Alas, poor Moxie. Aftermath is making me hope a lot of parents have found copies of The 10th Good Thing About Barney – because thanks to an AI company going under, a lot of autistic kids’ robot friends are about to abruptly stop working:
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.
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The response from Moxie owners seems fairly emotional. Parents have to explain to their kids that Moxie is functionally dying, although the company has “included a letter from the G.R.L. (Global Robotics Lab) to help guide this conversation in an age-appropriate way”. There are videos on TikTok of children and adults crying and asking Moxie what’s going to happen now.
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Videos at the link, if you can stand them.