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.
This is why you never buy any device that uses the cloud unless there is an option to self host.
Yeah, this isn’t really an AI-specific story. I’ve refused to buy all sorts of things that depend on “cloud services” that I know would simply cease to function if some remote server went away, without any option to tell it to talk to a server I run instead.
There are plenty of open models for AI these days, it should be possible to build a robot buddy like this that could have its brain rehosted somewhere else in the event that the parent company shuts down.