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.
An expensive gadget that requires the cloud to function that is designed to manipulate young children into believing that this gadget is their “friend”.
How this is even legal is beyond me.
Autistic children, there is a difference and they do have different needs.
With AI’s propensity for hallucinations, I wouldn’t even remotely trust one of these with my autistic child. The potential for damage, or even just gaslighting are huge.
shit, we might have to hire a human