One of the reasons companies move to the cloud is they don't have competent IT folks

How much would you be willing to pay to hire such AI?

I used Here maps a lot but switched to google maps. Basically here is good only for offline routing, every other aspect sucks. Their mobile app gets less user friendly with every version. Favorites are cumbersome to use. There are very few businesses listed.

I donâ(TM)t understand the uproar here: most Americans are likely Google shareholders through their retirement funds.

Your powers of observation continue to serve you well.
In fact, it's the other thing: stuff that matters

Aging is something we could solve.
Check out the strategy here:

The Science of Curing Aging" | Talks at Google
https://youtu.be/S6ARUQ5LoUo

Read Seth Godin's blog.

except DeepMind (targeting healthcare) and Waymo

Maybe we don't need to dissect the living thing while it's working. It might be sufficient to determine our brain's connectome http://www.humanconnectomeproj... then replicate the essential parts as neural network and feed it with data like we do with our kids.

https://youtu.be/wuhbqcMzOaw

intuition is pattern recognition
modelling requires abstraction or essentially requires abstraction
our current modelling approaches require us to speak a language, either math or a programming language
abstraction is taking complex patterns and reducing them to simple concepts

From these, I think "speaking the language" is the most difficult problem. Incidentally, it is also what separates us from animals

Intuition is pattern matching. It's your brain recognizing a previously experienced situation without you consciously being aware of the exact details. If you were you'd call it reasoning.

Animals are conscious yet we wouldn't consider animal level AI particularly useful. What we really want is human or near human level intelligence. It is much more than consciousness.
In fact consciousness can be quite undesirable for commercial applications.

Valid point.

So Tesla made a move in November and unveiled their Roadster 2 - apparently totally unexpected by the industry. "The point of this is to give a hardcore smackdown to gasoline cars" is what Elon said to justify it. Two months later Ferrari bites the bait and announces their counter-move, an electric supercar. Fair enough. Doesn't look like Ferrari has the initiative though. Marchionne made a point that Ferrari would release theirs first - they better do, because their customers don't buy Ferraris for being second and he knows that.
Seems like Ferrari doesn't think they can counter it with a better ICE supercar. Why is that? Acceleration anxiety? Power anxiety? Top speed anxiety?

Looks like Musk's master plan is playing out exactly like intended.

I agree, but only if it (profit) is spent. Profit in the bank does nothing and drains the economy (other actors) of means to achieve something.

No Facebook is the worst. Apple provides a useful, tangible product at inflated price, Google provides useful search and other services. Facebook just steals your time and confuses people about what is true and what is fake. An ex-Facebook executive explains it here https://youtu.be/MakEIlvlyfE