Magic Leap, the much-hyped augmented reality startup that has raised about $2.6 billion in funding, is reportedly in trouble after sales of its first AR headset fell way short of the company’s target.
According to The Information, only about 6,000 units of the $2,295 Magic Leap One Creator Edition were sold in the first six months after its April 1 launch. The modest sales figures for the mixed-reality headset indicate it will badly miss the startup’s target of 100,000 headsets sold in the first year.
Making matters even worse for Magic Leap is that the startup’s founder and CEO, Rony Abovitz, initially set a goal of at least 1 million units sold within the headset’s first year, according to The Information, citing four people who heard the target from Abovitz himself. Magic Leap executives eventually convinced Abovitz to go lower with a sales target of 100,000 units, according to three sources familiar with the matter.
The Information reported that with the poor sales, Magic Leap started giving its employees free units of the AR headset. The lackluster performance of its flagship product is also said to have resulted in dozens of layoffs across several departments, alongside other cost-saving initiatives such as limiting work-related travel and slowing down hiring of new employees.
A Magic Leap spokesperson, however, disputed The Information’s report, claiming that it was “littered with inaccuracies and misleading statements, and erroneously portrays Magic Leap’s operations, internal plans and overall strategy.”
The Information received the sales figure of 6,000 units from a single source, and it remains unverified as the startup has not revealed such data to the public, nor its employees. However, the startup’s spokesperson failed to point out which parts of the report were inaccurate, so Magic Leap’s current state remains unclear.
Magic Leap is already said to be working on the Magic Leap 2, which will feature several upgrades such as 5G compatibility, improved graphics, a wider field of view, and a smaller and lighter headset. However, it is reportedly years away from being rolled out, in which case it will have to compete in a more crowded space as Apple is expected to launch an AR headset in 2022 and AR glasses in 2023.
AI companies spend enormous amounts of time convincing us their technology is safe and secure. But what happens when those same companies become targets of increasingly sophisticated AI-powered attacks? Anthropic, the company behind Claude, is now facing that question. According to a Washington Post report, cybersecurity startup Cathedral discovered vulnerabilities that let its researchers access sensitive information in Anthropic's internal systems.
The researchers used AI agents to identify potential entry points in less than 12 hours. Interestingly, they didn't need to crack Claude itself. Instead, they exploited weaknesses in third-party business applications that Anthropic uses for everyday operations. Anthropic's security testing program disclosed the findings, which allows outside researchers to identify and report vulnerabilities.
Military working dogs charge into places the rest of us would flee. So, I understand why anyone would want to breed tougher, healthier dogs for the job.
Warhound, a new startup from Colossal Biosciences co-founder Ben Lamm and Anduril co-founder Palmer Luckey, has stepped out of stealth with $200 million to clone and gene-edit working dogs for American troops, police departments, and emergency services (via TechCrunch).
AI can describe a picture, identify objects, and answer questions about what a camera sees. But when a blind user needs a quick answer, getting an entire spoken essay about the scene isn't exactly helpful. Researchers at the University of Maryland (UMD) have found that AI-powered visual assistance can leave blind users doing too much work to get the information they actually need.
The study, titled Say It My Way: Exploring Control in Conversational Visual Question Answering with Blind Users, examined how people interact with Be My AI, an AI-powered feature of the Be My Eyes app. The researchers found that users often received lengthy descriptions that didn't adequately address their immediate goals, forcing them to ask follow-up questions or find ways to steer the AI towards a more useful answer.