Comment by rjdagost

Your suspicion is largely correct, in my experience. I've worked as a consultant on a number of different AI / ML projects for start-ups. Most aren't doing anything all that new or groundbreaking from an ML point of view. Their real innovation is usually more about applying ML to industries / areas where it hasn't been used much before. But that doesn't get the investor dollars flowing in, so the founders try to make it seem like they have some radical new ML breakthrough. And in recent times, it has worked.