Instagram Founder shut down his Artifact
Plus OpenAI-backed AI Robot 1X got another $100M funding
Artifact, created by Instagram cofounder Kevin Systrom, is announcing a shutdown after one year of operation.
The app uses algorithmic predictions, which Kevin Systrom sees as ‘the future of social’, and was described as TikTok for Text.
Some features such as AI tools to summarize news, rewrite clickbait headlines, and surface the best content, are very attractive to me and many other techies.
The key to shutdown from Kevin Systrom:
We have built something that a core group of users love, but we have concluded that the market opportunity isn’t big enough to warrant continued investment in this way. It’s easy for startups to ignore this reality, but often making the tough call earlier is better for everyone involved.
The biggest opportunity cost is time working on newer, bigger and better things that have the ability to reach many millions of people. I am personally excited to continue building new things, though only time will tell what that might be.
We live in an exciting time where artificial intelligence is changing just about everything we touch, and the opportunities for new ideas seem limitless.
The app has a small team of 8 and was recently named the everyday essential app of the year by the Google Play Store. What a pity but I believe they’ve made the right decision.
What also caught my eye is about humanoid robots:
1. OpenAI-Backed 1X Gets Another $100 Million Leading by EQT Ventures
1X intends to utilize the new capital to bring to market its second-generation android NEO.
Designed as a bipedal humanoid, NEO is tailored for everyday home assistance, offering versatile support for a wide range of domestic tasks.
At home, it’s able to clean and organize. In industrial settings, it can be used to operate machinery and handle complex tasks, and I think the most important is it is safe to work among people.
1X already sells EVE, an android on two wheels that’s able to perform tasks in factories or operate as a patrolling guard, opening doors, taking elevators and operating keypads.
2. Another Human-robot Figure-01 has learned to make coffee
Figure is another key player in the Humanoid robots industry created by serial entrepreneur Bretty Adcock.
It can now make coffee learned after watching humans make coffee. Bretty said this is end-to-end AI: our neural networks are taking video in, trajectories out.
Why is this so important? Bretty:
The reason why this is so groundbreaking is if you can get human data for an application (making coffee, folding laundry, warehouse work, etc) , you can then train an AI system end-to-end on Figure 01.
There is a path to scale to every use case and when the fleet expands, further data is collected from the robot fleet, re-trained, and the robot achieves even better performance.
1X's mission makes me full of expectations for the future：
To create robots with practical, real-world applications to enhance the global human workforce.