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I never got into the mindstorms stuff, and robotics isn’t really my thing. But I had followed it for a long time, and it’s genuinely strange to me that Lego moved to the “Spike Prime” thing and then cancelled it, too.
I’ve also read that there’s a big push for “AI literacy” in schools, and Lego may be trying to appeal to this curriculum demand with the new kit. I guess it just goes to show that everything has to have AI in it nowadays.
They’re making money hand over fist in botanical sets and pricey display models, maybe they think the robotics game doesn’t have high enough growth potential for their current business model.
But I’m still stewing over the death of Bionicle, and I think about Lego Universe every now again, so the LEGO Group’s ability to cancel iconic things without remorse doesn’t surprise me.
Yeah. It's a massive amount of development expenses to throw out, because pretty much everything programmable with a 3+ ports is going or gone. And there's no obvious silicon supply issues, even at Lego's scale, to explain some secular reason. 6 years is a lot of time by computer standards, but it's lightning fast by consumer electronics: the EV3 got 9 years, and the economics arguments were a lot stronger by the time it got ol'yeller'd.
My best guess is that Lego has been aimed at the educational sector increasingly heavily over the last four or five years -- the Boston move explicitly drew lines about proximity to educators -- and something about the Spike didn't fit that. The curriculum had too many students or educators dropping out, the classroom infrastructure just wasn't working, or some agreement meant they weren't getting the money from teacher training that's been a real cash cow for Vex and company.
Or they just like bad decisions? Killing Bionicle was a bizarre one.
Which is funny, because the CS/AI kit's big ML feature is just computer vision, a lot of it stuff that's been around for a decade in OpenCV. But that's why they've got the massive marketing team and I don't.
Everything is AI now. Searching a database? AI. Computer vision? Obviously AI. If-then statement? That sounds like a computer following a chain of logic, it’s AI. Everything and nothing is AI.
I guess when investment pushes into a particular area, the financial incentives push for dressing anything up as the area in question. Generative AI is genuinely a huge deal, but it’s expensive to actually invest in it, and substandard substitutes are eager to parade as the real deal.
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