Around the time of this MEng thesis, in one startup-oriented professor's AI-ish research group, the spinoff startups found that no one wanted the AI parts of th

Around the time of this MEng thesis, in one startup-oriented professor's AI-ish research group, the spinoff startups found that no one wanted the AI parts of the startups. But customers of the AI startups very much wanted more mundane solutions, which the startup would then pivot to doing. (For example, you do startup to build AI systems to do X, and a database system is incidental to that; turns out the B2B customers wanted that database system, for non-AI reasons.) So a grad student remarked about AI startups, "First thing you do, throw out the AI." Which was an awkward thing for students working on AI to say to each other. But it was a little too early for deep learning or transformers. And the gold rush at the time was for Web/Internet.