The AI boom has produced spectacular successes, but it has also left behind a growing graveyard. From Apple’s repeatedly delayed Siri AI to OpenAI’s messy super app launch, a new running list tracks the AI projects and startups that shut down, pivoted or simply missed expectations.
AI (Credits: TechCrunch)
The AI Graveyard: Startups That Did Not Make It
Among the most notable casualties is Relay, an AI-powered workflow automation tool built as an alternative to Zapier. Relay shut down entirely in August after five years, as OpenAI, Google and other larger platforms built similar automation directly into their own tools, leaving the standalone product without a clear reason to exist.
More recently, chatbot platform Character.ai filed for bankruptcy just five years after launching, a striking fall for a company once seen as a leader in companion chatbots.
The pattern is not limited to startups. According to S&P Global Market Intelligence, about 42% of AI initiatives are ultimately abandoned by their corporate parents, for reasons ranging from insufficient funding and technical challenges to competition, difficulty scaling and weak user demand.
Even OpenAI Has Its Own AI Failures
Even the biggest players are not immune. On July 9, OpenAI updated ChatGPT to combine several experiences, including separate Chat, Codex and Work modes, while renaming the familiar version ChatGPT Classic. Users found the new interface confusing and cluttered, and OpenAI soon rolled the change back.
The company has also shut down several standalone apps and folded their features into ChatGPT. ChatGPT Atlas, a standalone AI-powered web browser, lasted less than a year before being discontinued on August 9, while the Operator agent, which could browse the web and complete tasks for users, met a similar fate. Image generation has increasingly been built directly into ChatGPT too, shrinking the role of DALL-E as its own destination.
The lesson of the AI graveyard is not that the technology has failed, but that the race is brutal: even well-funded ideas can vanish quickly when a bigger platform absorbs their best feature or users simply do not show up.
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Source: TechCrunch AI — read the full story there.
