A record of dead AI products.
The shutdowns, the acqui-hires that ended in silence, the products that promised the future and could not survive the present.
In the last 60 days.
DALL-E 2
OpenAI's second-generation text-to-image model that opened consumer AI image generation to a mass audience.
OpenAI Sora (v1)
OpenAI's standalone text-to-video app and web product, killed less than five months after its public launch.
Hiro
A "personal AI CFO" that modeled income, debt, and expenses, acqui-hired into OpenAI five months after launch.
Yupp
A free, crypto-incentivized playground for chatting with 800-plus AI models that paid users for their preference votes.
Snazzy AI / Smart Copy
An early GPT-3 copywriting tool that Unbounce bought, renamed Smart Copy, and later switched off as a standalone product.
Phind
An AI answer engine built for developers that resolved coding questions with cited sources, later running its own large models.
Rewind
A Mac app that recorded and indexed everything on a user's screen and microphone so they could search their past with natural language.
Microsoft Language Understanding (LUIS)
An Azure cloud service for adding natural language intent recognition to bots and apps.
Microsoft QnA Maker
An Azure service that turned FAQ pages and documents into a question-answering bot.
Dot (New Computer)
A personalized AI companion app pitched as an assistant that grows with you and keeps a living diary.
Humanloop
A development platform for building, evaluating, and monitoring LLM applications, used by companies like Duolingo, Gusto, and Vanta.
theGist
An AI assistant that read across Slack, email, and CRM to hand knowledge workers one prioritized digest a day.
Astra
An AI chief of staff for sales reps that promised to automate most of an account executive's grunt work.
CodeParrot
A Y Combinator-backed tool that turned Figma designs and screenshots into production front-end code.
CentML
A Canadian startup that built an optimization layer between AI models and chips to squeeze more performance and lower cost out of compute.
Pepper
SoftBank's four-foot humanoid robot with an emotion-reading face and a chest tablet, sold for retail greeting and home companionship.
Builder.ai
A no-code app builder that promised software as easy as ordering pizza, with an AI assistant that turned out to be mostly human.
Tome
An AI presentation tool that let users generate full decks from a prompt and grew to millions of users at its peak.
Dashworks
An AI assistant that answered work questions by searching across a company's documents, messages, tickets, and connected apps.
Humane AI Pin
A screenless wearable AI assistant that clipped to your shirt.
Moxie (Embodied)
An $800 cloud-connected social robot designed to teach social and emotional skills to children.
Magic Leap One
A $2,295 mixed-reality headset that used computer-vision AI to anchor virtual objects in physical rooms.
Figgs AI
A free roleplay chatbot platform where users built custom AI characters for open-ended conversations and interactive fiction.
Bench
An online bookkeeping service that pitched itself as AI-augmented bookkeeping for small businesses.
Cruise
GM's driverless robotaxi service, grounded after a pedestrian was dragged and then scrapped once the parent company stopped funding it.
Forward
AI-powered primary care, delivered through standalone kiosks.
OctoAI
A managed platform for running and optimizing open-source AI models cheaply across different hardware, built by the creators of Apache TVM.
Amazon Astro for Business
A roving security-guard version of Amazon's Astro home robot, sold to small businesses.
Meta AI Celebrity Personas
A lineup of 28 Meta chatbots dressed in the names and faces of celebrities like Tom Brady, Kendall Jenner, Snoop Dogg, and Paris Hilton.
GameOn
A sports-focused AI chatbot platform that powered fan conversations for the NBA, Arsenal, and the Las Vegas Raiders.
Adept AI
An agent startup training large models to operate existing software and APIs on behalf of knowledge workers.
Splash
An AI music generator from the Australian studio behind a hit Roblox music game, able to compose backing tracks and synthesize singing from a text prompt.
Ghost Autonomy
Aftermarket self-driving software for consumer cars.
GitHub Copilot Voice ("Hey, GitHub")
A voice-controlled coding assistant that let developers dictate code and editor commands to Copilot.
Forefront Chat
A free consumer chat app that gave users access to GPT-4, Claude, and persona-based AI characters in one interface.
TuSimple (US)
An autonomous trucking company that ran some of the first driverless freight runs in the US before retreating to Asia.
Artifact
Instagram founders' AI-driven news reader that ranked, summarized, and de-clickbaited the feed.
Olive AI
Robotic process automation for hospital back offices.
Babylon Health
AI-driven symptom checker and virtual primary care service that contracted with the NHS and US insurers.
Microsoft Cortana
Microsoft's voice assistant for Windows, phones, and smart speakers, retired in favor of Copilot.
Amazon Halo
Amazon's health-tracking wristband and subscription app that scanned body fat from phone photos and judged the emotional tone of the wearer's voice.
Microsoft Soundscape
A Microsoft Research app that used 3D spatial audio to call out streets, shops, and intersections to blind and low-vision users as they walked.
Joonko
An AI recruiting startup that claimed to source diverse job candidates, brought down when its founder fabricated customers and revenue.
Neeva
An ad-free, subscription-based AI search engine pitched as a privacy-respecting Google alternative.
Pear Therapeutics
A prescription digital therapeutics company making FDA-cleared software apps for substance use disorder and insomnia.
Mindstrong Health
A mental health platform that read smartphone typing and scrolling patterns as digital biomarkers of cognitive state.
Embark Trucks
An autonomous trucking startup building a self-driving software platform for long-haul Class 8 freight.
Mycroft AI
An open-source voice assistant and Linux-based smart speaker positioned as a privacy-respecting alternative to Alexa and Google Assistant.
Google Stadia
Google's cloud gaming platform, marketed around machine-learning features for streaming and game development.
Meta Portal
Meta's line of smart video-calling displays whose Smart Camera used computer vision to pan, zoom, and keep callers in frame automatically.
Galactica
Meta's large language model for science, trained on 48 million papers, textbooks, and encyclopedias that could summarize research, generate equations, and annotate molecules.
Kite
A Python-focused AI code completion plugin that predated GitHub Copilot by years.
Mighty
A cloud-streamed Chromium browser that ran Chrome on remote servers to free up local laptop resources.
Argo AI
Autonomous vehicle software, backed by Ford and Volkswagen.
Amazon Scout
Amazon's six-wheeled, cooler-sized autonomous robot that rolled along sidewalks delivering packages to customers' doors.
Amazon Glow
A $300 video-calling device for children that projected interactive games and puzzles onto a table.
DeepArt
One of the first public neural style-transfer tools, turning any photo into artwork in the style of a second image.
Sonantic
A London voice-AI startup that synthesized emotional, human-sounding speech for games and film.
Vicarious
A long-horizon AI research startup building brain-inspired models for industrial robotics and visual reasoning.
IBM Watson Health
IBM's flagship healthcare AI division that promised to use Watson to diagnose disease, match cancer treatments, and run hospital analytics.
Local Motors Olli
A 3D-printed, electric, self-driving shuttle designed for low-speed campus and city routes.
Optimus Ride
An MIT spinout building low-speed autonomous electric shuttles for geofenced communities and campuses.
x.ai (Amy and Andrew)
AI scheduling assistants Amy and Andrew Ingram that handled meeting coordination over email, one of the first widely deployed autonomous agent products. Not the Elon Musk xAI.
Voyage Auto
An autonomous taxi startup that operated low-speed self-driving cars inside private retirement communities.
Element AI
A Montreal-based enterprise AI services company building custom machine learning solutions for large companies.
ROSS Intelligence
An AI-powered legal research platform that used natural language queries to surface relevant case law for lawyers.
Starsky Robotics
A self-driving truck startup that paired highway autonomy with remote human teleoperation for the first and last miles.
Atrium
A law firm and software company that promised to automate startup legal work with machine learning.
Snips
A privacy-first voice assistant platform that ran entirely on-device, pitched to hardware makers as an alternative to Alexa and Google Assistant.
Google Clips
A clip-on camera that used on-device machine learning to decide on its own when to take a picture.
Google Pixel Buds (1st generation)
Wired Bluetooth earbuds with a Google Assistant trigger and a real-time translation feature pitched as a Babel-fish moment for AI.
Lyrebird
A Montreal voice-cloning startup that recreated a speaker's voice from a one-minute sample.
Microsoft Zo
Microsoft's English-language successor to the Tay chatbot, designed for casual conversation on messaging platforms.
Drive.ai
A self-driving car startup spun out of Stanford's AI Lab, known for retrofitted vans running geofenced shuttle pilots in Texas.
Knewton
A heavily funded adaptive-learning company that promised to personalize coursework for every student in real time.
Anki
A consumer robotics company behind the Cozmo and Vector AI companion robots and the Anki Drive racing system, marketed as real robotics in toy form.
Laundroid
A cabinet-sized robot from Japan's Seven Dreamers that used cameras and AI to fold laundry, priced around $16,000 and never shipped a unit.
Sentient Technologies
One of the best-funded AI startups of its era, built on evolutionary computation and deep learning, that was broken up and sold for parts.
Google Allo
A messaging app built around Smart Reply suggestions and the first consumer outing of Google Assistant.
Keecker
A French home robot that drove from room to room projecting movies and music while doubling as a security and smart-home hub.
Jibo
The self-described first social robot for the home, a swiveling tabletop companion that recognized faces, held conversations, and told stories.
Lighthouse AI
A smart home security camera with 3D sensing and computer vision that could recognize specific family members, pets, and strangers and respond to natural language queries.
Kuri
A $700 wheeled home robot with expressive eyes and a built-in camera, made by a Bosch-backed startup to roam the house and film candid moments.
Otto
A self-driving truck startup that made the first commercial autonomous freight delivery before being absorbed and shut by Uber.
Yahoo Aviate
An Android launcher that rearranged your home screen by time of day, location, and what you were doing.
Facebook M
Facebook's Messenger concierge, a personal assistant that mixed AI with human contractors to book tables, order gifts, and plan trips.
Microsoft Tay
Microsoft's Twitter chatbot designed to mimic an American teenage girl and learn through conversation with users.
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Patterns across the archive.
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The easy market that wasn't
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The first deaths of the AI boom
The generative-AI wave has started producing its own obituaries. The early ones rhyme.