Alphabet-subsidiary Everyday Robots powers down amid zealous budget cuts

Article by Jacob Bourne | Feb 27, 2023

The news: Alphabet has shut down its Everyday Robots subsidiary, consolidating some of the technologies and team members into Google Research, per The Verge.

The number of jobs affected by the closure hasn’t been announced.
Last August, Everyday Robots was working on using Google’s PaLM-SayCan research and large language models (LLMs) like OpenAI’s GPT-3 to help robots better understand the intentions behind human requests.
Meanwhile, Microsoft announced this week that it's researching how to use ChatGPT to give robots instructions and help them interact more easily with people, per Gizmodo.

Cuts in context: The Everyday Robots closure is part of broader budget cuts at Google, including company-wide layoffs and its industrial robotics arm, Intrinsic, downsizing by 20%.

Google Cloud recently asked staff to share desks to control costs—a surprising move from a company that had long been a bastion of workplace luxury and that would presumably have adequate deskspace after cutting 12,000 employees.
The tech giant has become timid about moonshot projects in favor of endeavors with more certain revenue potential.
The cuts are a sign of a lack of confidence in successfully bringing innovative ideas to market that could undermine Google’s dominant status.
Google deprioritizing robotics research through overzealous belt tightening could indicate it’s too focused on pleasing investors’ calls for cuts at the expense of a long-term strategy.

The AI + robotics potential: Microsoft investment in AI robotics research could give it an advantage over Google in capturing future demand for consumer robotics.

AI will enable robots to perform about 39% of household chores within a decade, according to a Plos One survey of AI experts, per The Guardian.
Even for companies that don’t produce physical robots, leading patents on the technology could be lucrative.
AI is one of the critical ingredients to making robots better at performing domestic and commercial tasks, and we’ll likely see growing demand for the applications.