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.

  • Sanctus@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    16 days ago

    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.

      • BearOfaTime@lemm.eeEnglish
        0·
        15 days ago

        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.

    • fmstrat@lemmy.nowsci.comEnglish
      0·
      15 days ago

      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.

    • SharkAttak@kbin.melroy.org
      0·
      14 days ago

      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…