Such concentration of bad AI news is quite atypical these days, but here you go:

As time goes, more and more cracks are showing on the self driving car narrative. In June, one of the prominent startups in the competition - Drive.ai got acqui-hired by Apple, reportedly days before it would have ran out of cash. For those not well versed in startup valuation, this is not the best imaginable outcome.

Cruise is apparently plagued with glitches, one of Alphabet’s execs admitted that there has been much hype in the space, while Waymo’s valuation got pretty seriously (40% !!!) slashed by Morgan Stanley.

And there is much more, one blow after another. Except for the “robot” video at the end, that’s hilarious. I won’t quote any more, because the whole thing is worth reading.

On the positive side, the most egregious projects get quietly defunded, one by one. This sounds better than a sudden implosion, that could bring about another AI winter. That would be too bad, now that AI finally begins to be actually quite useful.

I see the current tech companies long shot AI projects as a useful source of scientific funding, one that is unlikely to pay off for them. Something like IBM researching voice recognition for decades, laying grounds for others to reap the cash. Now that tech companies don’t have to pay taxes, that’s at least something.