrote a highly engaging satirical piece about AI fundraising and startups, which I’ve translated below:
I told you I pivoted to AI.
It’s going extremely well.
I raised $4 million.
The pitch deck has 22 slides. The word “AI” appears on every single one. Fourteen slides have “AI” in the title. Three slides are just big letters “AI” over a stock photo of a brain with circuits.
One slide says: “The future is now.”
That’s the financial forecast page.
But there are no real forecasts.
Just that brain.
My startup is called Synthetica. We are an “AI-native intelligent platform.” That means we built a website that connects to ChatGPT’s API and displays responses in our own font.
The font is called Satoshi.
I chose it because it sounds both like cryptocurrency and high-tech. Double whammy, though neither is real.
We have a white paper. It’s identical to the one from my previous crypto company, except all mentions of “blockchain” are replaced with “neural networks.” Finding and replacing—that’s our IP.
Our product costs $29 a month. ChatGPT costs $20 a month. The difference is our logo and a loading screen that says “Thinking deeply…” while waiting for the API.
Same API, just a $9 markup for that loading screen.
I call it a “moat.”
My technical co-founder built the whole product in a weekend. For the next 11 months, we just “optimized branding”—meaning we changed the loading screen color four times.
He quit in month 7.
I hired a Filipino contractor at $15/hour to replace him. I told investors we have a “globally distributed engineering team.”
Actually, just two people.
One is me.
I don’t code.
We raised that $4 million in February. The lead investor asked what our moat was.
I said: “Proprietary AI infrastructure.”
He asked what that meant.
I said: “We built a custom orchestration layer on top of the base models.”
He asked if that’s just an API key.
I said: “Much more complex than an API key.”
Really, it’s just an API key.
He invested $2 million.
His fund’s name has “AI” in it. Before 2023, it was a crypto fund. They changed the name and website but kept the same partners and strategy. Their strategy: invest in what they don’t understand, then exit before anyone notices.
I respect that.
Because my strategy is the same.
All those partners’ LinkedIn profiles look the same: crypto evangelists from 2020 to 2022; “building in stealth mode” from 2022 to 2023; and from January 2024, “AI visionary.” The conviction is the same, just the words change.
OpenAI just raised funding at a $730 billion valuation—more than Switzerland’s GDP. Anthropic’s valuation is $380 billion. In just January and February this year, $220 billion flowed into AI companies.
Eighty-three percent of all venture capital in February went to just three companies.
Three.
The remaining 17% was split among 4,000 startups like mine. Decks wrapped in API shells, branded loading screens. Packaging a $20 product as a $29 sale.
A company with fewer than 100 employees is now valued at $12 billion.
I have no idea what they do.
Neither do they.
But they have a white paper with a chart and arrows—arrows representing progress.
We’re still early.
I issued a token.
SYN, Synthetica’s utility token. It powers our not-yet-built “decentralized AI marketplace.”
Someone asked what the token is for.
I said: “Facilitating value exchange within the Synthetica ecosystem.”
He asked in plain language.
I said: “You can buy it, it might go up.”
He bought $12,000 worth of tokens.
The total market cap of SYN is $340,000. I hold 40% of the supply, and my Discord members hold another 30%.
My Discord has 1,200 members, of which 800 are bots I bought on Fiverr.
We also have Telegram. There’s a price bot that posts SYN’s price hourly. It’s been the same for three weeks because no one is trading.
But the bot keeps posting.
That’s community engagement.
I reused the same Discord, just changed the banner.
Crypto communities overnight turned into AI communities. No one noticed; conversations are all the same. Just swap “to the moon” with “to AGI.”
I also ran a Polymarket bot—an AI-powered prediction market trading agent. It uses algorithms I don’t understand, with money I don’t have, betting on real-world events on a platform where US senators are trying to ban it.
Among the top 20 traders on Polymarket, 14 are bots. Last year, bots made $40 million through arbitrage. One bot made $115,000 in a week.
My bot lost $4,200 in 11 days.
But I created a course: “AI-Driven Prediction Markets: The $115K Profit Playbook.” Selling for $497.
It’s a PDF filled with screenshots of other people’s bots, with my logo added.
Thirty-one people bought it.
I earned more from the course than the bots earned in the market—that’s real alpha.
The U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) issued a warning: “Scammers are exploiting public interest in AI, hyping automated trading algorithms, promising unrealistic high or guaranteed returns.”
I screenshot that and posted it in my Discord.
I said: “They want to wipe us out.”
That got 47 rocket emojis.
Thirty of those came from bots.
A senior VC said this week that AI valuations are “overheated.” He said, " chasing higher highs only works in bubbles."
I screenshot that and posted it in my Discord.
I said: “They said the same about the internet.”
They said the same about the metaverse.
And they were right about the metaverse.
I participated too. I owned 11 properties, now worth $6,400 total. My bored ape NFT dropped from $189K to $14K. Gucci’s virtual store is still empty. My beachfront villa is just an app.
I learned a lot from that experience.
If something goes to zero, you should move on—and do it faster next time.
The metaverse taught me timing. Crypto taught me language. AI taught me: if the timing is right, language doesn’t matter.
We’re still early.
I hosted a demo day. Fourteen investors showed up. I demonstrated the product, entered a question into Synthetica. The loading screen said “Thinking deeply…” for 8 seconds. Then it gave an answer identical to ChatGPT.
One investor asked: “Isn’t this just ChatGPT?”
I said: “We use GPT-4 as part of our multi-model reasoning stack.”
He asked what the other components are.
I said: “Proprietary technology.”
He wanted to see.
I said they’re in “stealth mode.”
Stealth mode means they don’t really exist.
He invested $400,000.
My mom called, asking how the AI company is doing.
I said: “We just closed a $4 million funding round.”
She asked: “Is this like that metaverse thing?”
I said: “Totally different.”
She said: “You said NFTs were the same last time.”
I said: “NFTs are digital art. This is artificial intelligence.”
She asked: “Is your profile still that monkey?”
I changed the subject.
She asked if I’m eating well.
I haven’t been eating enough. I spent my grocery budget on GPU tokens. I don’t know what GPUs do, but everyone says you need them for AI. I bought $7,000 worth of GPU tokens on a platform I’ve only logged into twice.
That’s infrastructure.
My accountant called—the same one. He asked about the company.
I said: “We’re still pre-revenue.”
He said: “Every company you start is always pre-revenue.”
I said: “This time, we have product-market fit.”
He asked what the product is.
I said: “An AI-native intelligent platform.”
He asked what it does.
I said: “It thinks deeply.”
He said: “So it’s just a loading screen.”
I hung up.
He lacks vision.
We’re still early.
I know we’re early because I’ve always been early. I was early on the metaverse, NFTs, DAOs, tokens—all of it. Every time.
I’ve never been on time.
But that’s the beauty of being early. You don’t need to be right. You just need to be first. Then when it crashes, you say you were “too early.” When the next thing comes, you say “this time it’s different.”
And this time, it really is.
The AI bubble isn’t a bubble. It’s a paradigm shift. A fundamental redefinition of how digital economic value is created and captured.
That’s what I read in my fundraising deck.
Maybe it’s the same one I wrote. They all look alike. I have a folder on my desktop called “Fundraising Deck” with 47 files. I open one from 2021 that says: “The metaverse is a paradigm shift.” I open one from 2024 that says: “AI is a paradigm shift.” Same font. Same brain. Same slides.
I haven’t deleted the metaverse one.
Maybe I’ll need it someday.
We’re still early.
As long as the chart curves upward to the right.
