Waymo ceo made a similar statement.

All and every piece of electronics we did in the automotive sector had some lame "AI platform" attached somewhere, for no apparent reason.

The most blatant "AI washing" I saw was an "AI power steering" which was a plain PID, inferior on all fronts to purpose made systems already on the market.

Second to it was an "AI airbag," which was basically an OpenCV hello world that will trigger the airbag ahead of time. Terribly unreliable, and would've probably killed more people than saved.

I wish there was a collection of stubborn dismissals of things that did come to pass and became bigger and better than originally imagined, so we could point and laugh at those cynical sticks in the muds.

Steve Ballmer's dismissal of the iPhone being a popular relatively recent case.

I still remember that quote I discovered through Civilization, apparently made by some popular leader (Napoleon?) about steam engines: "You would make a ship of iron and without sails move by lighting a bonfire under its deck?? Absurd!"