I understand your point. But if you follow the achievements of spacex and the current progress of starship, they clearly are making the most progress of any group of people in this direction.
Elon has a bad time prediction engine for predicting how much time something will take his companies to achieve. But please let me know of something that he said that turned out to be a lie or actually impossible by the laws of physics. Because I never heard him say anything like that. And he will pay whatever tens of billions he has to pay. He really doesn't care about money.
This is really strange! I'm a tech entrepreneur, but don't personally know many others. Critical thinking should prevail in the tech industry, not this nonsense.
In the ted interview he did recently he said he had a plan B. And that plan was clearly to create a new social media, if you watch the interview you will notice. I honestly don't think he was trying to pull anything. If you see a product that seems made of real gold and then when you ask the seller to prove it's gold, they go round and round not actually answering your question, why would you buy it? Better to put that money into another product. It's common sense, people should stop being so cynical. It's a distorted and sad world that one. As Elon said once "I prefer to be optimistic and wrong rather than pessimistic and right".
The amount of envy people here have for Elon is crazy. The man is succeeding at making us a multi-planetary species, arguably the single most important achievement in the history of life itself, and your little damaged egos can't handle it. So sad.
Yes definitely, I had the same experience in college a couple of years ago, the AI course was about "expert systems" and that kind of old symbolic AI. No neural nets at all. But, interestingly enough I think neural nets will likely be combined with something like symbolic methods when we finally build AGI, mainly for reasoning tasks.