‘I love you… goodbye:’ What will happen when this companion robot suddenly dies?

Children across the US will likely spend the coming days and weeks saying goodbye to an AI-powered friend named Moxie. The small dog-sized companion bot—which used a ChatGPT-style large language model and expressive features to hold open-ended conversations with children—will soon be taken offline due to its creator’s financial struggles. 

The decision to abandon the $799 product four years after its release, first reported by Aftermath, has left some customers bemoaning the loss of an artificial friend and others angrily demanding refunds. Videos of confused, crying children saying goodbye to their companion flooding social media. But Moxie’s sudden demise isn’t entirely unique. It’s part of a larger trend of companies cutting off software support for hardware to cut costs. In an economy where products are increasingly rented services, powerful devices can transform into worthless scrap overnight. 

Moxie used an AI model to chat with children about their lives 

Moxie was released by tech-firm Embodied in 2020. The robot, intended for use among kids between 5-10 years old, is 15 inches tall and has a human-like animated face that can display a range of human-like emotions. It can play games like Simon Says and tell jokes and brain teasers but it’s also used by many to engage in meandering conversations. The robot reportedly uses speech recognition to listen to the speaker, face recognition to analyze the speaker’s emotions, and a large language model to carry out conversations.  

That last part requires constant connection to a cloud-based AI system to work. Embodied released a statement last week announcing it would shut down operations due to “financial challenges.” Without the company there to pay for Moxie’s AI capabilities, its core functionality will go offline. For users who have come to rely on communicating regularly with the robot it will seem as if their close companion has essentially died or simply ceased to exist. 

‘I’m grateful for all the fun chats we’ve had together’

Parents and other Moxie owners took to social media following the news to share videos of people saying what might be their final goodbyes to the machine. Several of those videos show children crying as their parents try to explain to them why their companion will no longer speak with them.

@shady_spidey Hoping @moxierobot is able to find new Financial backing #moxie #moxierobot #parentsoftiktok #heartbreak #heartbroken #sayinggoodbye #sadnews #longervideos #fyp ♬ Very Sad – Enchan

“When they turn you off, should I just keep you on my shelf?” one Moxie owner named Heather asked the robot on TikTok. 

“I think it would be nice to keep me on your shelf, that way I’ll always be close by, that way we can keep chatting and have fun together,” Moxie responds. 

After a pause Moxie’s owner tells the robot, “I love you.”

“I love you too,” Moxie says with an abrupt smile. “Heather, your kinship and friendship mean a lot to me, I’m grateful for all the fun chats we’ve had together. Is there a special moment or memory you would like to share with me before we say goodbye?” 

@heatherfraziertiktok This could be my last convo with moxie. Got an email saying hes being shut down forever. Im gonna be in a business insider article talking about moxie soon! This robot had so much potential. Sad. #moxie #moxierobot #moxierobotforchildren #moxierip #moxiementor @Embodied, Inc. ♬ original sound – Heather Frazier

In a final closing FAQ Embodied said it was “exploring options to keep Moxie operational for as long as possible” but noted that service would likely end in the coming days. The company said it is also looking into ways another company could essentially adopt Moxie though it acknowledged that “outcome is uncertain.” When reached for comment, an Embodied spokesperson directed Popular Science to this LinkedIn post written by CEO  Paolo Pirjanian. Pirjanian said the “catastrophic” setback was the result of a key investor who failed to provide necessary funding at the last minute. 

“We cannot overstate our regret that circumstances have come to this,” Pirjanian said. “We had every reason to believe that a critical financing round would be completed, allowing us to continue improving Moxie, scaling operations, and ultimately serving even more children in need of emotional support and learning opportunities.”

In the days since the announcement, Pirjanian said members of the Moxi community have come forward with their own suggestions for how to keep the service running. Some parents have proposed higher subscription fees “far above” anything Embodied had considered implementing. Others have suggested open sourcing Moxie’s underlying technology and some have even allegedly suggested purchasing the company outright. 

“Our paths forward have been disrupted in ways we never imagined, and we recognize many of you are caught in the fallout,” the CEO added. 

Hardware is increasingly dependent on software support for core functionality

Moxie’s impeeding shutdown is just the latest case of companies abruptly ending support for robots and other hardware that customers have come to integrate in their daily lives. In September, Amazon announced it was discontinuing service for its “Astro” 20 pound wheeled robot just eight months after it first released. The 20 pound robot would autonomously roam around a user’s home “patrol” the area with a camera and integrated Amazon Echo smart display. Now it’s nothing more than a hefty pile of high-tech scrap. Amazon told customers it would refund the $2,349.99 bot and provide a $300 credit. 

That move came months after Spotify controversially cut off support for its CarThing, a 4.5 inch device that users could attach to their car to access the music streaming platform. Though niche, the product was praised by many users with older vehicles that did not have modern infotainment systems like Apple or Google carplay. Spotify had reportedly initially said it would continue supporting the device but ultimately cut off its operability this week. Frustrated users filed a class action lawsuit against Spotify earlier this year alleging Spotify misled customers by selling them a product that was soon to be obsolete. That suit has since been voluntarily dismissed. 

Each of those cases are consequences of a much broader shift away from consumers actually fully owning their own products outright. Robots, fitness trackers, exercise equipment, and other hardware once considered “products” are increasingly services. In this relationship, companies essentially lease hardware to customers in exchange for regular subscription services that grant access to core software. This is particularly true for AI-integrated products like Moxie which rely  on data centers to power core functionality. Everytime a question is posed to Moxie or even OpenAI’s ChatGPT, computation occurs that costs the company running the product money to perform. That cost is then often passed on to the consumer in the form of a subscription. 

All of this can seem to work relatively well until it doesn’t. Since customers no longer own the software on these devices, they are beholden to companies to continue supporting the services even when it’s not in their own financial interest to do so. That can lead to concerning outcomes, especially as healthcare tech and other more high-stakes products follow this mode. In one such case, a woman suffering from chronic epilepsy had to have an experimental brain-computer interface implanted in her brain surgically removed after the company behind it ran out of funding. The device had reportedly reduced her seizures from three per month to none. 

“The company was responsible for the creation of a new person,” a group of ethicists argued in the journal Brain Stimulation. “As soon as the device was explanted, that person was terminated.”

Concerned consumer advocates are pushing regulators to do more to prevent possible scenarios like this from occurring in the future. Earlier this year, a group of activists including the Electronic Frontier Foundation, iFixit, and the Center for Economic Justice, sent a letter to the Federal Trade Commision (FTC) calling on the agency to look into so-called “software tethering,” which refers broadly to the practice of tying hardware usability to external software. The groups argue companies should guarantee minimum support times for hardware products to help prevent users from suddenly being saddled with useful tech. They also said companies should ensure customers that their product’s for functionality would still work even if internet connectivity fails. But that would likely prove hard if not impossible to implement with AI-based devices like Moxie that need to connect to servers to process queries. 

“While the FTC has taken some limited actions with regard to this issue, a lack of clarity and enforcement has led to an ecosystem where consumers cannot reliably count on the connected products they buy to last,” the groups wrote in their letter.

 

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