AI Graveyard: 142 AI services so far dead, many more to come

You've probably visited the Google Graveyard, which keeps track of bodies dumped by the tech giant, but the AI boom has already got it beat. There's already a veritable mountain of corpses in the AI Graveyard, lurching with "142 AI tools that have shut down or been acquired and folded into other products." It's a side-project of ToolDirectory.AI, an online directory of AI things, whose operators noticed the industry's growing stench of death.

19 were shut down by announcement, 62 disappeared in acquisition, and 61 simply went 404. As some of the acquired products remain alive, the numbers reflect a Monty Python "bring out yer dead" situation that's actually written in Python. Actually smelling off on April's cart is Avanzai ("Accelerate financial data analysis"), CollovGPT ("AI-powered interior design generator"), Pipio ("Create videos with AI-generated actors"), Sessions ("professional meetings, workshops, and webinars"), and various others amid the acquisitions. March saw a big body in Sora, shut down by a belt-tightening OpenAI.

The growing expense of keeping up in the artificial intelligence race is driving technology companies, young and old, to cut costs. Tech companies increasingly feel under pressure to cut costs to afford the artificial intelligence race. But the call to lay off workers and reduce spending isn't just being felt at established titans like Microsoft and Meta. Younger ones, including OpenAI, are also facing tough financial decisions.

Speaking of OpenAI, it has its own graveyard of announced deals that died before they were consummated. As you can imagine, Ed Zitron is not impressed by these circular financing flambées.

As I've explained, most AI revenues out of Google, Microsoft and Amazon come from two companies that lose billions of dollars a year, have no path to profitability, and are only able to keep paying these companies because the companies (and investors) keep feeding them money.

These relationships are utterly poisonous, and an intentional attempt to deceive investors and the general public. 

Perhaps a lot of these bodies were born with death in mind.