I wonder if Google regret selling Boston Dynamics? It was a interesting proposition at the time - self driving delivery vans with a humanoid delivery robot (charging from the van's traction battery between deliveries) for the last few steps from van to door etc. Ahead of its time perhaps ... but these days perhaps that will become viable again "soon"?

At least they didn't kill it I guess and BD got to live on as an independent.

Let’s see if this is the time for industrial robots,

Boston Dynamica: Majority Owner: Hyundai Motor Group (80%) Minority Owner: SoftBank (20%)

Few things that go overlooked from someone that works in industrial robotics:

- note that google already has investment in industrial robotics with intrinsic ai (that is the confluence of OSRF, bot and dolly, and a few other robotics/ai companies)

- this partnership specifically seems to be focused on humanoid robotics, which is not taken seriously by industrial manufacturing folks

granted, I find it somewhat amusing that the head of Boston Dynamics got invited to give a keynote at NEURIPS 2016 or 2017 and admitted than Spot the Dog didn't really use any learning...

Makes sense. AFAIK BD were using a lot of traditional programming and outdated ml concepts and haven't really managed to hop on board the choo choo transformer train a la VLMs/VLAs.

Deepmind has its own robotics team, but doesn't get much done. Best folks leave

There was this one Black Mirror episode..

What could possibly go wrong? Lame, I know, but seriously can we have some good, not sinister news for a week or two? With no AI or evil tech-bro, or senile despot overtones if possible.

Oh great.

tbh I think Google should sell all the companies they bought because Google can't deliver any products anymore. There are product companies (hello OpenAI, Anthro) and then there are corporate companies. Google is the latter. Their attempts at making new products have been failure after failure recently:

Bard → Gemini → Jules → Antigravity (they can't even come up with a good product name)

Their GCP console is a mess. Wanna get a Gemini API? Good luck with that.

And where is the "internet through balloons"? Where's their quantum HPC? Where is half the stuff they demo every year to devs to prove that they're still relevant but never ship them? e.g., where is that smart glass they used in their demo last year that had Gemini in it and could analyze what you see? Where's their "calls any restaurant on your behalf" ML model they introduced many years ago?

Google has lost it, and to make things even worse, occasionally they poke at their successful products and googllify them too (YT likes disappearing, Gmail with Gemini, Google Search performing worse than Bing, etc.)