Google's Parent Alphabet Ends Domestic Robot Helper Project

Google’s parent company Alphabet is shutting down its domestic robot helper project Everyday Robots in the latest of a string of cutbacks at the firm.

As Wired reports, Everyday Robots will cease to exist as a “separate project” within Alphabet. “Some of the technology and part of the team will be consolidated into existing robotics efforts within Google Research," says Denise Gamboa, director of marketing and communications.

PCMag reached out to Alphabet to ask how many people will be affected by layoffs from the project shutdown, and we'll update this story with any response. The news comes after Alphabet announced last month that it would let go of around 12,000 employees, which amounts to 6% of its total workforce. Meanwhile, Intrinsic, an Alphabet subsidiary working on industrial robots, has faced a 20% cut to its staff.

The Everyday Robots project originated after Google bought robotics engineering company Boston Dynamics back in 2013, and its development saw a fleet of robots repeating tasks like sorting trash. Eventually, as Wired notes in its report, the one-armed robots would help to clean Google’s dining halls and tidy up conference rooms. 

The robots had been showing promising signs in the domestic settings they were trained in until very recently, however. Last year, Google AI researchers integrated a ChatGPT-like language model into the robots' system, which meant they responded to someone saying they were hungry by getting a bag of chips for them.

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And in a November 2021 blog post on Google’s research and development offshoot for radical technologies, X, Chief Robot Officer Hans Peter Brøndmo wrote that the company had “seen signs that creating a general-purpose learning robot is possible.”

That said, expenses piled up as losses mounted. Wired reports that Everyday Robots and Google’s driverless electric vehicle venture Waymo lost the company about $6.1 billion in 2022.

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I am interested in how technology and human rights intersect, and how technology shapes cultural trends. I have a master's degree in Investigative Journalism from City University London.

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