The Wall Street Journal’s Sean McLain reported Sunday on the recent Humanoids Summit in Mountain View, California held earlier this month. McLain seems to have come away with the impression that makers of robots are worried they’ve oversold a technology that, well, sucks. So far anyway.
Sure, Elon Musk is promising a robot army, and there’s now some kind of robot butler being preordered by rich people who are expected to pay $20,000 essentially just to help train it. What the optimists perhaps haven’t considered is something the Chinese government has already spoken on: there’s a danger that if this hype produces actual retail products, the creators of those products are on the verge of creating millions of unsatisfied customers, and will have accomplished nothing other than filling landfills with mountains of human-shaped e-waste.
One cautious robot executive Kaan Dogrusoz, CEO of Weave Robotics, told the Journal, “There’s a lot of great technological work happening, a lot of great talent working on these, but they are not yet well defined products.” Then Dogrusoz invoked a piece of consumer tech history that should have robot optimists rethinking their lives: “Full bipedal humanoids are the Newtons of our times,” Dogrusoz told the Journal.
The Apple Newton MessagePad was a portable computer product marketed in the mid-90s at a time when Steve Jobs didn’t control the company. It was buggy, and became a huge public joke. When Steve Jobs assumed control of Apple again, he discontinued it. As Wired wrote in 2013, “The Newton wasn’t just killed, it was violently murdered, dragged into a closet by its hair and kicked to death in its youth by one of technology’s great men.”
Releasing a bunch of worthless Newton-level bipedal robot duds into the world is a possibility that should have tech company CEOs worried. A good metaphor for such a corporate disaster might be someone teleoperating a humanoid robot such that it delivers a groin kick to its operator. If only there were a freshly viral video in my feeds that could help me illustrate this…
Here are some other choice quotes the Journal took down at the summit:
Ani Kelkar, a McKinsey partner told the Journal that when a company spends $100 on robot deployment in a workplace, $20 goes to the robot, and the other $80 goes toward stopping the robot from injuring people. “We’re doing a big extrapolation from watching videos of robots doing laundry to a butler in my house that can do everything,” Kelkar warned in the Journal’s article.
Isaac Qureshi, the CEO of a company called Gatlin Robotics, whose flagship product at the Summit was able to scrub a brick wall if it was teleoperated by a person in a VR headset said, “Slowly, we’re going to teach the Gatlin robot more things, like starting with dusting, surface cleaning, trash bins and then the toilet.”
Pras Velagapudi, the CTO of Agility Robotics said, “We’ve been trying to figure out how do we not just make a humanoid robot, but also make a humanoid robot that does useful work.” He might be onto something.
Robot executives have spoken. Don’t buy a humanoid robot, folks. It cannot do anything useful for you, but it can clobber your groin.
Source link
#Making #Humanoid #Robot #Makers #Worry #Robots #Suck
![Fintech startup Parker files for bankruptcy | TechCrunch
Parker, a well-funded startup offering corporate credit cards and banking services for e-commerce businesses, has filed for bankruptcy and is widely reported to have shut down.
The startup was part of Y Combinator’s winter 2019 cohort, and its Series A was led by Valar Ventures.
Parker came out of stealth in 2023, touting a corporate credit that it said was designed for use by e-commerce companies. At the time, co-founder and CEO Yacine Sibous said the startup’s “secret sauce” was an underwriting process that could properly assess e-commerce cash flows.
“We imagined building better financial products for e-commerce founders with the mission of increasing the number of financially independent people,” Sibous told TechCrunch.
Parker’s website is still up and doesn’t mention any shutdown. Instead, a banner at the top boasts that the company has raised more than 0 million in total funding, including a 5 million lending arrangement.
However, multiple social media posts state that Parker’s credit card partner Patriot Bank sent a message to customers this week confirming the shutdown. Parker’s competitors seemed to jump on the news with their own posts seeking to lure over the startup’s former customers.
And Parker’s troubles seem to be confirmed in its May 7 filing for Chapter 7 bankruptcy protection. The filing states that the company has between million and 0 million in assets, with liabilities in the same range. It also states that Parker has between 100 and 199 creditors.
Techcrunch event
San Francisco, CA
|
October 13-15, 2026
Fintech consultant Jason Mikula recently claimed that Parker had been in negotiations for a potential acquisition, with the failure of those talks ultimately leading to the startup’s abrupt shutdown. Mirkula added that this “has left small business customers in a tough spot” and also raised “questions about [banking partner] Piermont’s and Patriot’s oversight of the program.”
Parker did not immediately respond to an email from TechCrunch.
The company’s CEO Sibous has not explicitly acknowledged the shutdown or bankruptcy on LinkedIn, and in a recent post, he repeated the 0 million funding figure, adding that the company had reached million in revenue. But he also said that if he started over, he’d do some things differently, such as: “Avoid over-hiring, reactive decisions, and doomsayers.”
When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesn’t affect our editorial independence.#Fintech #startup #Parker #files #bankruptcy #TechCrunchParker,Valar Ventures,Y Combinator,Yacine Sibous](https://i0.wp.com/techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/tech-crunch-photo.png?resize=1200%2C674&ssl=1 "Fintech startup Parker files for bankruptcy | TechCrunch
Parker, a well-funded startup offering corporate credit cards and banking services for e-commerce businesses, has filed for bankruptcy and is widely reported to have shut down.
The startup was part of Y Combinator’s winter 2019 cohort, and its Series A was led by Valar Ventures.
Parker came out of stealth in 2023, touting a corporate credit that it said was designed for use by e-commerce companies. At the time, co-founder and CEO Yacine Sibous said the startup’s “secret sauce” was an underwriting process that could properly assess e-commerce cash flows.
“We imagined building better financial products for e-commerce founders with the mission of increasing the number of financially independent people,” Sibous told TechCrunch.
Parker’s website is still up and doesn’t mention any shutdown. Instead, a banner at the top boasts that the company has raised more than 0 million in total funding, including a 5 million lending arrangement.
However, multiple social media posts state that Parker’s credit card partner Patriot Bank sent a message to customers this week confirming the shutdown. Parker’s competitors seemed to jump on the news with their own posts seeking to lure over the startup’s former customers.
And Parker’s troubles seem to be confirmed in its May 7 filing for Chapter 7 bankruptcy protection. The filing states that the company has between million and 0 million in assets, with liabilities in the same range. It also states that Parker has between 100 and 199 creditors.
Techcrunch event
San Francisco, CA
|
October 13-15, 2026
Fintech consultant Jason Mikula recently claimed that Parker had been in negotiations for a potential acquisition, with the failure of those talks ultimately leading to the startup’s abrupt shutdown. Mirkula added that this “has left small business customers in a tough spot” and also raised “questions about [banking partner] Piermont’s and Patriot’s oversight of the program.”
Parker did not immediately respond to an email from TechCrunch.
The company’s CEO Sibous has not explicitly acknowledged the shutdown or bankruptcy on LinkedIn, and in a recent post, he repeated the 0 million funding figure, adding that the company had reached million in revenue. But he also said that if he started over, he’d do some things differently, such as: “Avoid over-hiring, reactive decisions, and doomsayers.”
When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesn’t affect our editorial independence.#Fintech #startup #Parker #files #bankruptcy #TechCrunchParker,Valar Ventures,Y Combinator,Yacine Sibous")
Post Comment