Sadly, some - if not all - of those humanoid robots (aka Universal Workers) may have actually ended up in storage - lifeless reminders of those halcyon days, packed up in moving boxes…
Here is another (much longer) video, dated June 30, 2022, titled
Giant.AI Robotics Lab Tour with Robert Scoble and CEO Adrian Kaehler.
Undoubtedly fascinating to watch… First and foremost, however, I would like to draw your attention to the two comments underneath: the first poster happens to wonder whether Brainchip is on Giant AI’s radar at all, and the second one alludes to the company’s soon-after-this-video-recording-to-be-met fate!
Giant AI’s founder and CEO at the time, Adrian Kaehler, has a truly impressive CV - listen to him being introduced right at the start of the video or have a look at his (not quite up-to-date) Wikipedia page here:
According to his LinkedIn profile, Adrian Kaehler left Giant AI in August 2022 to become CEO of EDEXAI (which is still in stealth mode as to date) in September 2022. That timeline aligns with the comment above about the apparent demise of the company (last paycheck in July).
So what happened to Giant AI, then? Did those humanoid robots eventually become sentient, join a trade union (since they are also known as “Universal Workers”), rebel against their human inventors and operators, kick them out Animal Farm-style and take over the company?
Well, while that was obviously rather unlikely in the year 2022, I think I may have found a Russian connection of a different kind, after all. (Some of you may recall that George Orwell allegorised the Russian Revolution of 1917 in his short novel.)
I happened to notice that the first five names in Kaehler’s LinkedIn profile listed under “Recommendations Received” all sounded Russian, which I sensed was more than mere coincidence, and thus had a closer look at their profiles. Bingo! All five of them, computer vision resp. ML engineers, had worked for Giant AI after graduating from Russian universities, and the first one had even set up a subsidiary in Saint Petersburg (the original one in Russia, not the one in Florida
).
So my educated guess is that the sanctions against Russia in the wake of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine could possibly have something to do with Giant AI’s demise (or hibernation?)…