“The mechanism is always the same in every story I've been covering. The demo works in a controlled environment with clean inputs. The deplo…

“The mechanism is always the same in every story I've been covering. The demo works in a controlled environment with clean inputs. The deployment fails because real kitchens, real intersections, and real warehouses produce messy inputs the demo never tested. The vendor gets paid through the failure cycle. The buyer eats the cost and quietly retires the product. If a pizza chef can lose 250,000 on a topping robot, the people writing 80 billion capex checks for general purpose AI agents should expect to learn the same lessons at much larger scale” 🦔Picnic, a Seattle pizza robotics startup that raised 53 million and partnered with Domino's, just shut down. The company sold its IP to an unnamed buyer and left at least one restaurant owner stuck with 250,000 of useless robots. Zume Pizza did the same thing in 2023 after bu…

Source: Gary Marcus (X) | 2026-05-28