BERLIN--Volkswagen AG Chief Executive Oliver Blume has put plans for a self-driving vehicle under review in the first sign since his appointment two months ago that he is walking back some of his predecessor's most ambitious technology ventures. Mr. Blume is likely to delay the Trinty self-driving electric car project and could cancel plans to build a new factory for the vehicle near its headquarters, people familiar with the matter said. In a message Thursday that was seen by The Wall Street Journal, Mr. Blume and VW brand CEO Thomas Schäfer told employees, "We are using this opportunity to review all projects and investments and determine whether they are viable." The move shows how Mr. Blume, who took the helm in September after the board ousted Herbert Diess, is beginning to reorder VW's most ambitious--and fraught--endeavors to focus on near-term implementation of key software and technology for coming models. A personal, guided tour to the best scoops and stories every day in The Wall Street Journal.

Earlier this month, researchers at the Allen Institute for AI -- a nonprofit founded by late Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen -- released an interactive demo of a system they describe as part of a "new generation" of AI applications that can analyze, search across, and respond to questions about videos "at scale." Called Merlot Reserve, the researchers had the system "watch" 20 million YouTube videos to learn the relationships between images, sounds, and subtitles, allowing it to, for example, answer questions such as "What meal does the person in the video want to eat?" or "Has the boy in this video swam in the ocean before?" Systems that can process and relate information from audio, visuals and text have been around for years. These technologies continue to improve in their ability to understand the world more like humans. San Francisco research lab OpenAI's DALL-E, which was released in 2021, can generate images of objects -- real or imagined -- from simple text descriptions like "an armchair in the shape of an avocado."

In recent years, defense officials have been banging the drum about the importance of adopting artificial intelligence to assist with everything from operating autonomous platforms to intelligence analysis to logistics and back office functions. But the Pentagon is not pumping enough money into this technology, according to one expert. "The critical question is whether the United States will be at the forefront of these developments or lag behind, reacting to advances in this space by competitors such as China," Susanna Blume, director of the defense program at the Center for a New American Security, said in a recent report titled, "Strategy to Ask: Analysis of the 2020 Defense Budget Request." The request includes just $927 million for the Pentagon's AI efforts, about 0.13 percent of the department's proposed $718 billion topline, she noted. "Given the enormous implications of artificial intelligence for the future of warfare, it should be a far higher priority for DoD in the technology development space, and certainly a higher priority than the current No. 1 -- development of hypersonic weapons," she said.

The advances have also fueled speculation of a wave of job losses as machines replace humans, just as the industrial revolution rendered many occupations redundant. The World Economic Forum predicted in January that by 2020, 5 million jobs could be lost to machines. Experts said when it came to the banking and finance sector, the topic needed a more nuanced approach. Speaking on a panel discussing global trends in fintech at InnovFest UnBound, a digital technology conference organized in Singapore, Avinash Hegde, co-founder of a chat bot service Supertext, explained that low-skilled finance jobs, such as basic analytics and number crunching, could soon be done by AI. "The way we interact with business and financial analysts is going to dramatically change in the next few years," he said. Would financial analysts find themselves out of a job?