Now that humanoids are all the rage in the robotics industry, Boston Dynamics on Tuesday officially retired theirs.
Boston Dynamics has been focused on commercializing technologies for a number of years now.
Boston Dynamics was, of course, well ahead of the current humanoid robotics curve.
Another wrinkle in today’s news is that, as of February, Boston Dynamics was still showcasing Atlas’ capabilities.
Meantime, in lieu of a gold watch, Boston Dynamics is offering up a video featuring some of Atlas’ greatest hits and most spectacular falls.
Design firm Zypsy will do $100,000 worth of work for 1% equity for early-stage startupsZypsy, a design firm with a track record of helping early-stage startups, has launched a new and somewhat unique venture investment program.
Instead startups will pay by issuing Zypsy 1% equity of their companies via a SAFE (Simple Agreement for Future Equity).
Zypsy has already added five startups to the first cohort of the design capital program (alphabetical order):Pilot projects with over 25 startups for three yearsThe six-year-old design company has worked with more than 25 startups.
“They are ‘cash-based clients, not an ‘equity-based portfolios’ like five companies we mentioned in the first design capital program,” he said.
In 2023, Zypsy raised $3 million to establish Design Capital.
Welcome to Startups Weekly — your weekly recap of everything you can’t miss from the world of startups.
Ron has been working from home as a writer for almost as long as I’ve been alive.
Moar transpoLook, I’m trying my best to have a balance of everything here on Startups Weekly.
The Apple falls far from the car: Apple, after packing in its electric car project, let go of 600 staff who were reportedly working on the project.
I’d pay good money to see the prototypes …Apple, after packing in its electric car project, let go of 600 staff who were reportedly working on the project.
It’s tough out there — and yet, doing my semi-regular jobs post always gives me hope.
Seems every time I post one of these, the number increases.
At 74 companies, this is undoubtedly the largest list we’ve made, by a wide margin.
That means more work for me in putting this post together, but if it helps a few folks find some work, it was definitely worth it.
1X Technologies (23 roles)Advanced Construction Robotics (4 roles)Aescape (5 roles)Aethon (5 roles)Agility Robotics (5 roles)Allvision (2 roles)Ambi Robotics (2 roles)ANYbotics (25 roles)Apptronik (16 roles)Astrobotic (23 roles)Atomic Machines (2 roles)Aurora (40 careers)Baubot (10 roles)Bear Robotics (13 roles)BHS Robotics (8 roles)Bloomfield Robotics (5 roles)Boxbot (3 roles)Carnegie Robotics (1 role)Cepheid (4 roles)Chef Robotics (15 roles)Civ Robotics (5 roles)Collaborative Robotics (10 roles)Covariant (20 roles)Dexterity (42 roles)Edge Case Research (1 role)Ekumen (3 roles)Enchanted Tools (50 roles)Engineered Arts (1 role)Exotec (174 roles)Eye-Bot (4 roles)Forcen (4 roles)Formant, Inc. (4 roles)Formic (8 roles)Formlogic (12 roles)Four Growers (4 roles)Foxglove (2 roles)Fulfil Solutions (15 roles)Gecko Robotics (18 roles)GrayMatter Robotics (11 roles)Hellbender (6 roles)Johnson & Johnson Med Tech (1 role)Keybotic (2 roles)Matic Robots (10 roles)Medra (3 roles)Mine Vision Systems (2 roles)Near Earth Autonomy (4 roles)Neocis (15 roles)Neubility (1 role)Neuraville (8 roles)Neya Systems (9 roles)Nimble Robotics (8 roles)Nuro (40 roles)Onward Robotics (2 roles)Plus.ai (3 roles)Polymath Robotics (2 roles)Pudu Robotics (2 roles)Pyka (10 roles)Reliable Robotics (36 roles)Roboto AI (1 role)Robust AI (14 roles)Sanctuary AI (14 roles)Sakar Robotics (6 roles)Scythe Robotics (11 roles)Seegrid (10 roles)Sphinx (5 roles)Stack AV (40 roles)Sunnybotics (2 roles)The AI Institute (19 roles)Titan Robotics (3 roles)UnitX (8 roles)Vecna Robotics (7 roles)Vention (20 roles)Viam (4 roles)Volley Automation (10 roles)
Spotify is building on its AI DJ feature, adding a new AI-powered playlist feature.
Spotify’s AI work nests into its other efforts to differentiate its service from rivals like Apple Music and offerings from Amazon.
Starting in just a few countries, the new AI playlist feature will roll out to more markets over time.
Some Spotify users have complained that the rollout of new products can take longer than they want to reach their home market, it’s worth noting.
But for those of us who aren’t mega-ChatGPT users, AI can seem ever so slightly remote from our regular existence.
On Tuesday at the Google Cloud Next customer conference in Las Vegas, Google introduced a new AI-fueled video creation tool called Google Vids.
At Google Cloud Next, we’re unveiling Google Vids, a brand new, AI-powered video creation app for work,” Aparna Pappu, VP & GM at Google Workspace said, introducing the tool.
Examples of the kinds of videos people are creating with Google Vids include product pitches, training content or celebratory team videos.
Like most generative AI tooling, Google Vids starts with a prompt.
Along the way colleagues can comment or make changes, just as with any Google Workspace tool.
Working from home isn’t going away, even if some CEOs wish it would Most workers crave flexibility and work-life balanceWhen I started working from home in the late 1980s as a freelance technical writer, I was clearly an outlier.
Today, 14% of U.S. workers work at home full time (including me), and that number is expected to increase to 20% by next year, according to data published by USA Today.
Wayfair, the Boston-based online furniture company, concentrated on remote workers over in-office folks in a layoff earlier this year, according to a WSJ report.
Meanwhile Michael Bloomberg suggested remote workers weren’t actually working, but playing golf (which honestly sounds like projecting to me).
That’s a lot of executive energy being directed against working from home and toward working in the office.
The AI boom, love it or find it to be a bit more hype than substance, is here to stay.
That means lots of companies raising oodles of dollars, a healthy dose of regulatory concern, academic work, and corporate jockeying.
For startups, it means a huge opportunity to bring new technology to bear on a host of industries that could use a bit of polish.
But if you read the news, you might notice that men are the far and away most cited, and discussed players in AI today.
So, TechCrunch’s Dominic-Madori Davis and Kyle Wiggers decided to go out and talk to women working in AI to learn more about their work, how they got into the world of artificial intelligence, and more.
Such is the case with Anthropic and its latest research which demonstrates an interesting vulnerability in current LLM technology.
Of course given progress in open-source AI technology, you can spin up your own LLM locally and just ask it whatever you want, but for more consumer-grade stuff this is an issue worth pondering.
But the closer we get to more generalized AI intelligence, the more it should resemble a thinking entity, and not a computer that we can program, right?
If so, we might have a harder time nailing down edge cases to the point when that work becomes unfeasible?
Anyway, let’s talk about what Anthropic recently shared.
Gómez’s research is grounded in the computational music field, where she contributes to the understanding of the way humans describe music and the methods in which it’s modeled digitally.
What I liked at the time from machine learning was its modelling capabilities and the shift from knowledge-driven to data-driven algorithm design — e.g.
There’s also PHENICX, a large European Union (EU)-funded project I coordinated on the use of music; and AI to create enriched symphonic music experiences.
What advice would you give to women seeking to enter the AI field?
They should learn about the working principles and limitations of AI algorithms to be able to challenge them and use them in a responsible way.
