Alphabet gives bipedal robots the Schaft 'cos no one wants to buy its creepy machine maker Google's parent company Alphabet has closed down its biped robot maker Schaft after failing to find a buyer. Even the singularity-obsessed panic buyer SoftBank, which had made a commitment to buy the company last year, wasn't interested. Talks broke down, Nikkei reported this week. Schaft was a spinout from the University of …
I dunno, we've run a lot of skeptical stuff. The acceleration hardware and libraries popping up are interesting, and some NN applications, too, in that new algorithms are interesting.
Whether or not AI is a good idea in the real world long-term isn't clear. I get the feeling no one gets VC funding for saying they use "heuristics" these days.
C.
>> Rubin acquired seven robotics companies including Boston Dynamics
So one of the seven companies is being closed down? I wonder what the other six are secretly doing? We probably won't know until an army of armed Google Assault Bots suddenly appears on the streets.
Google hates outside code, outside programing languages, and outside libraries. Most acquisitions are doomed to failure because Google is using an ancient mainframe and mega-OS style of development. Outside projects can have a 10x to 100x increase in coding effort when coming into Google, or might not even be possible due to having execution timing constraints.
Google hates outside code, outside programing languages, and outside libraries.
No it doesn't. It engages constructively in lots of different projects and actively supports others. It does have some odd development practices that seem to stem from people moving rapidly between projects and also from the shear scale of some deployments. I personally am flabbergasted that they didn't crash their data centres and network with all the transcoding they do for YouTube due to the world and dog insisting on 4K cat videos!
It does develop, acquire and abandon quite a lot of projects but this is within its role as investor. It seems to keep the useful stuff and role it into other projects. Lots of companies do this but generally seem to acquire and then shutdown potential competitors (Oracle, SAP, et al).
As long as there are stairs in the building that should not be an issue.
You're thinking of Daleks. They will have gotten stair climbing ability from Boston Dynamics if they didn't sell it too soon.
Google doesn't want Daleks, the eyeballs that give them almost all their revenue need to be attached to living beings that haven't been exterminated for advertisers to pay for the ad impressions. For now, at least.
Pedantically, canonically, some Daleks can fly. It depends upon the model of chassis, which in turn depends upon when they are encountered. Early model Daleks could not fly, but they revised their design to fix that flaw once their technology advanced sufficiently.
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