The saddest news is that they are down to like 4 mechanical engineers. There were at least 30 when I was working there.
I was told all the engineering actually gets done by the contractors in China. The engineers just send a wish list and the China team hacks it together.
iRobot not going to make it. 4 engineers can’t innovate just like that.
I used to work at iRobot. Chinese manufacturers cloned Roomba so well that parts from their robot like wheels assemblies could be dropped in and the Roomba would work.
The issue is that iRobot decided not to litigate patent infringement in China because it’s an uphill battle.
I agree that iRobot was very slow to innovate. They were on the brink of releasing a lawn mower robot but covid hit and the C suites made the decision to kill that product and fire that team to reduce risk…
Scammers won’t need to social engineer grandma into giving out her SSN, they can just ask her AI many times and eventually, it will spit out absolutely everything.
Interesting Defcon presentation about how AI is a security nightmare:
DEF CON 33 - Exploiting Shadow Data from AI Models and Embeddings - Patrick Walsh
https://youtu.be/O7BI4jfEFwA