China’s once-hot artificial intelligence sector is in a funk: spurned by investors, failing to deliver on cutting-edge technology and struggling to generate returns.

It is a far cry from last year, when Beijing issued plans to lead the world in AI by 2030, venture capital investors were pumping up valuations and China’s tech giants peppered their earnings calls liberally with their AI ambitions.

Disillusionment with the progress of AI is not unique to China. In the US, IBM laid off engineers at its flagship AI IBM Watson in the summer. Earlier Gary Marcus, a psychology professor at New York University and longtime sceptic lamented that “six decades into the history of AI, our bots do little more than play music, sweep floors and bid on advertisements”.