Ministers have shut down or dropped at least half a dozen artificial intelligence prototypes intended for the welfare system, the Guardian has learned, in a sign of the headwinds facing Keir Starmer’s effort to increase government efficiency.

AI and “efficiency” are not even on the same planet right now. Did he mean to say “government burning piles of money in return for feathering oligarch’s nests and little else”? Because that would be true.

This month the prime minister declared “AI is the way … to transform our public services” and wrote to all cabinet ministers “tasking them with driving AI adoption and growth … and making that a top priority for their departments”.

Yeah I think a lot of managers are being given this particular marching order - “Figure out something to do with AI quickly!” It’s insanity. You can build a bot to repeat a limited number of things, or you can hire people to be behind the bot actually making the decisions. Those are you options for “AI adoption and growth”.

Writing in December after a year of running i.AI, the Whitehall AI incubator, its director, Laura Gilbert, admitted “there have been abundant blockers, frustrations and false starts”, but said “if something fails, we try, try again and find another route to impact”.

She said that of 57 ideas tested, 11 made it to rollout in various stages of testing and scaling. She added it has been working with US AI firms including OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and Microsoft.

For numbers we expect to be padded, that’s miserable. And yes, the usual money vacuums are involved, no surprise there.

The hype train has eaten minds - which we should not be surprised about given the predictable success of blatant propaganda around the world - but it’s time to grow up and explain to the techbros that they fucked this up super big time. There is nothing worthwhile for most of the human-interaction use cases. And there won’t be anytime soon.