Ahahahahaha! Ahem. How the mighty have fallen.
Windows has a lot of the long-lived corporateware.
This desktop toy basically has a few sensors and a moveable head. No capability to pick/grasp/move an object or do any actual task.
So, disrupting it, is making whatever gizmo sells more than a vacuum cleaner.
Sounds very important and high tech.
It seems weird for a “$4.5 billion artificial intelligence platform” to be pivoting into the toy space.
The line between robot and animatronic is often blurred. I know there are industry definitions—or at least de facto conventions—but for me a robot is something that performs and controls "mechanical work" based on external sensing or input. For me, the output "work" isn't meant to solely be character expression.
That said, animatronics from Disney Imagineers really blur the line for me.
Is it supposed to just be an amazon echo type unit?
Why all the movement capability?
It codes in python, but what would that code be doing?
In my experience, these "intended MSRP prices" tend to be ... aspirational.
The only negative point I see: Pollen Robotics doesn't seem used to do mass market/cheap products. But as I said, it seems to be a pretty simple production (I mean, they are probably running everywhere like crazy because nothing is ready and everything is broken, but they should be able to accomplish this)
Not sure what huggingface is going for here. Seems like a big distraction for the company
I mean, great: I have another $300 toy in the makerspace arena that I can program. Awesome; I write code and am heavily invested personally and professionally with LLMs (open-weight models running on local GPUs as well as LLM chatbots that everyone knows, like Gemini, OpenAI, and Claude). Now what? It'll sit on my desk and maybe gather dust, if it's not dancing, because...it doesn't actually have a point or built in capabilities out of the gate--at least not that I can see--aside from looking cute and dancing according to the video in the press-release-article; all things that any $30 toy on Amazon can already do.
This is more like a Furby that you’re supposed to connect to your AI system’s audio/video interface so people can interact with a stationary humanoid device
...But...
I'm so confused by the economics, and not in a general way.
I'm a mobile developer by trade, and AFAICT from dipping my toe in the water of servers, file downloads are on the order of $0.01/GB, and cheapest you'll get publicly is maybe $0.04/GB. But they never ever charge and regularly have people downloading tens of gigabytes.
That's the cost side as far as I understand it.
On the revenue side...afaict all they have is inference? And they don't seem to be popular for an inference solution? I don't hear much about it and they don't seem to care too much.
How do their economics even begin to pencil out? It bothers me, I've lived through enough companies to know this doesn't matter in the short term. But this is novel, to me, in that there's no plan, no market being addressed. With other money losers, you knew what they were trying to do and they were doing it.
There is a variety of income sources, including inference and Hub Pro and enterprise subscriptions [1].
I do like that it's open source though.
The others I'm thinking of are the plush bear that contains a AI copy of a human mind, and the killer robot dogs.
I bet in a few years we'll be walking between cute looking potential killer machines and everybody will think it is normal.
As far as I can infer, the thing's basically a smart speaker which rotates.
As is probably more than half of the inescapable AI hype. Imagine replacing most devices and workers with their hallucinating counterparts.
It has nothing to do with the disrupting the “robot industry” like the Venture Beat headline says. It’s a little animated thing to house the AV equipment.
This has everything to do with disruptive innovation as defined by Clayton Christensen, where a new product enters the marketplace "at the bottom", with fewer and/or lower quality features but at a significantly lower cost, and then (if successful) gradually improves the feature set and quality until it displaces incumbents "Gradually and then suddenly".
But if you think of it as a basic and open AI-integrated robot kit to be used in the home, then it's quite cheap. The closest competitor I see is the MISTY II, which is more fully-featured but starts at $3,995 [0].
Maybe disruption is not quite the right word as there are no incumbents in home robotics yet, but I expect that this space will explode next decade, and getting $299/$449 devices into hobbyist homes seems to me like a great play by Hugging Face.
But what does the robot do exactly?
I can collaborate perfectly well with LLMs, no need for a physical robot to do just that.
I am genuinely lost about this product.
I thought we were over that.
The “disrupt the robot industry” is an insane lie from Venture Beat. They clearly okay with lying if they know it will drive traffic.
As best I can tell, this is meant to be a little humanoid style desk toy to act as the interface for communication. It can move its head, wiggle antennas, and rotate, but can’t manipulate anything.
For those who don't remember (I couldn't remember the name, only the face, had to look hard for it) it was a desktop robot released in 2014 that was hyped pretty hard at the time. It didn't help that the company that launched it was founded by a fairly well-known MIT professor.
And yeah, it was a flop. The $900 price tag wasn't helping things, but neither was the fact that it didn't really do anything that an Alexa couldn't. You bought it solely because you really liked the idea of robots and thought it was cool, not at all for its value around the house.
I'm not gonna dunk on this too hard since it's probably just a fun company side-project, but I might change my tune if they get too high on hype.
It's a speaker + microphone + camera case with a rotate-able head that you can put a Raspberry PI inside. There's no way this will disrupt the robotics industry. It's just another toy.
Here's some actual info:
Sure, but presumably those $70,000 robots aren't just a cute case for a Raspberry Pi + camera module.
It looks like a cute fun little toy though!
Tidy profit, even on the Lite version.
https://anki.bot/products/vector-robot
The little robot was heavily inspired by Wall-E. He'll play around when he's bored. If you play music, he'll dance. And, at least for a while, they had Alexa baked in so you could "ask" Vector to do all the things Alexa does like playing music or turning off the lights.
Vector wasn't without flaws. The Alexa integration was a tad janky. And while Vector was pretty good at detecting his environment, his sensors would occasionally fail and he'd roll off the end of the desk and hit the floor. For me, this damaged the screen which made impossible to read the codes from the device necessary to sync it with services.
But there was enough there that worked to really get the vision across. After playing with Vector for a while, I believe the first in-home robot to see major success will be more of pet and less of a helper. Vector's playful personality was a key thing that made him unique. I believe that there are not technological challenges left to solve to build an amazing consumer product - it's just a matter of putting all the right pieces together to build something crazy appealing.
fdaudens•2h ago
Y_Y•2h ago
sigh
mdaniel•2h ago
wat10000•1h ago