Motor City Magic, investment starting to bounce back, and are female robots sinister?
California opens up robo-taxi opportunities, Serve goes public and vandals go for the food robots.
SVR is hosting four robotics events in the next couple of weeks - including Bots&Beer at Circuit Launch on Sept 6th. “GROAN” says everyone in SF and Peninsula. I promise the next one will not be in East Bay! But there’s a silver lining!
TokyoTV (Nikkei) wants to film/interview robotics startups. If you’ve got a Silicon Valley Bank collapse story they’d like to do an interview. If you don’t, but have a robot to demo and/or talk about then you still get coverage.
Do you want to host a Bots&Beer or Women in Robotics event, or robotics event of some sort and you aren’t in the East Bay - let me know!
And if you’re looking for a job in robotics - these companies are hiring - and you can submit your resume to Silicon Valley Robotics for even more opportunities.
Big thank you to everyone who has become a paid subscriber - it makes you an angel investor in the work I do at Silicon Valley Robotics and as a startup advisor, and accelerator. And maybe we can do more to share your experience and expertize with the robotics startup community. Mentor Office Hours, maybe startup profiles. We’ll keep exploring.
Robotics Events:
August 22nd SVR Robotics Technical Network - topics incl. NeRFs
August 22nd - Founders & Funders Night Out
August 25th - Deadline to apply to Defense Innovation Challenge & Expo
August 26th - IEEE Robotics Startup Bootcamp
September 19-21 - FIRA USA Salinas: Robotics and Autonomous Farming Solutions - FIRA
September 22 - Sustainable Robotics for Good with Synapse and Silicon Valley Robotics
September 28 - The Autonomous Systems Showcase - Deep Tech Showcase
October 1-5 - IROS in Detroit - IEEE RAS
October 18-22 - ROSCon + PX4 Autopilot Developer Summit in New Orleans and virtual - Open Robotics (save $100 by registering for both events)
October 25 - The Food AI Summit - Alameda CA - from The Spoon
Quick Reads:
Massive expansion of driverless robotaxis approved for San Francisco despite public safety concerns - LA Times
Nvidia GPU Shortage is ‘top gossip’ of Silicon Valley - VentureBeat
If it can be designed on a computer, it can be built by robots - The Economist
Is there a sinister side to the rise of female robots? - BBC Future
The robots are coming - and the companies building them are looking for workers - CNBC
Toyota, Pony.ai plan to mass produce robotaxis in China - Reuters
Rival air taxi startups Wisk and Archer settle their trade secret theft lawsuit - The Verge
Seaports to deploy over 370,000 autonomous guided vehicles by 2030 to alleviate congestion - American Journal of Transportation
How Dallas became the proving ground for autonomous trucks - Axios
The Midwest is America’s robot capital - Axios
Embedded Executive: Autonomous Farming Equipment, John Deere - Embedded Computing Design
An Uber-backed robot delivery company is going public - but the industry has yet to really deliver - Quartz
Vandals, thieves attacking L.A. food delivery robots - KTLA5
Human toddlers are inspiring new approaches to robot learning - TechCrunch
Cyngn to Deploy 100 Autonomous Electric Forklifts for Wood Products Supplier Arauco - Robotics 24/7
Amazon opens first Robotics Fulfillment Center in San Antonio - San Antonio Business Journal
The Billionaire Behind Walmart’s Robots Gains More Than $7Billion In A Day - Forbes
Beyond Imagination Announces Landmark Manufacturing Partnership With Dreamtech, Pioneering a New Era of AI-Powered Humanoid Robots - Accesswire
Skyline raises $3.35M to clean skyscraper windows with robots - TechCrunch
Olis Robotics raises $4M to take systems for remote robot management to next level - Geekwire
Top 10 robotics stories of July 2023 - The Robot Report
An origami-inspired universally deformable module for robotics applications - TechXplore
Tech track #4. NeRF: Photorealistic Image Synthesis - OpenCV.ai
Investment Landscape:
“Startups combined “to raise more than $15.4 billion in funding during the second quarter of 2023, up 26% from Q1.” In several other areas of the venture landscape, “such as early-stage valuations and late-stage deal counts, the story is similar: Numbers were trending back up in Q2 after significant declines in recent quarters.”
Even with these recent gains, the venture market “remains a long way off from the salad days of 2021.” crowdfundinsider.com
Deeper Reads:
What Self-Driving Cars Tell Us About AI Risk - Missy Cummings in Wired
Road Trippin with Steve - Motor City Magic
Join AMT’s Stephen LaMarca in Season 3 as he travels to Motor City to explore automotive manufacturing’s roots and the world of robotics. He hit Stellantis and enjoys his FIRST tour of an automotive plant—and it is the robot utopia you think it is. Then, he heads to a Manufacturing USA Institute right in Detroit. LIFT focuses on technology and talent development to drive U.S. manufacturing forward. In the final episode of the season, more is more at Fanuc where Stephen gets to see big robots, small robots, new robots, bigger robots, cutting-edge robots, and the biggest robots. Stay tuned for the series premiere on July 27.
Interesting AI:
Let's learn how to build a chatbot for your hobby or business with Llama2 from Learn with a Robot
Computer Vision and Multi-modal Models from Ahead in AI
Substance or Style: What Does Your Image Embedding Know? (10 Jul, https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.05610)
So-called probing methods are small models that are applied to text embeddings to analyze the properties of LLMs (see Probing Classifiers: Promises, Shortcomings, and Advances) and convolutional neural networks. In this work, the authors apply probing techniques to transformer-based vision models. Interestingly, the pretraining task (supervised, contrastive, masking, etc.) determines the type of non-semantic information the embeddings contain.
OpenFlamingo: An Open-Source Framework for Training Large Autoregressive Vision-Language Models (2 Aug, https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.01390)
OpenFlamingo is an open-source replication of DeepMind's Flamingo models, a suite of autoregressive vision-language models. This paper is a thorough technical report that describes the training pipeline to replicate the Flamingo models with 80 to 89% of the original Flamingo performance (on average).
From Sparse to Soft Mixtures of Experts (2 Aug, https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.00951)
Sparse mixture of experts (MoEs) are models trained for different tasks on subsets of the data before they are combined via an input routing mechanism. Here, the researchers propose a fully-differentiable sparse vision transformer (ViT) that addresses challenges such as training instability, token dropping, and inefficient finetuning. The resulting model has 10x lower inference cost compared to a standard ViT while matching its modeling performance.
Meta-Transformer: A Unified Framework for Multimodal Learning (20 Jul, https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.10802)
Similar to ImageBind or Perceiver a few years ago, this transformer can use multiple modalities, such as images, text, audio, and many more. Here, each input modality is processed by a different, learnable data preprocessor. Then, after preprocessing the inputs into a shared token space, a shared encoder is used to produce the embeddings.
Is Notes vs Chat confusing the heck out of you, too???