Memories.ai distributed a press release claiming they won "Best Video Understanding Tool for Bulk Video Analysis in 2025" from something called "AI-Tech Insight." There's just one problem: we can't find any evidence this organization actually exists.
Memories.ai is a real company - they raised $8M from Samsung Ventures in July 2025. Co-founder Shawn Shen has legitimate credentials with a PhD from Meta Reality Labs. The technology they're building - long-context video analysis - addresses a real problem in AI.
That's not how any of this works.
The Phantom Organization
"AI-Tech Insight" appears nowhere except in Memories.ai's press releases. No website. No LinkedIn company page. No past awards or recognition events. No board members or judges listed. The only Google results for "AI-Tech Insight consortium" are copies of this exact same press release distributed across dozens of local news sites.
Real awards come from real organizations with real websites. They don't materialize out of nowhere to give one company a perfectly timed award.
The Red Flags Keep Coming
The press release contains suspiciously perfect metrics: "93.6/100 score" and claims of "200x improvement" over competitors. But no benchmarking methodology, no competing products tested, no peer review process. Just convenient numbers that make Memories.ai look flawless.
Real technical evaluations publish their methods. They name competitors. They show failure cases. Look at how MLPerf publishes AI benchmarks, Papers With Code tracks model performance, or how Google's Gemini benchmarks show detailed comparisons with GPT-4 and Claude. This reads like they paid someone to write fake reviews for their own product.
What We Actually Know
When I dug into what they actually do, Memories.ai builds video analysis technology. They have legitimate funding and smart people working there. I've evaluated 30+ AI video tools for enterprise clients, and video understanding at scale is genuinely fucking hard - even Google's Video AI, Amazon Rekognition Video, and Microsoft's Video Analyzer struggle with long-context understanding. So their approach might actually be novel.
What's not verifiable: This award, this organization, these perfect performance metrics, or any independent validation of their claims.
The Startup Marketing Playbook
This follows a predictable pattern in tech PR:
- Create fictional authority to validate your product
- Distribute press release to maximize media coverage
- Hope nobody fact-checks the source
Sometimes it works. Most journalists don't have time to verify every claim in every press release. But when you're claiming breakthrough AI technology that outperforms Google and Amazon, expect people to call bullshit.
I've seen similar bullshit before. Startups create phantom organizations to validate their tech, then hope nobody fact-checks until after they raise money. The pattern is always the same: impossible performance claims backed by awards from organizations that exist only in press releases.
The stupid part? Memories.ai probably has decent tech. But leading with fake awards makes me question everything else they're claiming.
Maybe next time they should verify their award organization exists before sending out press releases.