AI company that made robots for children went bust and now the robots are dying
aftermath.site
aftermath.site
Or just do something so that they don't just "die".
Another example on the long list of "there should be a law that you have to open source your server if you're shutting down a server based service".
Rather than: "AI is hot. Parents with children spend money on toys. Selling children AI toys will make money. Profit."
Notably, does not look like that many people were actually swindled. Only 5000 downloads for the App companion on Google Play, and 27 reviews, and many are scathing. [1]
> Like a Jipsy moxie will keep taking your money And lie to to convince you to keep paying for it. It's $100 a month and cost $1,000 to buy.
> Do not buy this product. Technical support is non existent. I opted to return the robot. They acknowledged return. 3 weeks later still no refund for this $1K robot. Only after I created a PayPal dispute did PayPal refund me. Still not a single reply from the company to any of my emails.
[1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.embo.embod...
If they were ethical, they would’ve ensured that moxie would work at least somewhat offline.
Nintendo has been doing this for years. Their games are always almost entirely playable offline (outside of timed events.)
That’s why you can “time travel” in animal crossing and Pokémon.
It doesn’t even phone home to check the time even if it affects gameplay.
If Nintendo goes bankrupt, my game boy, 3DS, GameCube, Nintendo 64, and switch will all still work pretty much as if nothing has changed.
Unlike moxie or that Spotify car thing.
You’re describing a different issue entirely around games preservation outside of official Nintendo channels (emulators and roms)
They could include any number of DRM strategies to prevent emulation at the cost of longevity of their software and hardware.
They don’t, though. They opt for litigation over really strong DRM.
There should never be a case where something physical that I bought stops working because of an internet based service.
another proof for 'robotics is hard'...
I can imagine this going horribly wrong fast.
Personally, I love the phrase fiduciary duty. I use it all the time to help rationalize the choices I make, to ensure I maintain my fiduciary duty to myself, and use it liberally to convince my friends it's ok fight for raises, or the new job they want. I think I like it also, because of the context it has to live within my brain. A long time ago, when I was a young teenager, I was arguing, with a named partner for a huge lawfirm (family friends) about if a large company had to cede identifying information about users to $government. I made that same argument, they have a duty to shareholders. His retort was a simple. "No, this is a human rights issue, you can just say 'we're not playing'". That was a quick end to that conversation, because of how insane it is to suggest giving up human rights for money.
Fiduciary responsibility is nice and all, but have you tried upholding your responsibility to protecting human rights too? Sure, yes startup founders have a responsibility to hope for a miracle "for the shareholders!" but they have a much higher priority to human rights.
It is insane when you write it out kike that, but this is further complicated by money providing extrinsic motivation, and caring about human rights being intrinsic, at least with our current economic system and jurisprudence with laissez-faire approach to human rights violations (see wage theft for a direct example of the insanity). C-suites are more worried about shareholder lawsuits than they are about those from either consumer or employees.
My suspicion is that there's active filtering that prevents those who "overly" care about human rights from climbing too high up the leadership ladder at for-profit organizations.
What a great idea. Let parents hook it up to Gemini, who told users to eat glue and rocks. I’m sure wrong and harmful information won’t have any effect on autistic children, no siree, can’t see a single problem with that.
And before anyone has the followup brilliant idea of then putting the blame on parents for whatever LLM they choose, let me remind you that even on HN (ostensibly with a tech savvy crowd) a ton of people furiously defend LLMs. Non-tech users aren’t as equipped to make these choices.
Made into the film https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A.I._Artificial_Intelligence
This would not only allow consumers to continue using the product they supposedly own, but will also cause investors and managers to pause before developing and marketing an exclusively cloud-based device. CPU and memory are good enough that most regular consumer devices shouldn't need an internet connection
Forcing companies to forfeit their IP to public domain is an idea that appeals to tech people who imagine they’re going to reboot the entire service themselves, but it wouldn’t actually solve these problems in real life business cases.
It’s also effectively an appropriation of the company’s IP. Any country that introduced legislation that mandated companies run products for 7 years or completely forfeit all of the IP would immediately see development and production of that product move to other countries without such laws.
These ideas get floated on Hacker News but they’re completely unrealistic.
> you can go after the owners/executives if they're not compliant.
Holding startup founders personally liable if their product or business fails before 7 years and their business can’t be open sourced would create a very bad business environment, to say the least.
This also ignores the real problem that parts of source code are frequently licensed, not owned. Companies can’t just open source everything because they’re often using some licensed software or libraries.
This entire plan would make it effectively illegal for companies to develop or release a product which contains code they licensed from another party.
The number of issues with these kinds of ideas are numerous. It’s the domain of Internet fantasy, not actual policy.
Regulation can require that sublicenses extend to private individuals for repair of devices or services that are EOL. It could even limit the versions covered and commercial use.
Regardless, perfect doesn't need to be the enemy of the good. As it is consumers are increasingly powerless and landfills are overflowing.
Any country that did something like this would see every hardware company immediately relocate to a different country that didn’t have such weird laws.
Regulation like this is how you completely crush a country’s tech industry.
> landfills are overflowing
Tech waste is a tiny fraction of all garbage. People throw out more volumes of household trash in a week than they might discard tech devices in many years.
> Holding startup founders personally liable if their product or business fails before 7 years and their business can’t be open sourced would create a very bad business environment, to say the least.
Maybe. That's a conjecture; a hypothesis at best. At the same time it might introduce pressure to have the licensing craziness tamed and streamlined. It's way too complex and hinders innovation, as you half-alluded to.
I think you have a fundamental misunderstanding of how bankruptcy works if you don’t think the IP is important in bankruptcy.
> Maybe. That's a conjecture; a hypothesis at best.
It’s not conjecture, it’s simple fact.
If you introduce laws making founders personally liable if their product fails within 7 years, you create a hostile environment for startups. It’s very simple.
Citing legalese is not relevant here, we all know how the situation came to its current state, the real interesting question is how can things improve.
If you introduce a law like this, you effectively remove that IP from the company’s assets. Tech companies are valued largely by their IP.
No sane investor or startup will headquarter themselves in a country that has a law forcing their IP into public domain.
Investors won’t invest in and banks won’t loan companies to develop tech IP if there’s a law on the books that says they can’t sell that IP.
> The legal aspect is not interesting to me.
I can see that much. :)
The legal aspect is all important. Waving it away is ignoring the entire issue.
> the real interesting question is how can things improve.
The proposals so far would do nothing other than discourage development of new products in that country. Hardly an improvement.
https://www.epi.org/publication/employers-steal-billions-fro...
Many products are developed with software licensed from vendors, which cannot be open sourced by the startup. They don’t even own the IP, just a license to use it.
There’s also more to a product than just some source code. You’d need the cloud domains, the private keys and certificates, and other bits. Releasing many of these to the public domain wouldn’t solve anything because you’d need someone to operate the cloud servers at the known address and trust with the private keys and certificates
All of this quickly begins to look a lot like requiring someone to operate the business again, which is obviously a silly thing to require in bankruptcy proceedings.
Forcing companies to release their IP if they go bankrupt is equally silly, because it renders the value of the company’s IP as $0 before anyone can be paid out.
The only thing this would incentivize is for companies to either relocate to countries with sane laws, or to shut off the servers and avoid bankruptcies by keeping the company technically alive but doing nothing other than staying as a registered business. It would act as a holding company to keep the IP in case someone wanted to buy it.
> CPU and memory are good enough that most regular consumer devices shouldn't need an internet connection
https://moxierobot.com/products/ai-robot "emotion-responsive HD camera and GPT-powered AI"
Yet, this company failed to secure additional funding at the last minute in an atmosphere where Gen AI is the buzz word everyone's after?
Is this a one off case specific to this company or is it some sudden realization among businesses about the current viability of AI products?
Been more than a year, still waiting.
Sure, it might take 50. But the AI craziness is made no less crazy in the meantime. Way too much time and money thrown for fairly marginal benefits.
Marginal benefits? Even just Github Copilot itself is absolutely worth it, itself probably a billion dollar company, and changed the world.
Image generation is another. I personally know a business owner - it's an online grocery store - who used AI generated pictures to reduce costs by 10s of thousands of Euro, it's what made the business possible. (The pictures are cartoonish, nobody thinks it's a real photo)
I have only seen it introduce friction and keep seniors busy code-reviewing the subtle mistakes that the so-called "AI" does.
That it does not happen to you, means it never happens to anyone else?
One anecdotal evidence does not nullify the other, and vice versa. You have your experience, I have mine. I even qualified my statements -- one of the languages I use is not very popular and thus statistical models like the LLMs obviously don't do well with it -- but you are happy to ignore that and keep arguing that your experience is the prevailing phenomena, which I'll always disagree with.
Peace.
Can’t release those publicly, so you’d need someone to hold the domains, the certs, they private keys, and operate the servers. That costs money, so they’d need to collect payments and manager customers. Starting to look an awful lot like running the company again.
You probably also need the customer database including user accounts and user data. Obviously can’t release that, so you’d need some process to release everyone’s data individually on some ongoing basis.
And you couldn’t release any code that was licensed rather than owned, so users couldn’t build most software anyway without acquiring their own licenses for that 3rd-party code.
There are so many problems with this idea that would prevent it from being viable.
Your idea may work for technical systems used by technical users, but in this case (and I'd bet my bottom dollar most cases are similar) that the products are intended for non-technical end users.
How is some random family supposed to take the public repository of source code and set it up so their child's emotional support robot works? How is your middle-aged neighbour supposed to set up their Nest doorbell with someone else's server and establish trust? How is your aunt supposed to set their Alexa speaker to a self-hosted server? These are people who call a desktop computer a 'CPU'. Put yourself in their shoes, their IT skills are basically 0. Where would they host the compiled code? How would they even know where to start?
The intention is certainly good and it would be an improvement, but it would not allow consumers - most of whom are buying an appliance - to continue using their products. Would it really also push investors and managers to pause? It's a non-monetary impact and I can't imagine they'd allocate any effort building systems that package it up so that it's simple to stand up the cloud services. It has no benefit to them.
Most consumers aren't hackers/developers. Most are non-technical. Implicit in the purchase of a cloud-connected appliance is an expectation that some geeks somewhere make everything Just Work for them. They're not looking to have to tweak (digital) knobs and configure parameters - that's the company's job. That's why so many of these sorts of devices are designed with very simple user interfaces.
Your suggestion is good within the narrow window of technical systems for technical consumers, but this is a far tougher nut to crack than that when considering the broader audience.
It’s a nice-to-have if you could resolve the part about needing to trust some random person picking it up and modifying it, or hosting their own server for you to use. Unlike when you purchase an item from a known legal entity, there’s way less assurance about your data, security, etc.
The lay-consumer isn’t going to spin up a DO droplet to host their own instance. They’d be hard pressed to sign up to ChatGPT and drop in an API key.
These are all very hard problems and I don’t pretend to have any answers.
I honnestly wouldn't even go that far. Systems that were designed for self hosting can be difficult to deploy on your own. A system that was managed by multiple teams might take a man year to unravel.
My classic car is no longer supported by the defunct manufacturer, but there is a whole ecosystem of parts and services companies who come together to support it for me. If we had better access to the internals this could be the case for expensive electronics too.
Eventually network connected shit will piss off enough people to do a combination of all of above without the need to opensoure and deal with it yourself.
Something like that could be done here. If you make products that don’t last a reasonable amount of time or you pack up in the middle of commitments then there’s some way for your relevant corporate assets to be transferred to another entity that will take up support.
I'm sorry, but the legislative branch isn't of or for you. It is of and for the companies that pay for the congressional campaigns.
Perhaps the technical angle to this story is the promise of edge ML. If your language model runs on the device, your cloud inference costs go to zero and the device works as long as it has power.
Aside from the financial benefits, there’s a huge privacy upside as well since no audio or text is sent over a wire. Might be notable for a children’s toy.
Of course, this is very difficult for large companies and VC-backed startups to care about because 1) it involves hard technical problems rather than API calls and 2) as long as you can keep asking for money the inference costs don’t matter and 3) there are no criminal consequences (prison time) for privacy violations.
To the corporations, data is the new oil, and to the vast majority of consumers, there's this very defeatist attitude around privacy, something like "I already don't have any privacy, what's one more recording device going to do?".
I think we should not expect privacy to meaningfully improve until the gap between end-user perceptions of the value of their privacy and corporate perceptions of the value of their customers' (or users') data shrinks, and I sadly don't see much hope here at all. In fact, I think a substantial plurality, if not an outright majority, even have the technical aptitude to critically evaluate the accuracy of corporate claims of privacy, like those misleading claims of privacy offered by Apple.
Humans are highly adaptable creatures, and sadly, I think most have settled quite comfortably into the panopticon that modern society has mandated for so many of us, embedded deep down in the terms of service that everyone agrees to but never reads.
Do you see this as a generational thing? I remember working for wireless companies in the 1900's when GPS got huge and companies wanted to start using tracking apps for their fleet management and every company we talked to refused to install it because of privacy concerns and the drivers (and sometimes unions) being 100% opposed to it.
Now? We have what? Two to three generations who have never valued their privacy enough to really do anything about it. While I agree with your assertion, I whole heartedly believe the road back to people seeing privacy as important may have effectively died with the Gen Xers.
If your generational hypothesis is correct we should see that older people are less likely to allow the app to track. I personally doubt that but I don’t have the data. More likely is that young people are more likely to use newer technologies at all, and those technologies have other side effects.
People care, imo. Companies know this so they make it a pain in the butt to opt out. Plus, the harms are very abstract and rarely materialize. So unless a person has a lot of time to spend configuring everything, they usually don’t waste time turning tracking off.
For the layman, this will allow them to bypass a monthly cloud subscription fee which is a killer feature.
However, there is a middle ground: pluggable AI could potentially be a thing. The device would use an open protocol to access cloud AI. If the original company goes bankrupt then someone else can implement the protocol and the devices can be repointed.
For simpler things, small models can definitely handle them. Transcription, object detection, simple classification tasks. I expect more and more to fall under the category of “things which ML can do on $X of hardware” as hardware and software get better.
It could be worse. Imagine that the children had to hand over private information to use the toy, and for that entire dataset to be leaked because the toymaker knows nothing about security. Oh, that already happened: https://www.bitdefender.com/en-gb/blog/hotforsecurity/vtech-...
Or imagine the toy had cameras and microphones uploading continuously to the Clown, then "hackers" released all of it.
We can teach children not to trust a stranger offline or online. How do you teach them to be on guard about an interactive emotional support robot friend thats a parental gift?
The usual story, and more e-waste generated.
So, I disagree that it's any straw. In fact, I'd argue it's the reverse: AI has just revealed and accentuated the real probelm: social media, smartphones, internet, computers, video games, etc. were already some kind of problem and it's one of magnitude, not some binary condition.
Not enough emphasis is placed on this.
Except for the kids, that is, who've got hit by unneeded and unexpected grief.
Yay.
Let’s be real: This is at best a lesson for the adults, and not one they’re concerned with learning right now.
> nfl player pays for 15 kids to go to college
> student organizes bake sale to pay for school lunches
> chemistry teacher finds creative ways to pay for chemo
However, parents who shelled out $800 recently may not appreciate that.
There is no ethical way to build robots to which humans are meant to, or predictably will, become emotionally attached.
As always. Everything that relies on some cloud can become a brick without warning. And many things shouldn't require it...
Woah. So you'd have to keep paying for this now-defunct plastic piece of garbage?
They go out of business too quickly these days, and run away with the money.
This company is a take the money and run type of operation. No subscription plan and I doubt the API fees were making a huge part of their obscene profit. They would have eventually, but clearly they were not going to wait that long.
Humans will pack bond with anything.
I hear you, but I think corporate dissolution is the one case where no one can really expect a device to remain supported, so punishing that will do no good. Punishment only makes sense when you have an ongoing viable business that drops support for no good reason (like the Spotify Car thing).
IMHO, for dissolution, it makes more sense to require open-sourcing all device and server code if there's no entity willing to take on support.
For an ongoing business, there should be some onerous punishment if they decide brick a connected device too early (e.g before 5 or 7 years after the last version sold), and if they decide brick it later they need to open source the related code.
2. Never spend money on multiplayer-only video games. Never buy a robot that is 100% cloud connected — ESPECIALLY from a startup. This is the same concept stated twice.
3. You buy things for what they are today; NEVER for what they might be tomorrow.
I feel no remorse. Stupidity should be painful.
Of course, they could probably release code to the open-source. Still someone needs to run the service. Also, if the code contains intellectual property, wouldn't existing investors enforce the company of selling the IP rights in case of a bankruptcy?
I am not taking sides here, just trying to understand what options a company (any company) could explore in this case.
Allocate the money you need to become profitable before you can become profitable?
Where would that money come from? Presumably if you had that kind of money you could just skip the whole make a company bit and retire in luxury.
Imagine you have 10k and want to become rich by building a luxury appartement building. Can you start selling property titles without first having funding? Can you raise capital, sell not-yet-existing properties, then close up and expect everything to be okay?
If you can't deliver on a promise and didn't make a good faith effort, maybe you committed fraud.
I have no idea about bankruptcy law -- does the company defaulting on their contractual obligations make their customers their creditors? Maybe the customers are entitled to get rights to whatever code the company had and is free to run it at their own expense. Or maybe nobody really cares enough about 800 dollar teddy bears.
https://europa.eu/youreurope/citizens/consumers/shopping/gua...
The robot was never officially sold in Europe, but the claim might extend to the reseller.
That EU legal guarantee is only between seller and consumer. The manufacturer does not have any obligations under it.
In this case, it likely would come down to the “If this is impossible or the seller cannot do it within a reasonable time and without significant inconvenience to you, you are entitled to a full or partial refund” part
I mean, yes.
Or: "Robots will need to go hibernating now in order to return to its far, far away planet". You are welcome, coward parent.
It is unfortunate that the majority don't care. I'd prefer if the Invisible Hand pushed the economy towards products that weren't e-waste in waiting.
https://www.canadianpoultrymag.com/rise-of-the-robots-30876/
i'd give it a shot, but i dont have one :(
for example, a computer system that routinely checks for updates will hopefully still function if the update server goes away. and you can always install another operating system.
since I listen to most music via a streaming service these days, I don't consider the music owned and don't mind moving to another service (which I have gone twice, losing playlists in the process).
the worst is "digital copies" of movies. I try not to buy these, but occasionally do. I'm pretty sure that Blu-rays I buy today will work until the media degrades, but have no such confidence in digital copies.