Back in December 2020, Hyundai purchased an 80% controlling interest in Boston Dynamics from SoftBank for $880 million, part of a transaction that valued the robotics company at $1.1 billion. That agreement included a put option allowing SoftBank to sell its remaining stake to Hyundai at a later date.
SoftBank has now exercised that option.
Oh. It's Softbank exiting humanoid robotics at Softbank's discretion. That's a lot different than " Hyundai buys Boston Dynamics". Hyundai bought them years ago. This is just the last 8%.
Seems like a mistake. AI in its current form has limited usefulness for most people. Not something I would pay for to use outside of work. But a household robot that could clean, wash and fold the laundry, do the dishes, maybe even be a chauffeur... that would be huge. I think a lot of people would pay new-car money for something like that.
Well, that assumes that if you just keep throwing more data and compute at large language models you'll end up with something akin to AGI to control those robots. Which is far from guaranteed.
> robot maid that could clean, wash and fold the laundry, do the dishes, etc. would be huge. I think a lot of people would pay new-car money for something like that.
Once you take maintenance of a machine with price-parity to a new car into consideration, it’s surely cost competitive to just hire a human to do all those things.
The price needs to fall drastically below new-car territory before it’s competitive with manual human labour.
If you're paying cash/under the table, then maybe. But even then a twice a week household cleaning hire is going to cost upwards of $1500/mo unless you're being particularly exploitative. If you're not under the table, you're paying payroll taxes, probably paying for a payroll service, etc. so you're talking $2000+. At best you can maybe stay under $20k a year.
When you really look at the economics of it, a robot that never gets sick/doesn't require payroll/etc. makes a lot more sense.
maintenance cost of machines is largely driven by human labor cost
> Not something I would pay for to use outside of work
You wouldn't but apparently your employer would.
I don't disagree with you on robotics, though. For an empire like softbank, not buying an "insurance against the rise of robotics" also seems like a mistake to me.
That being said, they may expect robotics to rise through self-driving cars (hence their investment in Wayve).
All of finance is trading money for time. $1 million today vs $100,000 for the next ten years. Softbank needs the money today vs later.
That feels so low of a price when compared to the insane valuation people attribute to Tesla robots
Yesterday I read about Cursor being sold for $60bn. Cursor being worth more than 50x Boston Dynamics seems insane.
I was trying to think about the why with Cursor, and the only thing that makes sense to me is they wanted experts in making harnesses so that they can pivot that expertise towards building harnesses intended for autonomous agents to use instead of humans. There's no world where a 60 billion IDE makes sense.
[delayed]
Because it is.
The average (and above-average?) investor really does not understand tech.
Boston Dynamics robots can do gymnastics...
Hey, Hyundai isn't "just a car company"
The insane valuation is for Elon meme vibes and the "vision" of "colonizing Mars", not any of the products.
Softbank is bleeding money and they need cash, AI isn't shaping up to what they thought it would be
Not sure how to square this post with recent headlines like "SoftBank posts $46 billion gain at Vision Fund driven mainly by massive OpenAI bet".
Paper money vs cash
Sometimes the first one to leave the casino is the last one to join an add hoc concert playing "smoke on the water" for the first time