AI company Embodied announced this week that they would be shutting down following financial difficulties and a sudden withdrawal of funding. Embodied’s main product was Moxie, an AI-powered social robot specifically made with autistic children in mind. The robot itself cost $799.00 and now, following the closure of Embodied, it will cease to function.
Moxie is a small blue robot with a big expressive face straight out of a Pixar movie. The robot used large language models in the cloud to answer questions, talk, and function. With Embodied out of business, the robot will soon no longer be able to make those calls. This outcome was always likely – any cloud based device is subject to the health of the company and LLMs are not cheap to run. This has actually happened before with a company called Vector. But the shocking part is that this was not an old device, it was fairly recent, expensive, and still being sold.
This is a fantastic opportunity to allow parents to explain financial insolvency to their autistic child grieving the loss of their robot companion.
LLMs in a robot that talks to a child? Surely nothing can go wrong with that.
There’s a movie plot hook buried there. About a kid on spectrum whose robot buddy gets killed by the uncaring business. They go “oh no, I’ll have to fix my robot buddy” and go on to become a tech genius. One day, they become a tech millionaire, and the story’s antagonist, the shady businesses partner, goes “look, we’re bankrupt, we have no choice, we have to shut down all of the robot buddies”. And the protagonist remembers the saddest moment of their childhood and are like “no, we can’t do that”.
Isn’t this kind of the plot to the Rick and Morty dog episode but kinda flipped
LOL RIP AI BOZOS
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We are going to be seeing so many of these investor-backed, AI-focused, trend-chasing startups dropping like flies in the next few years as the interest (and VC money) dries up. The landfills of the world are going to fill with even more disposable trash as so many cloud-dependant gadgets go offline.
Never buy any hardware that doesn’t work offline.
That’s why I like to check if someone has already rooted a purpose-built gadget before buying.
My RabbitAI will make a nice little MP3 player when the company folds.
or play Minecraft on it!
♫ That’s a chargeback ♫
This is why you never buy any device that uses the cloud unless there is an option to self host.
Yeah, this isn’t really an AI-specific story. I’ve refused to buy all sorts of things that depend on “cloud services” that I know would simply cease to function if some remote server went away, without any option to tell it to talk to a server I run instead.
There are plenty of open models for AI these days, it should be possible to build a robot buddy like this that could have its brain rehosted somewhere else in the event that the parent company shuts down.
An expensive gadget that requires the cloud to function that is designed to manipulate young children into believing that this gadget is their “friend”.
How this is even legal is beyond me.
Autistic children, there is a difference and they do have different needs.
shit, we might have to hire a human
With AI’s propensity for hallucinations, I wouldn’t even remotely trust one of these with my autistic child. The potential for damage, or even just gaslighting are huge.
Have you used one of these? My in-laws bought one (WHYYY) for my kids, I said at the time it was just a waste of money that wouldnt last 3 years. Anyway, it was creepy, monotone, and could only remember 1 child’s name. Really not great for interacting with kids.
You’ve answered what I was wondering… “Given how ‘good’ these AI turds are, was this robot any good? Isn’t it probably the reason the company is going butt-up?” I seriously hope the ‘specifically made for autistic children’ wasn’t their way to stand out among all the other toy robots…
I’m not sure how big that was in their marketing. I never saw any of it, my kids are not autistic. They played with it one (1) time for about twenty minutes.
I might be interested in putting together at-cost replacement internals to make these things work again for kids that saw benefit from them. DM me if you’d like to help me figure out if this is possible.
If so, please keep it off the internet if possible, I’ll explain why.
My kids didnt like it so I dont have much interest in making it work again. If you’d like the unit you can DM me and we can figure that out. You’ll probably need a few in your endeavors.
Your in-laws are fired lmao
Yea, that thing would’ve gone out in the next trash collection.
“Oh, it broke”. Actually, no, it would’ve never come in my house. I’m pretty up front about not allowing such invasive bullshit.
Now they’re out-laws.
Now I wonder if Hello Barbie still works.
I assume they’re filing for bankruptcy. Is there any way we could purchase the servers and IP to keep this running with a much cheaper and less stupid backend than an LLM? Parents of autistic kids needing to tell them that their robot buddy will no longer be part of their daily routine isn’t doing anyone any favors.
Is there any way we could purchase
Purchase? Fuck that, this company (and its investors) failed their customers. They should be forced to Open Source all of their code.
That’s a solution I could get behind!
we? how much do you have to invest
Purchase was the wrong word. Acquire?
