Thanks for your candid account of your AI journey, Alberto.

I worked on AI for over 30 years as a researcher, but perhaps my ambitions were more modest.

Of course, "AI loses its magic when you look from the inside." When any magician reveals his trick, it's not magic anymore!

The purely scientific and the business perspectives are opposed to some extent: one AI researcher explained how they made money out of AI:

"We made our AI dumber and dumber until we made money."

I don't see AI's mission as "uncovering the mysteries of human intelligence" but as "delivering useful solutions to common human problems." Put in this way, an AI solution would not be good because it's made out of AI but because it solves the problem it intends to solve.

Most products don't even need AI to be useful, but there are some situations where only AI will provide a good solution. One example is translation. Another is writing correction, where products like Grammarly shine because of their usefulness. Grammarly will not change humanity's fate, but it's damn useful to me –it's even a life-saver for my writing!

There are many more aspects of your post worth discussing, but I don't want to make this comment longer.

Congrats on your thought-provoking articles!