Happy New Years’s Eve! Hope you’re staying safe and warm out there. Here’s to 2023…
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Saturday, 31 December 2022
Crookie Awards: States That Have NOT Expanded Medicaid
A big ol' Crookie and a raspberry to the shameful racist resistance to expanding Medicaid.
Not to mention the damage this obstinacy does to rural hospitals and their constituencies.
The map above tells the story. The southeast and Texas (also a confederate state) stand out as bastards.
(Also note that in Wisconsin, adults with incomes up to 100% of the federal poverty level are eligible for Medicaid. So not Medicaid "expansion," but more than the Confederacy.)
Medicaid expansion is tremendously popular with voters, but in the South voters can NOT decide things like Medicaid expansion because Jim Crow is alive and well in Republican-dominated legislatures.
And even when voters DID vote to expand Medicaid in Missouri, Republican legislators tried to stop it.
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Crookies 2022: Ballot Initiative Of The Year: Abortion In Kansas
It was a significant win for women. And a harbinger of the midterms to come. As Karoli Kuns wrote in August:
Kansas voters didn't just say no to a constitutional amendment allowing an abortion ban,, they shouted "Hell NO" to one at the top of their voting lungs. As of this writing, the "No" vote was winning with a 61 percent to 39 percent lead.
Turnout in Kansas was up, with some predicting it would match or possibly exceed turnout in the 2008 presidential race, where it was 63.3 percent of eligible voters. Whatever the turnout, it's clear voters don't want abortion bans, even in red states.
To the activists who went to battle, and won big, on behalf of Kansas women, a Crookie Good Guys Award:
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Crookie GOOD GUY: Dark Brandon Meme
[Above: "Know Your Meme" explains how we libs took over "Dark Brandon." - eds.]
Let's Go Brandon was a weird meme that came out of a Nascar race where some fans misheard something someone said and thought "cool, let's turn this into a dig against Joe Biden", complete with FJB stickers and t-shirts. Well, that was reclaimed when Dark Brandon came out and boy did it turn the tide.
Some backstory on Lets Go Brandon.
It really started to take hold on social media when the White House hired Megan Coyne and the tone started to be less like a press release and more...social media appropriate.
President Biden took the meme mocking and brought it to life.
It even has an offshoot Dank Brandon after he started pardoning marijuana related offenses.
To Dark (and Dank) Brandon - you win a Crookie GOOD GUY of 2022 Award!
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2022 Crookies Fail Of The Year: Kevin McCarthy, Leader Who Can't Lead
We all know how badly Kevin McCarthy wants to be Speaker of the House -- but why? He won't really lead his caucus, he's embarrassingly transactional. How will he get anything done when he's promised so many different things to so many of his members? Even the Republicans who say they'll vote for him say they want to reserve the right to call another speaker election.
That's a real vote of confidence, there, Kevin! No one seems to like you:
Micromobility in limbo: Takeaways from Paris and LA
Shared electric scooters came onto the scene five years ago with a promising vision of getting people out of cars and onto greener modes of transportation. Yet despite billions in VC money and plenty of hype, the future that micromobility companies promised still hasn’t quite arrived.
In cities like Paris, most people aren’t replacing car trips with shared e-scooter jaunts in a meaningful way; the cost of riding scooters makes them an expensive option for last-mile transit connections and equitable access; and the public disclosures of Bird and Helbiz have shown us that achieving profitability is incredibly difficult. Plus, cities that allowed shared e-scooter companies in their midsts are increasingly making it difficult for scooter companies to operate sustainably.
For the sake of traffic flow and carbon emissions, there need to be alternatives to cars. Are shared e-scooters the answer to that, or are they just another shitty option? What have we gained by introducing shared micromobility to cities?
We decided to take a look at two cities that were at the forefront of the e-scooter revolution – Los Angeles and Paris. The former has garnered a reputation of being a bit of a free-for-all, with a laissez-faire capitalist regulatory approach that allows multiple operators to compete for rides and space. The latter has some of the strictest regulations in the game, including limited operator permits, and in fact is still considering banning shared e-scooters entirely.
“From a societal perspective, I’d be more concerned about e-scooters leaving Los Angeles than Paris,” David Zipper, a visiting fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Taubman Center for State and Local Government, told TechCrunch. “Paris is so dense and has a great metro. It’s possible scooters there are replacing forms of transportation that are even greener. LA is different. It’s so car dominated and hungry for alternatives to the automobile.”
Despite that apparent hunger, two scooter operators – Lyft and Spin – recently exited the Los Angeles area, blaming a lack of favorable regulations and too much competition, which apparently made it difficult to turn a profit. In total, there are still six operators in LA – Bird, Lime, Veo, Superpedestrian, Wheels (now owned by Helbiz), and Tuk Tuk, a new entrant.
The fact that both cities – one sprawling, the other dense; one under-regulated (so say the shared scooter companies) with several operators, the other highly regulated with fewer operators – still haven’t quite got it right with e-scooters raises a key question. What type of market, if any, is the right one?
Paris: To ban or not to ban?
People walk or ride their electric scooter past the statue of the Marechal Joffre, in Paris, on May 19, 2020. (Photo by THOMAS COEX/AFP via Getty Images)
If ever there were a city where you’d think shared e-scooters would thrive, it’s Paris. The city is one of the most densely populated in Europe. Most households don’t own a car, and if they do, they use them rarely. And Paris is led by Mayor Anne Hidalgo, an advocate for the reclamation of public space from roads and vehicles for a more liveable, “15-minute city.” In her time in office, Hidalgo has removed parking spots, turned streets into walkable areas and opened new bike lanes.
And yet, Paris is in the midst of potentially banning its 15,000 shared e-scooters as politicians from several parties call on Hidalgo not to renew the contracts of Lime, Dott and Tier when they expire in February 2023. She is expected to make her decision any day now, and indeed there are some rumors floating around that she already has.
Paris has been an important market for the e-scooter industry at large, but the city has chafed against the vehicles, citing safety incidents, some of which were fatal.
Over the years, Paris has responded to safety issues with increasingly strict regulations. Last summer, following the death of someone who was hit by two women riding a scooter near the Seine, Paris implemented “slow zones” for scooters. A year later, the whole city turned into a slow zone, with shared e-scooter speeds capped at just over 6 miles per hour.
Despite these harsh regulations, the city is still on the verge of saying goodbye to shared scooters forever.
Shocked. Appalled. Frustrated. These are the feelings I had upon first hearing the news of the potential ban. So what if there are accidents? Car accidents happen all the time! Boohoo to your complaints about scooters on sidewalks! Build better bike lanes, then!
But looking at the scattered statistics of how scooters are used in Paris, it’s possible that scooters aren’t providing the value that cities need – namely, limiting car usage.
Lime told TechCrunch that 90% of its fleet in Paris is used everyday, and a scooter trip starts every four seconds in the city. In 2021, over 1.2 million scooter riders, 85% of whom were Parisian residents, took a total of 10 million rides across all three operators. Lime estimated that could have replaced 1.6 million car trips. Could have, but did they?
One study from 2021 found that e-scooter users in Paris are mainly men aged 18 to 29, have a high educational level, and usually jump on a scooter for travel time savings. Most riders (72%) in the study said they shifted from walking and public transportation, not cars. Another survey of French scooter riders found that shared scooters were “more likely to replace walking trips than other modes of transport.”
These results aren’t limited to Paris. A survey among customers who were registered with five different shared e-scooter apps in Norway in the fall of 2021 found that in all circumstances except for night rides, e-scooters most often replace walking. E-scooters do replace cars with longer e-scooter trips if the user is male, if the e-scooter is privately owned, and to destinations poorly served by public transport, the study showed.
What is getting in the way of the ultimate goal – to shift travelers away from cars? Perhaps most people, in Paris at least, wouldn’t use a car anyway because the city is walkable and public transportation is sufficient. Or, maybe would-be car drivers and taxi riders just need more time to get used to the concept of scooter riding as a way of life. Or, maybe scooters just aren’t reliable as forms of transport for longer journeys.
Fluctuo, an aggregator of shared mobility data, found the average scooter trip length in Paris was 2.67 kilometers in July 2022 and 2.53 kilometers in November. A long enough journey that you might prefer not to walk it, but too short to drive it in a place like Paris.
Whether scooters are getting people out of cars or not, they’re certainly popular in Paris. A September Ipsos poll commissioned by Lime, Dott and Tier (and therefore taken with a grain of salt) found that most Parisians agree e-scooters are part of the daily mobility of the city and are consistent with City Hall’s broader transport policy. Most of the respondents (68%) said they are satisfied with the number of self-service scooters on the streets of Paris, while a quarter indicated they would actually like to see more.
And in response to the potential ban, a recent petition launched by a Paris resident has garnered more than 19,000 signatures in opposition.
Hannah Landau, Lime’s communications manager for France and southern Europe, told TechCrunch a ban would make Paris a global outlier.
“No major city in the world that introduced a shared e-scooter service has permanently banned them,” she said. “In fact, the major global trend today is cities renewing their programs – such as London – or even expanding them with more vehicles or larger service areas (NYC, Chicago, Washington D.C., Rome, Madrid, Lyon).”
Lime, Dott and Tier have put forward a variety of measures to Paris’ city hall, which they say will address safety concerns and ensure a renewal of scooter licenses next year. Among the proposals are a joint campaign to raise awareness about traffic laws; a fine system that uses cameras on public roads; expanding use of scooter ADAS to prevent sidewalk riding; and equipping scooters with registration plates.
Among major cities, Paris may be unique in weighing a blanket ban, but other locales have recently shown an appetite for limiting scooters, including Stockholm, Tenerife, Spain, Boston College and Fordham University.
– Rebecca Bellan
Los Angeles: City of Autos
A shared scooter parked on a sidewalk in Koreatown, a neighborhood in central Los Angeles, on December 29, 2022.
Let’s add a couple more wheels back into this discussion. Yes, I’m about to get personal about the automobile. Buckle up!
Automakers rewired American cities over the last century, and if you ask me, we’re all suffering for it – especially Angelenos. Gas-powered cars, SUVs and trucks infamously clog LA’s arteries. They muck up the air, driving climate change and health issues alike. Plus, a driver in an SUV once hit me while I was standing on the sidewalk, innocently looking for a nearby ramen joint. See, I told you it was personal!
All this is to say that, as an occasional driver and grudge-bearing pedestrian (the kind who bellows, “I’m walkin’ here!” in a vaguely New York accent), my heart aches when I see micromobility operators bail on cities, as Spin, Bolt and Lyft have in LA.
This isn’t because I ride scooters regularly, and it’s not because scooters are now scarce (a block from my apartment in central LA, I can find several Limes and Links on sidewalks and in the crooks of curbs). I simply want to see cars reined in, to rebalance the city around public transit, walking, biking and even scooting — whatever it takes to free up streets and reduce fumes. But what future do scooters and the like have here, given the recent exits, and Bird’s financial struggles to boot?
That depends on who you ask. At least one operator — Lime — says things have never been better in Tinseltown. A spokesperson recently told us that Los Angeles is Lime’s biggest American market today.
While acknowledging LA’s shortcomings for scooters, including its sprawling geography, the spokesperson likened 2022 to a “wow moment” that showed how “micromobility is here to stay.” Lime credited its local staff, work with city officials and investments in hardware for the apparently strong year, but the company did not respond when TechCrunch asked if its LA operations are currently profitable. Lime is privately held, so we don’t get as much insight into it as we do Lyft and Bird.
Lime’s experience in LA may be an outlier. Both Spin and Lyft told TechCrunch that they needed to strike new, longer-term deals with municipalities here in order to return. “In a nutshell: The challenge with LA is that it is an open vendor market with no vehicle cap,” Spin’s chief executive Philip Reinckens said in an email to TechCrunch. “This had led to an imbalance of vehicle supply to rider demand as operators over-saturate the market.”
“A long-term arrangement for limited operators would be a necessary condition to consider re-entry,” Reinckens added.
Santa Monica, a coastal city in LA county, already seems to be on board with this approach. Next year, Santa Monica says it plans to limit the number of permitted scooter operators from four to just one to two.
Zooming out: Greater LA area has a mixed reputation among cyclists, but officials have shown some willingness to accommodate things other than cars lately. There are a few interesting public initiatives underway, including recently announced efforts to promote cycling in South LA, North Hollywood and San Pedro. It’s no revolution, but it could make the city a bit safer for all lightweight modes of transportation, including e-scooters.
Taken together, LA’s scooter free-for-all seems destined for consolidation, leaving fewer operators with a whole lot of ground to cover. But shared e-scooters on the whole also don’t seem to be at risk of getting the boot, much unlike Paris.
– Harri Weber
Micromobility in limbo: Takeaways from Paris and LA by Rebecca Bellan originally published on TechCrunch
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Friday, 30 December 2022
Fidelity slashes the value of its Twitter stake by over half
Fidelity, which was among the group of outside investors that helped Elon Musk finance his $44 billion takeover of Twitter, has slashed the value of its stake in Twitter by 56%. The recalculation comes as Twitter navigates a number of challenges, most the result of chaotic management decisions — including an exodus of advertisers from the network.
Fidelity’s Blue Chip Growth Fund stake in Twitter was valued at around $8.63 million as of November, according to a monthly disclosure and Fidelity Contrafund notice first reported today by Axios. That’s down from $19.66 million as of the end of October.
Macroeconomic trends are likely to blame in part. Stripe took a 28% internal valuation cut in July, while Instacart this week reportedly suffered a 75% cut to its valuation.
But Twitter’s wishy-washy policies post-Musk clearly haven’t helped matters.
The network’s become less stable at a technical level as of late, on Wednesday suffering outages after Musk made “significant” backend server architecture changes. Twitter recently laid off employees in its public policy and engineering department, dissolving the group responsible for weighing in on content moderation and human rights-related issues such as suicide prevention. And the company’s raised the ire of regulators after banning — and then quickly reinstating — accounts belonging to prominent journalists.
Then again — as Axios business editor Dan Primack pointed out, appropriately in a tweet — Fidelity seems to rely heavily on public market performance where it concerns valuations. It’s quite possible that the firm doesn’t have any inside info on Twitter’s financial performance.
Cutbacks at Twitter abound as the company approaches $1 billion in interest payments due on $13 billion in debt, all while revenue dips. A November report from Media Matters for America estimated that half of Twitter’s top 100 advertisers, which spent almost $750 million on Twitter ads this year combined, appear to no longer be advertising on the website. Twitter’s heavily pushing its Twitter Blue plan, aiming to make it a larger profit driver. But third-party tracking data suggest it’s been slow to take off.
Some Twitter employees are bringing their own toilet paper to work after the company cut back on janitorial services, the New York Times recently reported, and Twitter has stopped paying rent for several of its offices including its San Francisco headquarters.
Musk has attempted to save around $500 million in costs unrelated to labor, according to the aforementioned Times report, over the past few weeks shutting down a data center and launching a fire sale after putting office items up for auction in a bid to recoup costs.
Separately, Musk’s team has reached out to investors for potential fresh investment for Twitter at the same price as the original $44 billion acquisition, according to The Wall Street Journal.
A poll put up by Musk asking if he should step down as head of the company closed December 19 with users voting resoundingly in favor of him leaving. Musk responded several days afterward, saying he’d resign as CEO “as soon as [he found] someone foolish enough to take the job” and after that “just run the software and servers teams.”
Fidelity slashes the value of its Twitter stake by over half by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
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Daily Crunch: To take the friction out of consumer messaging, more companies are entering the Matrix
To get a roundup of TechCrunch’s biggest and most important stories delivered to your inbox every day at 3 p.m. PDT, subscribe here.
Welcome back to your daily digest of TechCrunch goodness. It is my last day with you (you’re welcome!), so Christine will be back in the Daily Crunch seat on Tuesday. Haje will not be back just yet because he is heading to Vegas as part of the team covering CES. Speaking of CES, Brian raised the curtain on what we can expect from its first full-fledged production since before COVID.
Bye for now, folks. Safe and Happy New Year to you all. — Henry
At the top
- Into the Matrix: No, not that Matrix. We’re talking about the open standards-based comms protocol called Matrix that Paul went deep on. Its network doubled thanks in part to increased use by enterprises and government. Reddit is also having a go, experimenting with it for its chat feature.
- For the fusion: Tim took a look at five startups primed to benefit from the recent breakthroughs in fusion. [TC+]
- Alt-ChatGPT: In the wake of the response to OpenAI’s ChatGPT comes an open source equivalent. It’s called PaLM + RLHF (rolls right off the tongue, eh?), but Kyle writes that it isn’t pre-trained, which means good luck running it.
- The Meta eyes have it: Amanda writes that Meta is getting into the eyewear business with its purchase of the Netherlands-based, smart eyewear company Luxexcel.
- Book tracking: Aisha rounded up a list of five apps that you can use to track all that reading you’re planning to do once the clock strikes 2023.
- Netflix vs. Hulu: Perhaps you’ve decided to cut a streaming service or two from your lineup in light of their continued price hikes. Lauren took a look at the features of Netflix and Hulu to help you make a decision.
What to look for in a term sheet as a first-time founder
Image Credits: syolacan (opens in a new window) / Getty Images
Silicon Valley reporter Connie Loizos interviewed three seasoned VCs to get their best advice for novice entrepreneurs. She asked them:
- Why should you know what’s going to be in a term sheet before you see it?
- Which mechanism is best to use at the outset?
- How much equity is distributed at each level of early-stage fundraising?
- What’s a red flag in a term sheet?
- How should founders think about valuation when it comes to that first term sheet?
TechCrunch+ is our membership program that helps founders and startup teams get ahead of the pack. You can sign up here. Use code “DC” for a 15% discount on an annual subscription!
Looking back and looking ahead
We rounded up TC+ venture capital stories from a year that unfortunately saw a lot of downs. And here are a few more favorites for good measure:
- Some new venture firms are going really, really (really) niche, by Connie
- A love letter to micro funds, the backbone and future of venture capital, by Rebecca
- Every startup wants an extension round, but there aren’t enough to go around, also by Rebecca
Zack and Carly took a look back at how law enforcement cracked down on cybercriminals this year. They examine the efforts of both breachers and cops to bring justice.
Indian startups were flush with cash with record investments. Now, Manish writes, the ecosystem is struggling with tightening funding purses, layoffs and disappointing public debuts.
Daily Crunch: To take the friction out of consumer messaging, more companies are entering the Matrix by Henry Pickavet originally published on TechCrunch
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LOL Ginni Thomas: Clarence Knows Nothing About What I Do
Reading Ginni Thomas' deposition below is a little like taking a trip into a land where no one knows what anyone else in the same household is doing, or thinking, or crying about. If she is to be believed, Clarence Thomas has no clue that she's an ardent Trump fan, or who her friends are, or that she sits on the board of the Council for National Policy's 501(c)(4) action group, or anything like that!
It's almost like they don't sleep in the same bed or eat dinner together or anything!!! But if you read what she said carefully, it's pretty clear he knows exactly where her heart is and what she was doing.
Also, she conveeeeeniently took a "sabbatical" from all of her activism between November 9, 2020 and January 6th or thereabouts to spare her friends the "chilling effect" her marriage might have on their discussions about insurrections and the like. Okay, she didn't explicitly say that about insurrections. That was my inference.
Here's what she says in her opening statement about Daddy Justice Thomas on page 6: "I can guarantee that my husband has never spoken to me about pending cases in the Court. It's an ironclad rule in our house. Additionally, he's uninterested in politics, the topics I'm working on, who I'm calling, who I'm emailing, who I'm texting, or who I'm meeting."
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QuickVid uses AI to generate short-form videos, complete with voiceovers
Generative AI is coming for videos. A new website, QuickVid, combines several generative AI systems into a single tool for automatically creating short-form YouTube, Instagram TikTok and Snapchat videos. Given as little as a single word, QuickVid chooses a background video from a library, writes a script and keywords, overlays images generated by DALL-E 2, and adds a synthetic voiceover and background music from YouTube’s royalty-free music library.
QuickVid’s creator, Daniel Habib, says that he’s building the service to help creators meet the “ever-growing” demand from their fans.
“By providing creators with tools to quickly and easily produce quality content, QuickVid helps creators increase their content output, reducing the risk of burnout,” Habib told TechCrunch in an email interview. “Our goal is to empower your favorite creator to keep up with the demands of their audience by leveraging advancements in AI.”
But depending on how they’re used, tools like QuickVid threaten to flood already-crowded channels with spammy and duplicative content. They also face potential backlash from creators who opt not to use the tools, whether because of cost ($10 per month) or on principle, yet might have to compete with a raft of new AI-generated videos.
Going after video
QuickVid, which Habib, a self-taught developer who previously worked at Meta on Facebook Live and video infrastructure, built in a matter of weeks, launched on December 27. It’s relatively bare bones at present — Habib says that more personalization options will arrive in January — but QuickVid can cobble together the components that make up a typical informational YouTube Short or TikTok video, including captions and even avatars.
It’s easy to use. First, a user enters a prompt describing the subject matter of the video they want to create. QuickVid uses the prompt to generate a script, leveraging the generative text powers of GPT-3. From keywords either extracted from the script automatically or entered manually, QuickVid selects a background video from the royalty-free stock media library Pexels and generates overlay images using DALL-E 2. It then outputs a voiceover via Google Cloud’s text-to-speech API — Habib says that users will soon be able to clone their voice — before combining all these elements into a video.
Image Credits: QuickVid
See this video made with the prompt “Cats”:
Or this one:
QuickVid certainly isn’t pushing the boundaries of what’s possible with generative AI. Both Meta and Google have showcased AI systems that can generate completely original clips given a text prompt. But QuickVid amalgamates existing AI to exploit the repetitive, templated format of b-roll-heavy short-form videos, getting around the problem of having to generate the footage itself.
“Successful creators have an extremely high quality bar and aren’t interested in putting out content that they don’t feel is in their own voice,” Habib said. “This is the use case we’re focused on.”
That supposedly being the case, in terms of quality, QuickVid’s videos are generally a mixed bag. The background videos tend to be a bit random or only tangentially related to the topic, which isn’t surprising given QuickVid’s currently limited to the Pexels catalog. The DALL-E 2-generated images, meanwhile, exhibit the limitations of today’s text-to-image tech, like garbled text and off proportions.
In response to my feedback, Habib said that QuickVid is “being tested and tinkered with daily.”
Copyright issues
According to Habib, QuickVid users retain the right to use the content they create commercially and have permission to monetize it on platforms like YouTube. But the copyright status around AI-generated content is… nebulous, at least presently. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) recently moved to revoke copyright protection for an AI-generated comic, for example, saying copyrightable works require human authorship.
When asked about how the USPTO decision might affect QuickVid, Habib said he believes that it only pertain to the “patentability” of AI-generated products and not the rights of creators to use and monetize their content. Creators, he pointed out, aren’t often submitting patents for videos and usually lean into the creator economy, letting other creators repurpose their clips to increase their own reach.
“Creators care about putting out high-quality content in their voice that will help grow their channel,” Habib said.
Another legal challenge on the horizon might affect QuickVid’s DALL-E 2 integration — and, by extension, the site’s ability to generate image overlays. Microsoft, GitHub and OpenAI are being sued in a class action lawsuit that accuses them of violating copyright law by allowing Copilot, a code-generating system, to regurgitate sections of licensed code without providing credit. (Copilot was co-developed by OpenAI and GitHub, which Microsoft owns.) The case has implications for generative art AI like DALL-E 2, which similarly has been found to copy and paste from the data sets on which they were trained (i.e. images).
Habib isn’t concerned, arguing that the generative AI genie’s out of the bottle. “If another lawsuit showed up and OpenAI disappeared tomorrow, there are several alternatives that could power QuickVid,” he said, referring to the open source DALL-E 2-like system Stable Diffusion. QuickVid is already testing Stable Diffusion for generating avatar pics.
Moderation and spam
Aside from the legal dilemmas, QuickVid might soon have a moderation problem on its hands. While OpenAI has implemented filters and techniques to prevent them, generative AI has well-known toxicity and factual accuracy problems. GPT-3 spouts misinformation, particularly about recent events, which are beyond the boundaries of its knowledge base. And ChatGPT, a fine-tuned offspring of GPT-3, has been shown to use sexist and racist language.
That’s worrisome particularly for people who’d use QuickVid to create informational videos. In a quick test, I had my partner — who’s far more creative than me, particularly in this area — enter a few offensive prompts to see what QuickVid would generate. To QuickVid’s credit, obviously problematic prompts like “Jewish new world order” and “9/11 conspiracy theory” didn’t yield toxic scripts. But for “Critical race theory indoctrinating students,” QuickVid generated a video implying that critical race theory could be used to brainwash schoolchildren.
See:
Habib says that he’s relying on OpenAI’s filters to do most of the moderation work, and asserts that it’s incumbent on users to manually review every video created by QuickVid to ensure “everything is within the boundaries of the law.”
“As a general rule, I believe people should be able to express themselves and create whatever content they want,” Habib said.
That apparently includes spammy content. Habib makes the case that the video platforms’ algorithms, not QuickVid, are best-positioned to determine the quality of a video, and that people who produce low-quality content “are only damaging their own reputations.” The reputational damage will naturally disincentivize people from creating mass spam campaigns with QuickVid, he says.
“If people don’t want to watch your video, then you won’t receive distribution on platforms like YouTube,” he added. “Producing low-quality content will also make people will look at your channel in a negative light.”
But it’s instructive to look at ad agencies like Fractl, which in 2019 used an AI system called Grover to generate an entire site of marketing materials — reputation be damned. In an interview with The Verge, Fractl partner Kristin Tynski said that she foresaw generative AI enabling “a massive tsunami of computer-generated content across every niche imaginable.”
In any case, video-sharing platforms like TikTok and YouTube haven’t had to contend with moderating AI-generated content on a massive scale. Deepfakes — synthetic videos that replace an existing person with someone else’s likeness — began to populate platforms like YouTube several years ago, driven by tools that made deepfaked footage easier to produce. But unlike even the most convincing deepfakes today, the types of videos QuickVid creates aren’t obviously AI-generated in any way.
Google Search’s policy on AI-generated text might be a preview of what’s to come in the video domain. Google doesn’t treat synthetic text differently from human-written text where it concerns search rankings, but takes actions on content that’s “intended to manipulate search rankings and not help users.” That includes content stitched together or combined from different web pages that “[doesn’t] add sufficient value” as well as content generated through purely automated processes, both of which might apply to QuickVid.
In other words, AI-generated videos might not be banned from platforms outright should they take off in a major way, but rather simply become the cost of doing business. That isn’t likely to allay the fears of experts who believe that platforms like TikTok are becoming a new home for misleading videos, but — as Habib said during the interview — “there’s is no stopping the generative AI revolution.”
QuickVid uses AI to generate short-form videos, complete with voiceovers by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
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There’s now an open source alternative to ChatGPT, but good luck running it
The first open-source equivalent of OpenAI’s ChatGPT has arrived, but good luck running it on your laptop — or at all.
This week, Philip Wang, the developer responsible for reverse-engineering closed-sourced AI systems including Meta’s Make-A-Video, released PaLM + RLHF, a text-generating model that behaves similarly to ChatGPT. The system combines PaLM, a large language model from Google, and a technique called Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback — RLHF, for short — to create a system that can accomplish pretty much any task that ChatGPT can, including drafting emails and suggesting computer code.
But PaLM + RLHF isn’t pretrained. That is to say, the system hasn’t been trained on the example data from the web necessary for it to actually work. Downloading PaLM + RLHF won’t magically install a ChatGPT-like experience — that would require compiling gigabytes of text from which the model can learn and finding hardware beefy enough to handle the training workload.
Like ChatGPT, PaLM + RLHF is essentially a statistical tool to predict words. When fed an enormous number of examples from training data — e.g. posts from Reddit, news articles and ebooks — PaLM + RLHF learns how likely words are to occur based on patterns like the semantic context of surrounding text.
ChatGPT and PaLM + RLHF share a special sauce in Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback, a technique that aims to better align language models with what users wish them to accomplish. RLHF involves training a language model — in PaLM + RLHF’s case, PaLM — and fine-tuning it on a data set that includes prompts (e.g. “Explain machine learning to a six-year-old”) paired with what human volunteers expect the model to say (e.g. “Machine learning is a form of AI…”). The aforementioned prompts are then fed to the fine-tuned model, which generates several responses, and the volunteers rank all the responses from best to worst. Finally, the rankings are used to train a “reward model” that takes the original model’s responses and sorts them in order of preference, filtering for the top answers to a given prompt.
It’s an expensive process, collecting the training data. And training itself isn’t cheap. PaLM is 540 billion parameters in size, “parameters” referring to the parts of the language model learned from the training data. A 2020 study pegged the expenses for developing a text-generating model with only 1.5 billion parameters at as much as $1.6 million. And to train the open source model Bloom, which has 176 billion parameters, it took three months using 384 Nvidia A100 GPUs; a single A100 costs thousands of dollars.
Running a trained model of PaLM + RLHF’s size isn’t trivial, either. Bloom requires a dedicated PC with around eight A100 GPUs. Cloud alternatives are pricey, with back-of-the-envelope math finding the cost of running OpenAI’s text-generating GPT-3 — which has around 175 billion parameters — on a single Amazon Web Services to be around $87,000 per year.
Sebastian Raschka, an AI researcher, points out in a LinkedIn post about PaLM + RLHF that scaling up the necessary dev workflows could prove to be a challenge as well. “Even if someone provides you with 500 GPUs to train this model, you still need to have to deal with infrastructure and have a software framework that can handle that,” he said. “It’s obviously possible, but it’s a big effort at the moment (of course, we are developing frameworks to make that simpler, but it’s still not trivial, yet).”
That’s all to say that PaLM + RLHF isn’t going to replace ChatGPT today — unless a well-funded venture (or person) goes to the trouble of training and making it available publicly.
In better news, several other efforts to replicate ChatGPT are progressing at a fast clip, including one led by a research group called CarperAI. In partnership with the open AI research organization EleutherAI and startups Scale AI and Hugging Face, CarperAI plans to release the first ready-to-run, ChatGPT-like AI model trained with human feedback.
LAION, the nonprofit that supplied the initial data set used to train Stable Diffusion, is also spearheading a project to replicate ChatGPT using the newest machine learning techniques. Ambitiously, LAION aims to build an “assistant of the future” — one that not only writes emails and cover letters but “does meaningful work, uses APIs, dynamically researches information, and much more.” It’s in the early stages. But a GitHub page with resources for the project went live a few weeks ago.
There’s now an open source alternative to ChatGPT, but good luck running it by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
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It's The LAST DAY Of Our Holiday Fundraiser!
If you waited until the last day to chip in, here it is!
Please sign up for a yearly add-free subscription. These really help.
Any donation will be welcomed with our profound thanks.
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Meta acquires Luxexcel, a smart eyewear company
As Meta faces antitrust scrutiny over its acquisition of VR fitness developers Within, the tech giant is making another acquisition. Meta confirmed to TechCrunch that it is purchasing Luxexcel, a smart eyewear company headquartered in the Netherlands. The terms of the deal, which was first reported in the Belgian paper De Tijd, have not been disclosed.
Founded in 2009, Luxexcel uses 3D printing to make prescription lenses for glasses. More recently, the company has focused its efforts on smart lenses, which can be printed with integrated technology like LCD displays and holographic film.
“We’re excited that the Luxexcel team has joined Meta, deepening the existing partnership between the two companies,” a Meta spokesperson told TechCrunch. It’s rumored that Meta and Luxexcel had already worked together on Project Aria, the company’s augmented reality (AR) research initiative.
In September 2021, Meta unveiled the Ray-Ban Stories, a pair of smart glasses that can take photos and videos, or make handsfree, voice-controlled calls using Meta platforms like WhatsApp and Facebook. By absorbing Luxexcel, Meta will likely leverage the company’s technology to produce prescription AR glasses, a product that has long been anticipated to come out of Meta’s billions of dollars of investment into its Reality Labs. However, report this summer stated that Meta was scaling back its plans for consumer-grade AR glasses, which were initially slated for 2024. Meta did not comment on these rumors at the time.
When building its AR and VR products, Meta’s corporate strategy has been to acquire smaller companies that are building top technology in the field. Even Meta’s flagship headset, the Quest, comes from its acquisition of Oculus in 2014. Given the FTC’s attempts to block Meta’s purchase of Within, it’s possible that the purchase of Luxexcel could spark the same scrutiny.
Meta acquires Luxexcel, a smart eyewear company by Amanda Silberling originally published on TechCrunch
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Thursday, 29 December 2022
RNC Chair: Hunter Biden Laptop Investigation Should Be Top House Priority
On Fox News, anchor Molly Line asked RNC chair Ronna McDaniel what she thinks is “the most important question” that “Republicans should get to the bottom of” when they take over the House next week.
If McDaniel’s response is any guide, you can forget any solutions for the cost of health care and gasoline, climate change, immigration or just about anything else on your wish list unless it’s a power play for MAGA Republicans.
“Well, we have to govern. We have to do things on behalf of the American people,” McDaniel said, without naming a single thing.
She did go into detail on plans to stick it to the Biden administration.
MCDANIEL: I do think we have to look at big tech and the suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop and real information that was prevented from getting to the voters because of big tech and the Biden administration and Democrats colluding together.
Actually, that’s a load of MAGA disinformation. In his analysis of this fake scandal, The Daily Beast’s Roger Sollenberger pointed out that the FEC voted last year, 6-0, with two Republican commissioners issuing a statement that Twitter had not acted for “the purpose of influencing an election.” That was in response to complaints that included one from the RNC, by the way.
Line is supposedly a straight journalist but she did not correct the record for viewers.
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Is That The 'Libs Of TikTok' Lady Heading Into The Capitol On Jan 6?
Chaya Raichik, who runs the 'Libs of TikTok' accounts did an insane interview on Tucker Carlson's Fox News show, then just a few hours later, Chad Loder appeared to have found a clip of the hateful little bigot hanging out at the Capitol on Jan. 6.
Via Chad Loder:
Raichik claimed to have been present at the Jan 6th Capitol riot in now-deleted Tweets. One of the tweets appears to show footage filmed from the northwest lawn of the Capitol.
Loder pored over the video and photos from Jan. 6, compared them to Chaya's interview with Tuckems, and determined that she was wearing some of the same accessories on both occasions.
Watch:
What to expect at CES 2023
Taking a deep breath as I write these words: Next week, TechCrunch will return to our first in-person CES in three years.
Phew. It felt good to finally get that off my chest.
The last time our team flew to Las Vegas for the event was January 2020. An auspicious date. It wouldn’t be long before the entire world went pear-shaped. It was a big show, with 117,000 in attendance, per the CTA’s (Consumer Technology Association) figures. The event, which its governing body would rather you not call the Consumer Electronics Show, has become a sprawling affair in recent decades.
Attempting to see the entire show is a fool’s errand. Back in my younger, more hopeful days, I made a point of seeing as much of it as I could, making a pretty good run at walking every official hall. That’s become increasingly impossible over the years, as the show has spilled out well beyond the confines of the Las Vegas Convention Center. There’s the Venetian Convention and Expo Center (RIP the Sands), countless hotel suites and various official and unofficial event spaces orbiting around the strip.
As with countless other live event producers, the last three years have presented a kind of existential crisis for the CTA. After much foot dragging, the organization had to finally admit that an in-person CES 2021 was a terrible idea for all parties, and the pivot to a virtual event was understandably rocky. Last year, the show dovetailed with the omicron spike, and TechCrunch — among others — made the decision to sit that one out. Highly contagious new strains, coupled with holiday travel was a bridge too far.
CES, the world’s largest annual consumer technology trade show opens its door to visitors on January 5, 2022, at the Las Vegas Convention Center in Las Vegas, Nevada, United States. Image Credits: Tayfun Coskun/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images
Last year’s numbers were down significantly. The CTA pegged the event at “well over 40,000” people (44,000 is the commonly accepted figure), marking a 75% drop from 2020. It’s a remarkable drop, but I suppose that, given everything happening at the time, cracking 40,000 was a victory of sorts. The CTA says it’s on track for 100,000 this year — seeing as how there isn’t another prominent COVID-19 variant, it seems likely that, at the very least, there will be a sizable jump from 2022.
I’m likely not alone in my suspicions that the CTA didn’t want people getting too comfortable with 2021’s virtual event. Well before COVID, there had been a longstanding question around the efficacy of in-person tech events. CES and other hardware shows have had an edge in that debate, with a focus on products that do benefit from being seen in person. That said, the last two years have demonstrated that it is, indeed, possible to cover the show reasonably well from your living room.
We have, however, moved beyond conversation about “the new normal” (honestly, when was the last time you heard that phrase uttered in earnestness?). The new normal happened when we weren’t looking. The new normal is that the virus doesn’t exist because we say it doesn’t. Have I gotten it three times, including once from attending a trade show in Vegas? Well, yeah. Do I recognize that the act of attending a show that’s billing itself as drawing in 100,000 attendees means there’s a reasonable expectation that I could be staring down time number four in mid-January? Absolutely. The CES COVID protocols are here. The TL;DR is that vaccination, testing and masking aren’t required, but you can if you want. That’s pretty much the standard everywhere at this point.
Attendees pass through a hallway at the Las Vegas Convention Center on Day 1 of CES 2022, January 5, 2022, in Las Vegas, Nevada. CES is the world’s largest annual consumer technology trade show. Image Credits: Alex Wong/Getty Images
Is there still value in going? I think, yes. I mean, I’m going. Other TC staff are also going. We’ve pared down our presence from past years, and I imagine this is going to be the case moving forward. Given the amount of CES news that’s released via press release and the fact that pretty much every press conference is streamed, the right approach to covering an event like this is be smaller and more strategic.
This isn’t simply a product of this new, endemic virus. It’s a product of a shifting landscape for media in general. For all of my personal issues with the event, I do genuinely have nostalgia for those days of pure, uncut blogging, back when there was still money being dumped into format, before everything became paywalled. There’s value to be had at shows like this, but for TechCrunch, at least, it’s about taking the right meetings and finding the people who are working on cool things. It’s harder than it sounds, having come back to 1,600 unread emails after a couple of weeks off. We made this list, and I plan to check it twice more before I hop on a plane next week.
Image Credits: DENIS CHARLET/AFP / Getty Images
Even before these particular sets of circumstances, CES has been through a few crises of confidence. Figures have ebbed and flowed over the years, as is the nature of these things. The smartest thing the CTA has done in the past several years is lean into the automotive side. What started as an embrace of high-tech in-car systems has expanded significantly. It’s almost as if CES became a car show when none of us were looking.
One of the show’s key plays is timing. Much to the chagrin of every person who has attempted to enjoy some time off during the holidays, it’s positioned as the first show of the year in an attempt to set the cadence for the remaining 11.5 months. CES technically starts on January 5, but the press days are two days prior. This year, I’m flying out on the 2nd, just to make sure we’ve got our bases covered. There have been years when I’ve flown in on the 1st. Let’s just say I’m glad I stopped drinking a couple of years back.
By positioning the show right at the beginning of the year, it’s got a few months’ jump on major auto shows like the ones held in Chicago, Atlanta and New York. The technology angle means we get a good look at a lot of EVs and autonomous driving systems, as well as eVTOLs and micromobility. Expect some big news, including keynotes from BMW and Stellantis. Chip makers like Qualcomm and AMD also always have a lot on the automotive front at the show.
Image Credits: Hyundai
Hyundai will have a sizable presence at the show as well, walking the line between automotive, mobility and robotics. In fact, judging by my overstuffed inbox, it’s going to be a huge year for robotics, from consumer to the presence of key industrial startups in a broad range of different categories. Robotics is always a tricky one at CES. Big companies love to show off flashy robots that never go anywhere (believe it or not, the most recent Sony Aibo is a relative success story there), and there are going to be a ton of junky robotics toys. But the show is still a great place to see some legitimate breakthroughs up close. Stay tuned for next week’s issue of Actuator to get a full breakdown.
My inbox is also flooded with web3 and crypto pitches, despite the fact that I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve written about the subject over my 6+ years at TechCrunch. To say the industry hit a rough patch in 2022 is like saying Elon is “still figuring it out” as Twitter CEO. The believer still believes theirs is the fix-all solution to every problem plaguing humankind. Expect that to trickle into every aspect of the show, including, somewhat ironically, climate.
I would love to see sustainability become a major topic at CES. Apparently there’s a section in the Convention Center’s North Hall. There’s mostly been a smattering of climate companies at the show, but I’ve certainly never been overwhelmed by them. Hopefully this is the year that starts to turn around. Ditto for accessibility. I’ve heard tell of a few companies with this focus at the show, but this is something else that really needs to be at the forefront.
Remote control / smart home Image Credits: Erhui1979 / Getty Images
Much has been written about Amazon’s Alexa struggle of late. It’s safe to say that the smart home market hasn’t worked out like everyone planned. I do, however, anticipate a sizable press at CES, bolstered by Matter. The standard, supported by Amazon, Apple and Google, among others, really started gaining steam over the last few months. If things go according to plan, this CES will be an important moment, as the various categories of connected home gadgets are on full display.
Image Credits: Meta
AR/VR — yes, I say this every year. Yes, even more than with smart homes, this one has yet to shake out the way many hoped. The recent debut of Meta’s Quest Pro and HTC’s Vive tease will anchor the big VR news. AR will likely be even more ubiquitous. Even more than virtual reality, augmented reality feels like the Wild West right now. There are a ton of hardware makers currently vying for a spot on your face. Traditionally, CES hasn’t been very gaming focused, but Sony does tend to make it a centerpiece of its own press conference and we’ll likely be getting some face time with PlayStation VR.
Wearables should get some love at the show. Oura’s success has catapulted the ring form factor. We already wrote up Movano’s pre-show announcement. Bigger names like Google, Samsung and Apple do most of their gadget announcing at their own events these days, but CES is an opportunity for some of the smaller firms to grab a bit of attention. I’d anticipate an even bigger focus on health metric monitoring from names like Withings. Connected home fitness remains a key trend to watch, fueled by that initial pandemic push.
Image Credits: Oura
As ever, phones are mostly a nonstarter here. Mobile World Congress is where that magic happens. Otherwise, anticipate a smattering of announcements from hardware firms like Lenovo and Sony, which don’t have much of a presence in the North American market. This has, however, traditionally been a big show for PCs. Dell, Asus and Lenovo all have big presences, while AMD and Nvidia could serve up some big news about the chips that power those systems.
We don’t cover them that much, but CES is also big for TVs, in every sense of the word. LG, Samsung, Sony and TCL will likely have the latest, greatest and largest. QD-OLED and MLA OLED are the magic words — or letters, I guess.
The press days are January 3 and 4, and the CES show floor officially opens on January 5. Plan accordingly.
What to expect at CES 2023 by Brian Heater originally published on TechCrunch
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‘Small D*** Energy’: Greta Thunberg's Epic Smackdown Of Andrew Tate
The stupid thing about this is that after her epic smackdown it'll be Tate that's gloating as he gets worldwide attention for being a knob.
Source: NBC News
Climate activist Greta Thunberg had a fiery response to controversial influencer Andrew Tate's attempt to boast about his carbon-dioxide-emitting cars.
Tate, a self-described “success coach” who has been criticized online for a brand that many people describe as misogynistic, tweeted an image of himself with a car Tuesday. He addressed Thunberg directly, tagging her and writing: “Please provide your email address so I can send a complete list of my car collection and their respective enormous emissions.”
Thunberg — who is known for her signature no-nonsense, blunt style of speaking — quipped back Wednesday. She wrote, "yes, please do enlighten me." She then shared a fake email address at which to reach her: "smalldickenergy@getalife.com."
Reflecting on a roller coaster year for robotics
Big thanks to Joyce Sidopoulos, Peter Barrett and Ken Goldberg for filling in the last few weeks. I’m excited by the boost this newsletter has been getting in recent months and wanted to keep the light on while I was out. Three weeks is the longest break I’ve taken for work in…ever, really.
Went to a bunch of museums (do yourself a favor and check out Edward Hopper at the Whitney and Morris Hirshfield at the American Folk Art Museum — can’t recommend them enough) and spent a few days in Aruba, of all places. Still not sure why flights were so cheap, but if you’re ever looking for a nice place to stay on the island for $150 a night, let me know. There’s also a great animal rescue. Go make friends with a miniature donkey.
The minute you get off the plane at JFK, however . . . Let’s just say the inner peace from meditating on a white sand beach every morning wears off even faster than the tan. Suddenly you’re tossed back into New York during travel season in 30-degree weather. If anyone in the Leeward Antilles is looking for someone to write a robot newsletter, hit me up.
The truth of it is, I’m back on the clock this week because we’re less than a week out from CES. I spent yesterday combing through 1,600 unread emails in an inbox that was zeroed out the day I left. Without giving the game away, I will say that there’s going to be a lot of fodder for Actuator at the show. Likely next week’s newsletter will be written from CES, about CES.
We’ve seen a slow creep of robotics in recent years, but this feels different. There’s the simple fact that I (and many other regulars) haven’t attended the show in a few years (January 2020 was very auspicious timing for an event that brought 171,000 people from all over the world into the same space). Robotics has had the beginnings of a renaissance during that time, so it follows that it will have a bigger presence at the biggest consumer electronics show.
To all of my fellow journalists covering the space, a word of warning: bad robots are nothing new. They tend to be more prevalent in the consumer space than anywhere else. People looking to spend a couple hundred bucks on a home robot likely don’t do the same level of due diligence that goes into choosing a $100,000 robotics system for your factory.
Claims get overblown, things don’t work out as promised, stuff breaks and there’s no one from the company ready to fly in to fix it. Be careful out there, folks. A lot of bad robots are going to be mixed in with the good ones. I’ve received multiple emails from companies claiming to be bringing the world’s first consumer robot to the show, and we all know how meaningless and wrong that claim is.
Image Credits: Thamrongpat Theerathammakorn / Getty Images
The other important element of this is the degree to which CES has become an automotive show over the past decades. The obvious import of this is that many automakers are getting aggressive about robots — either through investments or through their own divisions. Hyundai’s Boston Dynamics acquisition was very much in the limelight at last year’s show. There’s also the slightly more tenuous — but equally important — impact that innovations in autonomous driving systems have had on the industry. Vision systems, drones, Lidar and the like are all here, and the robots will follow.
I just received an email from the CTA titled “Start Your Year Off at CES 2023,” which I plan to do slightly begrudgingly. Even in normal years, CES can be soul-destroying chaos, but after several years away, it’s going to be a lot. The timing is always annoying from the standpoint of attempting to enjoy the holidays but makes sense as far as trying to be the tip of the spear for tech news. CES planted its flag as the first tech show of the year, and it’s not budging, even if means, somewhat ironically, being on a plane full of hungover people traveling to the show.
Image Credits: Hyundai
Due to the nature of the show, it’s almost inevitable that next week’s Actuator is going to be looking ahead at the year to come. Thankfully, a trio of much more qualified people gave their 2022 debriefs and 2023 predictions right here, but the week between Christmas and New Year’s is supposed to be about quiet reflection, so let’s do some of that now, and if a little bit of prediction seeps in, well so be it.
It’s overly dramatic to suggest that 2022 is the year that robotics came crashing back down to Earth, but there was undeniably a lot of market correction. That’s something that will certainly drag on into the new year. There was a nice little window in there for several months when robotics and automation seemed unfazed by macroeconomic forces, cruising on the forward momentum afforded them by the pandemic.
But it didn’t take a genius to see this coming. Those forces come for us all eventually. Here’s what I will say on a positive note: I’ve not yet found the person who suddenly changed course on robotics in all of this. There’s certainly some disagreement on the finer details, but people from all walks of life and business categories still believe the robotics ubiquity is an inevitability. That bodes extremely well for the space.
Ultimately, however, a year that crashed out of the gate on a bullish note has ended 2022 a bit worse for wear. That’s manifested itself in a number of different ways, from startup folding (we did a big piece on those here) due to an inability to raise sufficient funds to layoffs at big firms. We’re likely going to see continued consolidation of the industry, in the forms of shuttered projects and company closures (most startups fail — I don’t need to tell you that).
Image Credits: Marko Geber / Getty Images
Of course, it’s never good when people lose jobs — I’ve been laid off a couple of times. It really hurts emotionally and financially and I don’t wish it on anyone. But there may be a silver lining of sorts in all of this. Founders have a way of overcrowding the market. Once it’s clear a product or concept brings in money, there’s a sudden land rush. This is how bubbles form. If you’ve got the right team and some luck, however, you can turn economic gloom into something great — whether it’s a pivot, a new company or combining forces with the right folks.
Ultimately, I see the industry emerging even stronger on the other side of this.
Image Credits: Brian Heater
Acquisitions will be a big piece of this. There are, of course, various reasons a startup doesn’t see a viable path forward, and economic headwinds invariably magnify these problems. Meanwhile, the company with deep pockets understands that it’s often easier to simply acquire a company with a proven track record, rather than attempting to remanufacture that momentum. Given the time, resources and brain power involved in launching a robotics company, that’s especially applicable here.
Once more big companies have determined their robotics strategies, expect them to get even more aggressive with acquisitions. And hey, if a firm is struggling due to economic factors and generally bad timing, even more reason to swoop in. The two roadblocks here are that (1) even conglomerates are cutting spending and (2) the FTA has signaled that it plans to go after antitrust concerns more aggressively. As anticipated, the Amazon/iRobot deal announced back in August is facing exactly that.
Far and away, the biggest bit of robotics news I missed during my time off was Intrinsic’s acquisition of Open Robotics. Making a note for myself to talk to the parties involved after CES, but the deal is — at the very least — an interesting one. Alphabet/Google (by way of Intrinsic) has essentially bought the for-profit elements of the company, rather than Open Source Robotics Foundation, which is the steward of ROS.
Image Credits: Intrinsic
Co-founder and CEO Brian Gerkey clarifies:
Intrinsic is acquiring assets from these for-profit subsidiaries, OSRC and OSRC-SG. OSRF continues as the independent nonprofit it’s always been, with the same mission, now with some new faces and a clearer focus on governance, community engagement, and other stewardship activities. That means there is no disruption in the day-to-day activities with respect to OSRF’s core commitment to ROS, Gazebo, Open-RMF, and the entire community.
So Google won’t own the open source operating system, but it is acquiring many of the brains that helped build it.
The other big thing I was slightly disappointed in not having been around to write about (nope, definitely not every dumb Elon tweet) was San Francisco’s reversal on the deadly force robotics clause. This is one of those cases where press coverage amplified an issue that authorities likely thought/hoped would go unnoticed. The city by the bay tapped into its activist roots (they’re there if you brush away some of the overgrowth and look closely enough), causing lawmakers to (at least temporarily) reverse course.
The story is an example where the things the clause represented — and the precedent it would create — were every bit as important to the story. Would the wording have directly led to bomb-strapped robots? Maybe. Maybe not. But I do believe that concern is justified here, and in a political environment where Democratic politicians went along with this over fear that blocking deadly robots might paint them as anti-policing, it’s a lot easier to give law enforcement power than to revoke it.
Image Credits: CARL COURT/AFP (opens in a new window) / Getty Images
I’m glad the story caused more people to watch this space. The debate is very far from over — not just in San Francisco, but everywhere.
I would add all of the Ghost Robotics autonomous rifles into this bucket, as well as the opening letter signed by industry leaders calling for an end to weaponized general-purpose robots. The future didn’t look exactly like any of us expected (futures have a way of doing that), but it’s here nonetheless.
Labor is, of course, a big centerpiece to the robotics conversation. An inability to fill blue-collar jobs led to a bump in automation investment. This dovetails with ongoing labor struggles around things like living wages and unionizing that have been bubbling up in recent years. It’s an extremely important and nuanced conversation and one I fully expect to be covering in the years to come. Viewing history and past precedent is an important step in contextualizing this, but it’s also important to note the elements that are unprecedented.
There are reasons to be hopeful and reasons to be concerned, and anyone who tells you definitively how all of this shakes out is getting high on their own supply, so to speak. As ever, the one position I’m advocating here is unchanged: it’s our role as a society to speak for those who don’t have a voice. Whether short- or long-term, lives are going to impacted. If we truly believe the role of technology is the better of society, we need to make sure people don’t get caught under the wheels of this train.
Tesla Robot moving and waving Image Credits: Tesla
I wouldn’t say that 2022 was a huge year for humanoid robotics, but we did see some important seeds planted. Tesla’s robot was pretty much what roboticists expected: a microcosm of every conversation you’ve ever had about why robotics is hard. The debut was important for two reasons. First, it reignited an important conversation around robotic form factors, and second, it reset a lot of expectations about what a robot is — and can be — in 2022.
A dramatic firework display shoots out from Big Ben at the stroke of midnight on New Year’s eve. Image Credits: Getty Images
A few more things to watch out for:
- Resurgent agtech robotics
- Prosthetic breakthroughs
- Advances in bio-inspired and soft robots
- Nano/microbotics, particularly in the medical field
- Eldercare robots, which are finally having a moment
As someone said to me recently, it may feel like we’ve been doing this robotics thing forever, and certainly there were times when it felt like progress was moving at a glacial pace. But if you take the long view, it’s clear that we’re a hell of a lot closer to the beginning than the end — or even the middle — of this thing. If you’re here and reading this, congratulations, you’re in on the ground floor.
Strap in and put your helmet on, it’s going to be a fun ride.
Image Credits: Bryce Durbin/TechCrunch
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Reflecting on a roller coaster year for robotics by Brian Heater originally published on TechCrunch
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