How Inappropriately Heavyweight AI Solutions Dragged Down A Startup (and Made Me Realize that Industrial Salaries Are High for a Good Reason)

These sorts of architectures were very much in vogue at the time, and the company wanted its own, proprietary technology. We started thinking about programming languages for the agents and the kinds of knowledge representation and reasoning that would be required. We spent a lot of time and money flying from London to the U.S. West Coast, talking to patent lawyers. It transpired that the architecture, its decision-making and action models, were completely inappropriate for the problem at hand. By the time we realized we should have been focusing on basic software engineering, quality assurance, and end-user requirements, the company had burned out much of the goodwill--and most of the funds--of our investors.