Depends what you mean by “valid”. If you mean “profitable”, sure: Fraud has always been a profitable business model.
But if you mean “valid” in terms of what Microsoft got out of their $455M investment, not so much, as they wanted a great new AI model, not the output that the “human-powered” model produced pretending to be an AI.
In the meantime. This is a valid business model.
Depends what you mean by “valid”. If you mean “profitable”, sure: Fraud has always been a profitable business model.
But if you mean “valid” in terms of what Microsoft got out of their $455M investment, not so much, as they wanted a great new AI model, not the output that the “human-powered” model produced pretending to be an AI.