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.
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.