Technology

The one thing I will say is that there does seem to be a generalized dislike for AI that has all the investors and upper management types nervous. Even by their own studies do people generally either not care about AI in their products or actively dislike it/find it intrusive. There was a study by a phone company from this past summer or fall that concluded that 80% of their users had no interest in AI or found that it actively made their experience worse, and there have been plenty of pretty damning reports about how useful it's been in various industries (just look at Microslop). That is not conducive to convincing investors to fund your product and does not show a viable path to making a profit in the future.

We've seen similar things happening recently with car manufacturers walking back on their big touchscreens (with some help from regulation in civilized places that care about things like "pedestrian fatalities" - like Europe) due to consumer sentiment. They tried for nearly a decade to push bigger and bigger screens into cars and remove physical buttons, and now they're moving in the other direction. Completely anecdotal evidence, but the last time I went to buy a car I told the salesman at the dealership that I wasn't interested in cars newer than a certain year because that was when they increased the size of the screen and put them in a more obnoxious spot on the dashboard, and he said that he heard similar sentiments from practically everybody who came in looking to buy a car - everybody hated the bigger screens.