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.
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.
This is why I buy NOTHING anymore…everything is integrated with bullshit that will stop working when they want to and the only courses of action I have are don’t buy anything, or buy things and throw them through they windows WHEN they do this.
I choose to save money and buy literally nothing.
same here. I cancelled all subscriptions too. The billionaires have enough money. Not giving them any more of mine. At this point, I only buy food and beer. I’m learning to sew so I can keep my clothes longer too. they will stop making garbage when people stop buying it.
You could also learn how to brew your own beer, and try growing your own herbs and vegetables either on a balcony or patio or even indoors. Even more of a middle finger to the billionaires. Buy-nothing groups for furniture and other items, or a local garage sale, or at least a locally-run secondhand store. The less we consume, the less wealth is transferred.
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I tried brewing my own once. It tasted like sweet frothy dirt. lol. I could give it another go I suppose. I did join some local facebook free groups. So that’s a start. I would like to also distance myself from facebook but there’s literally nothing else that people use around here.
You could try looking at Freecycle, Trashnothing, or Freegle, instead of the Facebook groups. I think there’s also Lemmy and Mastodon groups around brewing you can try looking at. Anything to fight the system!
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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!