Scott Phoenix, cofounder of vicarious, talks about the “Kiss of death of AI” in this interview: Vicarious’ Scott Phoenix on AI & race to unlock human brain to create AGI, our last invention (link starts at 21m50s)

[Scott] We’re a bunch of phd’s in a room. We’re solving fundamental research problems on how to build generally intelligent systems.

[Jason (interviewer)] Huh. With no customers ?

[Scott] Well, the customers are infinite. If you can solve this problem…

[Jason] But no customers currently, I’m saying. It’s not like Google, or Yahoo said: “we’re giving you 10 milling dollars to do X”

[Scott] Yeah yeah yeah. That’s the kiss of death of AI in my mind for AI research startups: as soon as you have your first customer and you haven’t solved the fundamental research problems, then you start making it more and more narrow. And there you are again stuck in artificial narrow intelligence. You haven’t cracked the thing.