In working with corporate clients, webdesigners are rarely at fault. Editorial committees and boards make sure sites are as featureless as possible claiming they must be "sober" and "serious". The same virus, different host.
Having some experience with AI, I would also be suspicious of The Grid as it is described in this article. The most inconsistent part is the natural language interpretation stated by the author, which is both very hard to achieve successfully (see Siri, Cortana and Google Now) but also never directly promised by The Grid.
There is some ambiguity of what they mean by "Throw pictures at your website and it creates a gallery" (vaguely paraphrasing) but it is a leap to say this implies language processing.
They can say that they only hire the "top 3%" because their application funnels only allow 3% of the people that apply to work for them. This has a two important implications, 1)They are the "top" by their standards and 2) They are the "top 3%" of the freelancers that apply to the site. I am sure that the real top 3% are busy dealing with job offers and referrals.
Being the CEO of a (Mexican) startup and having a daughter there is nothing I could value more than kids learning how to code as soon as possible. So much that I've been known to make my wife go mad by encouraging my daughter to forget about school and go head on into programming.
This is the kind of story that motivates me. I like being reminded that the internet hasn't become the place where initiatives (big or small) either become billion dollar companies or they fail completely, contrary to the picture the startup sphere tends to paint.
Truth is that having a backup like Storemapper can empower you to do something way bigger, in other words it can be the greatest investment you can make.
I think this is just a reflection of the gap between academia and the real world. One could argue that the problem is the lack of a 'trial and error' philosophy in 'theory and practice' or that scientists couldn't possibly develop so much if they were bothered with the real world.
I believe the true problem lies in our need to categorize people as either scientists and theoretical engineers or down-to-earth engineers, which only polarizes the spectrum.