This week's news briefings: Using AI and robotics from DeepMind to discover 400,000 new reliable materials, Giant robots to clean and inspect passenger planes for massive $13.5 billion in cost savings, Robotics to influence customers while driving “The Amazon” Take a look. Effect' and Zume's robot pizza lost $445 million.
Robots and AI discover 400,000 new materials
“Many technologies around us, including batteries and solar cells, could be improved with better materials,” says Ekin Dogus Cubak, who leads the materials discovery team at Google DeepMind in London.
At Cubak, new materials generally mean “stable” materials that can resist changes in their chemical composition even when exposed to air, water and heat. For example, “Scientists at the University of Chicago have discovered a way to create a material that can be made like plastic but conducts electricity like metal.”
Many of the new and reliable materials being discovered are autonomous systems that combine robotics and artificial intelligence (AI) to create entirely new materials. The AI, known as A-Lab, uses machine learning to devise a recipe for the ingredients, as if it were a reasonable guess, and then the robot goes to work mixing the ingredients in the recipe. A-Lab works 24/7, mixing tens of thousands of compounds until we find new, stable substances.
Over the centuries, chemists have painstakingly performed the same task by hand, creating perhaps 10,000 new stable substances. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) in Berkeley, California used the A-lab system to create a total of 48,000 stable materials in just a few weeks!
DeepMind London has now taken this approach even further with an AI system called Graph Networks for Materials Exploration, or GNoME. After learning from data collected from the Materials Project and similar databases, GNoME adjusted the composition of known materials to uncover 2.2 million potential compounds.
“After calculating whether these materials are stable and predicting their crystal structures, the system generated a final tally of 381,000 new inorganic compounds to add to the Materials Project database.”
Giant robots: Reduce the cost of cleaning passenger planes
If all 28,000 commercial airliners worldwide were cleaned every month, the cleaning would save 2% of jet fuel consumption. In 2023, global jet fuel consumption will be 86 billion gallons and the price of jet fuel will be $6.75 per gallon, which means saving 2 billion gallons or a whopping $13.5 billion.
Norwegian startup Avinxt is building large-scale AI robots to clean and inspect passenger aircraft.
According to Avinxt, large airliners can take up to 24 hours to be cleaned, so most airlines only clean them every two to six months. But dirty aircraft account for about 2.5% of global carbon emissions.
Additionally, Avinxt's giant robots can clean, de-ice and inspect passenger aircraft quickly and sustainably. The company's AI robot, which combines cameras and AI software, can clean the entire body and engine of an airplane in about 75 minutes. Meanwhile, the scan takes just seven hours, compared to days or weeks when performed manually.
“There is no reason why airports, airlines, air forces and ground handlers should continue to perform manual, time-consuming and costly processes,” said Ove Trøen, CEO and Chairman of Avinxt.
The company plans to start building the giant robots at Oslo Airport in 2024 and then at London's Gatwick for the Norse Atlantic Airways hub.
Robotics, the engine driving the ‘Amazon effect’
How will robots affect consumers?
2024 will be the first year that generative AI will be with us, and its impact on e-commerce is expected to explode. A recent Deloitte report predicts that generative AI will advance from potential to actual productivity and reshape several industries by 2024.
With nearly 60% of global consumers preferring online to in-store shopping, e-commerce has the opportunity to raise the needle even further on the 60% online shopping if logistics can make the most of generative AI, according to GWI research . , and with it billions of dollars of new money are created.
No one in e-commerce seems better prepared for this than Amazon, with an online share of nearly 40% as of 2023. Build a robotic workforce of 750,000 over 10 years, adding generative AI to tens of thousands more. The sheer number of robots could bring a huge windfall.
Robots are expensive. Yahoo Business claims that Amazon has spent $35 billion building an army of robots.
Amazon's impact on retail, the so-called “Amazon effect,” is changing customers' perceptions of the benefits of buying online while also sounding a wake-up call to retailers about how robots can attract and retain customers.
In 2024, brands that emulate Amazon's strategy “may also ride the wave of e-commerce affinity that Amazon brings and succeed along with it.”
But can they pull it off?
Amazon's robotics advantage is built in a secret robotics factory and R&D space in Massachusetts called Bos 33. This week on December 3, 2023, Yahoo Finance's new program NEXT put together a 17-minute video on Bos 33, giving predictions for robots and their prospects for 2024. Generative AI, including expert interviews from third-party sources.
Zume's Pizza Robot Fail Burns $445 Million
In 2018, Zume Inc. was keen to automate the preparation and delivery of hot pizza.
Forbes wrote about then-CEO Joe Garden: “Founded in 2015, Zume Inc. has added a new robot, “Vincenzo.” In June, we have to take the pizza out of the 800-degree oven. Vincenzo joins Zume's other robots in recognizing when pizzas are ready, applying pizza sauce, and moving pizzas to shelves. The company has changed the minds of some investors, and according to Bloomberg, SoftBank is in talks to invest up to $750 million in Zume.”
Wow, SoftBank really got lucky. Today it's all gone. Zume Inc. folded along with its owners' dreams of delivering hot pizza to customers.
By comparison, Zume lost more money than the combined annual revenue of Columbus, Ohio-based Donatos Pizzeria's 170 locations ($443 million in 2022).
Zume's special secret, which someone once boasted was the “Amazon of pizza,” was to make pizzas with robots in a warehouse and then finish them in a kitchen on wheels (like a mobile restaurant delivery van) while driving to customers' homes. Yes. Or an apartment.
According to Bloomberg, cooking while delivering pizza presented technical challenges that could never be fully overcome.
Zume implemented a series of layoffs in 2020, cutting more than 500 employees, including all of its robotics and food delivery truck businesses.
Patented in 2013 to cook food while it's being delivered, Garden will be Zume's “grilling on the way” process. Garden believed that automating pizza making by using robots to make pies would reduce production costs. “Better margins mean more money for higher quality ingredients and “better jobs,” not the boring, repetitive tasks often found in foodservice.” Garden decided she could beat the corporate pizza chain at its own game. Unfortunately, Garden had no experience in food, restaurants, or robotics.
As 2023 approached, Zume became “insolvent.” Restructuring firm Sherwood Partners has been instructed to sell the company's assets.
Zune no longer exists and has raised nearly $500 million from investors such as Grishin Robotics, MicroVentures, FJ Labs, Kleiner Perkins, SGH Capital, AME Cloud Ventures, Maveron, and SignalFire.