The result is a growing AI graveyard. Below is a look at some of the most notable AI products, startups, launches, and bets that have shut down, pivoted, or significantly missed expectations. Think of it less as a scorecard of flops than as a record of what these attempts can (hopefully) teach the rest of the industry.
That wasn’t OpenAI’s only attempt to pull everything under one roof. The company has also shut down several stand-alone apps and folded their features directly into ChatGPT — a strategy that’s worked out better than the redesign did. ChatGPT Atlas, a stand-alone AI-powered web browser, lasted less than a year before being discontinued on August 9, with its most useful features absorbed into ChatGPT.
Founded in 2021 by former Google researchers Noam Shazeer and Daniel De Freitas, Character.ai became a buzzed-about consumer AI app by letting people chat with customizable bots, many of them modeled on celebrities and fictional characters. It raised $150 million at a $1 billion valuation in 2023. Then, the next year, Google paid a reported $2.7 billion to license its technology and bring its founders back into its orbit, leaving the startup to carry on without them.
Lauren covers media, streaming, apps and platforms at TechCrunch.