Are there any proven examples of a company doing this (starting with a manual approach), receiving investment, and eventually developing a working AI product?

Depends on how you define AI. If you're talking hands-off, learned-from-scratch ML and deep learning. I'm not sure. If you're talking "used a human to learn the steps and then slowly automated those steps", then you're describing basically every company that's ever existed.

>If you're talking "used a human to learn the steps and then slowly automated those steps", then you're describing basically every company that's ever existed.

So, obviously not that definition then....

That's a pretty weak definition then. Might be your issue right there.

There was a fairly hyped scheduling assistant which had human intervention to start...

Ah here [1] it is, X.ai.

[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11520681

* Interestingly, searching on Google for “x.ai human” lead me back to the HN discussion as the 4th link! I’m seeing HN discussion surface in organic search results a lot more lately.

That's likely because your Google profile points HN threads as relevant / what you're searching for. Try using DDG for a less biased search result.

This did not occur to me. This would be mildly terrifying if true, except Incognito mode returns the same results.

The hn link is 5th result for me on google, but that link is the bottom of the second page on ddg (20th result I think?).

I think google is following you in your incognito mode!

Does incognito mode change your IP address? I wouldn't doubt google still "knows" it's you

seems like many self-driving car startups follow this model?

thanks! that's clearly what the above comment was asking. . .