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Intrinsic, a new Alphabet company

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Re: Intrinsic, a new Alphabet company

#21
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the face of it I’m not understanding the instant dismissal of the idea — what’s objectionable about this?

this is hacker news, where scorn is the major currency

I think Hacker News tries hard to be constructive in its criticism and even upbeat. Consider the guideline: "Be kind. Don't be snarky. Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine. Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

One of the reasons I visit hacker news is because of the collective will to try to abide by guidelines like these.

Re: Intrinsic, a new Alphabet company

#22
post #13
post #3

Weird. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27861201

The list of Robot company failures and the robotic industry dead pool runs very deep. Just in the past few years: * Rethink Robotics https://www.zdnet.com/article/sudden-unexpected-demise-of-re... * Anki https://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/home-robots/con... * Jibo https://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/home-robots/jib... * Blue Workforce https://www.therobotreport.com/blue-workforce-robot-files-ba...…

Your conclusions are true, though I think it may be helpful to further subdivide into some categories as far as what the target market was and where they were at with technical readiness.

Like, some of them (Anki, Jibo, Mayfield, Asimo, Reach) were 100% toys, and were always going to be at the extreme end price-wise trying to compete with increasingly "smart" toys being manufactured by regular toy companies with regular toy company processes, volumes, and margins.

Others (Rethink, Willow, Schaft, Blue) were trying to do something really ambitious and potentially provide B2B value, but were never far enough along to have a compelling value proposition for the end users they were targeting. They were never fast enough or reliable enough to be competitive with the minimum wage labour that they would have displaced— if robots are hard, then mobile robots are harder, and mobile manipulators are the hardest of all.

I think the saddest story in here is still Starsky, because they weren't in either of these groups: they really did have a clear value proposition, and they were technically there as far as delivering on it. The market needs what they were offering; they seemingly just ran out of runway at a time when investors were too starry-eyed about vaporous promises of L4 autonomy to want to back a company working on a viable hybrid solution.

(Disclosure: I work for a B2B mobile robotics company)

Re: Intrinsic, a new Alphabet company

#23
post #13
post #3

Weird. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27861201

The list of Robot company failures and the robotic industry dead pool runs very deep. Just in the past few years: * Rethink Robotics https://www.zdnet.com/article/sudden-unexpected-demise-of-re... * Anki https://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/home-robots/con... * Jibo https://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/home-robots/jib... * Blue Workforce https://www.therobotreport.com/blue-workforce-robot-files-ba...…

Market is not that big? What is the size of transportation industry alone? What about ride hailing? Investors are skittish? Cruise raised $10B most of it not that long ago, EmbarkTrucks is merging with a SPAC to go IPO soon, I could list others. Robotics is hard but that’s kind of the point.

Re: Intrinsic, a new Alphabet company

#24
> "when I was just starting Moonfruit, the world’s first SAAS website builder"

Moonfruit, launched in 2000, was definitely not the first SaaS website builder. Geocities launched 6 years before it and there were dozens of them by the time Moonfruit came around.

While not a big lie, it's an odd way to start a post like this.

Re: Intrinsic, a new Alphabet company

#25

> "when I was just starting Moonfruit, the world’s first SAAS website builder" Moonfruit, launched in 2000, was definitely not the first SaaS website builder. Geocities launched 6 years before it and there were dozens of them by the time Moonfruit came around. While not a big lie, it's an odd way to start a post like this.

Not odd at all, it's standard startup delusion trying to chase clout

Re: Intrinsic, a new Alphabet company

#27
post #15
post #9

The title should probably be "Introducing Intrinsic" to match the source and be much more meaningful.

Not just that. > I’m now leading Intrinsic, a new Alphabet company > After five and a half years developing our technology at X, we’re now ready to become an independent Alphabet company, leaving the moonshot factory’s rapid prototyping environment If you don't know what "X" in Alphabet/Google is, then this announcement looks a little vague and confusing, not like the skunkworks unveil it is supposed to be.

Ok, we've added the Alphabet above.

Re: Intrinsic, a new Alphabet company

#28
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The list of Robot company failures and the robotic industry dead pool runs very deep. Just in the past few years: * Rethink Robotics https://www.zdnet.com/article/sudden-unexpected-demise-of-re... * Anki https://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/home-robots/con... * Jibo https://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/home-robots/jib... * Blue Workforce https://www.therobotreport.com/blue-workforce-robot-files-ba...…

Your conclusions are true, though I think it may be helpful to further subdivide into some categories as far as what the target market was and where they were at with technical readiness. Like, some of them (Anki, Jibo, Mayfield, Asimo, Reach) were 100% toys, and were always going to be at the extreme end price-wise trying to compete with increasingly "smart" toys being manufactured by regular toy companies with regu…

Starsky value prop was teleop, but that was the same thing that cooled investors. Adding an extra 20-100ms latency to driving is akin to driving after two drinks. Operating a vehicle 10x larger than the ones on the road does not make this problem smaller.

Operating large trucks is not a game VCs wanted to play.

Re: Intrinsic, a new Alphabet company

#29

> "when I was just starting Moonfruit, the world’s first SAAS website builder" Moonfruit, launched in 2000, was definitely not the first SaaS website builder. Geocities launched 6 years before it and there were dozens of them by the time Moonfruit came around. While not a big lie, it's an odd way to start a post like this.

Geocities was free and didn't really provide any "software" in the service. It was a static web host.

Re: Intrinsic, a new Alphabet company

#30
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your conclusions are true, though I think it may be helpful to further subdivide into some categories as far as what the target market was and where they were at with technical readiness. Like, some of them (Anki, Jibo, Mayfield, Asimo, Reach) were 100% toys, and were always going to be at the extreme end price-wise trying to compete with increasingly "smart" toys being manufactured by regular toy companies with regu…

Starsky value prop was teleop, but that was the same thing that cooled investors. Adding an extra 20-100ms latency to driving is akin to driving after two drinks. Operating a vehicle 10x larger than the ones on the road does not make this problem smaller. Operating large trucks is not a game VCs wanted to play.

I don't think it was ever meant to be live driving at highway speeds:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/stefanseltz-axmacher/2020/06/16...

The point was that it was an autonomous system that could ask for help, and the "help" scenarios would mostly be cases where the truck was already stopped or at very low speeds: navigating a construction zone, a transfer yard, etc. Possibly in some of these situations it wasn't even wheel-to-wheel, but rather a system of choosing between a handful of high-level courses of action for the machine to then proceed with, or helping the perception system classify an unknown object it was looking at.

I didn't sense from the postmortem articles by Stefan that safety concerns were what killed it. It was investors being disappointed that they weren't trying to build a truck without a steering wheel at all, since that was clearly where Uber, Waymo, Tesla, and others were headed (and at least at the time, external safety concerns were not seemingly impacting any of them).

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