During a presentation at IFA 2025, Deebot parent company Ecovacs (full disclosure: travel and lodging were paid by Ecovacs, but Gizmodo did not guarantee any coverage as a condition of accepting the trip) said repeatedly that its new X11 OmniCyclone robot vacuum‘s AI smarts are all on-device. Or the bulk of them are, anyway. I returned to the booth later and spoke with a couple of the company’s representatives to try to figure out exactly how divorced from the cloud the Deebot X11 OmniCyclone truly is—is it an all-on-device experience, like the Matic robot vacuum, or does it still need an internet connection to keep its best functionality?
The Deebot X11 OmniCyclone’s promise is that it can use local AI smarts to do things like identify spills and messes on the floor and decide how best to clean them, and if mopping is required, what kind of mopping solution to use (the X11’s charging dock holds a couple of options). It can also learn from your routine, shifting and morphing its cleaning schedule and approach over time to suit your behavior.
You, the owner, can talk to the AI Agent Yiko—the company’s name for its refreshed, generative AI-powered vacuum assistant—and give it some pretty broad, natural-language requests, at least according to Ecovacs. I didn’t get to test this out. I wanted to know how broad. Can you say, “Hey Yiko, only clean the bedroom on Fridays,” and it works? Ecovacs’s folks said yes. What about, “Hey Yiko, please clean up around my dining room table at 7 p.m. every night.” Yep, that’s apparently possible, too, although the rep told me you might need to name that table in the Ecovacs Home app and call it by that specific name when you speak your request. Again, I didn’t get to test any of this.
Not that it would matter if your internet went down—in that case, you’d lose a lot of functionality, according to the reps. The app would no longer work because it bounces through Ecovacs’ cloud infrastructure in the U.S. to do that. No more tapping around to tell the robot to clean specific rooms, or remotely controlling it from your smartphone, or seeing cloud-saved videos recorded while you were doing that. It also means no Yiko, because the device’s generative AI voice assistant is cloud-dependent, too.
But there’s a way to use the robot vacuum in which that doesn’t matter. There’s an “Agent Hosting” mode in the Ecovacs Home app where you can switch the Deebot X11 OmniCyclone to AI-only control, essentially putting all of your faith in it to clean your house properly. It might be able to do so, at least according to Ecovacs, which says it can recognize over 100 different categories of objects, as small as a grain of sand. If you switch it to that mode and find that it does just fine at cleaning your house, with no input from you, then you may never bother with the app again. And if that’s the case, you might never know when your internet is out or that the Deebot X11 OmniCyclone has lost its connection to your network.
That doesn’t mean the robot would be useless. Ecovacs’s reps told me that without an internet connection, the Deebot X11 OmniCyclone’s onboard AI would still do its thing, sliding its schedule around as needed, identifying messes, and switching up its cleaning approach as it goes along. I asked if the company sees a future where even the AI voice assistant is on-device, and the reps weren’t sure.
It’s not all the way to the world I want to see, where my smart home devices never need an internet connection to bring me their full feature set, or close enough to it for blues. But it is an encouraging move in that direction, assuming it all works the way Ecovacs says it will. And, with AI, that can be a big “if.”
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![Founders Fund launches game show starring Sam Altman, Palmer Luckey, and other tech elites | TechCrunch
Have you ever had the desire to see Sam Altman and Palmer Luckey square off over a moderately suspenseful card game? If so, you are in luck.
Silicon Valley’s leaders are rushing to embrace the power of media for the purposes of marketing and political capital. Now, in a sign of the times, Founders Fund, the venture capital firm co-founded by Peter Thiel, has launched its own game show.
MAFIA the GAME, will apparently be an ongoing thing, where prominent tech luminaries get together and face off over a game of cards (the show is named after the party-game favorite).
The spectacle is moderated by Pirate Wires editor Mike Solana (who is also the chief marketing officer at Founders Fund). The debut episode includes a who’s who of players, Altman, Luckey, Bryan Johnson, the famed biohacker who will (according to him) live forever, and Moxie Marlinspike, the founder of encrypted chat app Signal.
[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EDCwQe7P8T0[/embed]
“I’m so f*cking bored with VC content,” Solana told Newcomer, which originally reported the show’s existence. “There has to be a more interesting way to get to know someone, and I think that this is a way more interesting way to get to know someone.”
TechCrunch reached out to Founders Fund for more information on the program.
In many ways, having a reality-TV-esque platform is just good business these days. The internet has turned the world into a population of chronic media consumers, and the average American spends around 2.5 hours on social media per day. Much of that time is spent scrolling through an endless flood of advertising-laced memes and videos.
In the modern era, the road to power and influence is paved by infotainment.
Companies and executives have sought to take advantage of this new reality in different ways. OpenAI recently raised some eyebrows when it procured TBPN, the buzzy founder-led podcast. Meanwhile, a number of tech’s most prominent players have leveraged virality to their advantage. Johnson, for instance, has managed to grow his following through a very active (and quite bizarre) social media presence. Elon Musk, meanwhile, has also managed to leverage his public persona to go viral (although arguments could be made that his online presence has sometimes hurt rather than helped his businesses).
This trend has also spread to the startup space, where people like Cluely CEO Chungin “Roy” Lee have demonstrated the power of being a one-man viral hype machine.
When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesn’t affect our editorial independence.#Founders #Fund #launches #game #show #starring #Sam #Altman #Palmer #Luckey #tech #elites #TechCrunchbryan johnson,Founders Fund,media,Palmer Luckey,sam altman](https://i0.wp.com/techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2271655123.jpg?resize=1200%2C787&ssl=1 "Founders Fund launches game show starring Sam Altman, Palmer Luckey, and other tech elites | TechCrunch
Have you ever had the desire to see Sam Altman and Palmer Luckey square off over a moderately suspenseful card game? If so, you are in luck.
Silicon Valley’s leaders are rushing to embrace the power of media for the purposes of marketing and political capital. Now, in a sign of the times, Founders Fund, the venture capital firm co-founded by Peter Thiel, has launched its own game show.
MAFIA the GAME, will apparently be an ongoing thing, where prominent tech luminaries get together and face off over a game of cards (the show is named after the party-game favorite).
The spectacle is moderated by Pirate Wires editor Mike Solana (who is also the chief marketing officer at Founders Fund). The debut episode includes a who’s who of players, Altman, Luckey, Bryan Johnson, the famed biohacker who will (according to him) live forever, and Moxie Marlinspike, the founder of encrypted chat app Signal.
[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EDCwQe7P8T0[/embed]
“I’m so f*cking bored with VC content,” Solana told Newcomer, which originally reported the show’s existence. “There has to be a more interesting way to get to know someone, and I think that this is a way more interesting way to get to know someone.”
TechCrunch reached out to Founders Fund for more information on the program.
In many ways, having a reality-TV-esque platform is just good business these days. The internet has turned the world into a population of chronic media consumers, and the average American spends around 2.5 hours on social media per day. Much of that time is spent scrolling through an endless flood of advertising-laced memes and videos.
In the modern era, the road to power and influence is paved by infotainment.
Companies and executives have sought to take advantage of this new reality in different ways. OpenAI recently raised some eyebrows when it procured TBPN, the buzzy founder-led podcast. Meanwhile, a number of tech’s most prominent players have leveraged virality to their advantage. Johnson, for instance, has managed to grow his following through a very active (and quite bizarre) social media presence. Elon Musk, meanwhile, has also managed to leverage his public persona to go viral (although arguments could be made that his online presence has sometimes hurt rather than helped his businesses).
This trend has also spread to the startup space, where people like Cluely CEO Chungin “Roy” Lee have demonstrated the power of being a one-man viral hype machine.
When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesn’t affect our editorial independence.#Founders #Fund #launches #game #show #starring #Sam #Altman #Palmer #Luckey #tech #elites #TechCrunchbryan johnson,Founders Fund,media,Palmer Luckey,sam altman")
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