It's hard to believe that they were acquired for 'only' 1.1B, given the valuations we have seen of many other companies recently.
How much did slack go for? 30 billion? For a shiny chat client with fewer features than the 25 year old tech they ape.
Yeah, until there's a B1-66ER incident...
Absolutely stunning show of animation styles, story telling and great music.
https://www.army-technology.com/features/us-army-exoskeleton...
IMO they pay for the customer base more than the app itself.
There's a whole ton of unsolved problems:
- no true autonomy in chaotic/dynamic environments
- powering these machines for longer timespans is currently impossible (batteries endurance is measured in minutes, not hours)
- high skill level required for operating these machines (again - they're not autonomous in the slightest)
- paradox of complexity: it's easier to genetically engineer tomatoes that can withstand falling to the ground and being swept into a box than it is to engineer a machine that can identify and carefully pick ripe tomatoes as fast, as reliably and as cheap as a human worker
- motion planning and navigating unmapped environments is largely unsolved
- specialised machines are cheaper, more reliable and readily available: it's often more beneficial to modify the process than to program a generalised machine to perform human tasks, e.g. washing machines and dish washers don't need actual hands and tumble dryers don't need to use clothes lines yet all three work fine/better than the human version of the process
- AI safety is still in its infancy (even in the context of "just" motion planning and navigation); there's no such thing as tried and tested safety protocols for fully autonomous robots
- the state of the software (in terms of autonomy) is way behind the state of the hardware
- even Spot is for the most part still just a super low-volume solution looking for a problem
Judging from the comments in this thread, the value proposition for BD is still very unclear. Bi/quadriped robots are - currently, at least - an expensive solution to a problem that no-one really has.
Investing in BD is a gamble that they'll be able to carve out a profitable niche some time in the future. The valuation has to reflect that uncertainty.
While I can't argue they are actually worth much more, I think I do feel a bit of an 'I wish cool hardware got as much hype and attention as software' lament in general.