Hyundai to Launch New A.I. Center in the U.S.

Hyundai's New AI Research Center

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Based around Boston Dynamics, $424 million center?

Gif credit: Boston Dynamics

SATURDAY AUGUST 13TH, 2022 3:15 PM MONTREAL, CANADA

Hey Guys,

I’ve always said the push of automotive companies to be leaders in the next era of robotics is real. Now there’s suddenly more proof. On June 21st, 2021 Hyundai completed the deal for majority ownership in Boston Dynamics, a robotics company that has been passed around like candy.

Its YouTube has 3 million followers. (Video )

The South Korean automotive giant now owns a controlling interest in Boston Dynamics, previously belonging to SoftBank. Before that of course Boston Dynamics was owned by Google. Considering all the R&D Google does on robotics in Google Brain, the sale in retrospect is somewhat puzzling.

Companies like Tesla, Xpeng and Hyundai as I have reported, have serious interests in the future of robotics and of course, the robo-taxi industry which is going to have such an absurdly high TAM.

So why does all this matter?

Hyundai Motor said on Friday it will spend $424 million to build an artificial intelligence (AI) research centre in the US to bolster its edge in robotics technology, an area it cites as a key future growth driver.

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So let’s get into it:

Hyundai Motor, Kia and Hyundai Mobis -- Hyundai's three key auto affiliates -- will invest $211.9 million, $127.1 million and $84.7 million, respectively, for the AI center that will be located in Boston, Hyundai's regulatory filing showed.

Boston is such a great hub with MIT and other Universities close by. The new Kendall Square institute plans to focus on robotics, artificial intelligence and intelligent machines research. Kendall Square is a neighborhood in Cambridge, Massachusetts, US, with the square itself at the intersection of Main Street and Broadway.

Boston Dynamics has a valuation around $1 Billion in this point in 2022. In December, 2021 it was announced that Softbank was selling Boston Dynamics for $1.1 Billion to HMG. Hyundai Motor Group acquired an 80% controlling interest in Boston Dynamics in 2021.

With significant labor shortages in some sectors, demand for robot automation solutions in industries like hospitality, hotel, restaurants and more mainstream sectors is increasing during the pandemic period that begin in late 2019.

As TechCrunch insinuates, the 30-year-old bleeding-edge robotics firm had been an uncomfortable fit for its last two owners, Google and SoftBank, but the Korean automotive giant insisted things would be different. Robotics is a really hard field, as Tesla is going to find out with Elon Musk promising a general purpose consumer robot in the coming years.

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New AI Institute

The Institute, led by founder of Boston Dynamics Marc Raibert , to invest resources across the technical areas of cognitive AI, athletic AI and organic hardware design, with each discipline contributing to progress in advanced machine capabilities. While it’s called an AI Research center, you can bet robotics is going to be a huge part of what will go on here.

It’s a bit slow to market when it comes to robots at scale. Boston Dynamics has brought its quadrupedal robot Spot to market and this year announced the (still upcoming) launch of Stretch (TechCrunch), an updated version of its warehouse robot, Handle.

For biotech and robotics companies, I think Boston is paradise. The Institute to recruit talent in diverse areas, including AI and robotics research, and software and hardware engineering, as well as to partner with universities and corporate research labs.

What can Boston Dynamics become under Hyundai? Hyundai Motor Group (the Group) announced the launch of Boston Dynamics AI Institute on August 12th, 2022, (the Institute), with the goal of making fundamental advances in artificial intelligence (AI), robotics and intelligent machines. The Group and Boston Dynamics will make an initial investment of more than $400 million in the new Institute. That’s a pretty good budget at founding.

This will also open up Japan and U.S. research to new possibilities. The U.S. is only now feeling the demographic pinch with U.S. fertility rate dropping to 1.6 now in 2022, which could threaten its GDP in the coming years pretty quickly. One of the ways to boost productivity, is actually more robots. This ratio of robots to workers will only increase through the 2020s and especially into the 2030s and 2040s.

The institute will "invest resources across the technical areas of cognitive AI, athletic AI and organic hardware design, with each discipline contributing to progress in advanced machine capabilities," Hyundai said in a release on the website.

An Impressively Broad Mission Statement

Hyundai’s ambition here is really impressive actually:

• As a research-first organization, the Institute will work on solving the most important and difficult challenges facing the creation of advanced robots.
• Elite talent across AI, robotics, computing, machine learning and engineering will develop technology for robots and use it to advance their capabilities and usefulness.
• The Institute's culture is designed to combine the best features of university research labs with those of corporate development labs while working in four core technical areas:

The Robotics Revolution of the 2030s

1. cognitive AI
2. Athletic AI
3. Organic hardware design
4. Ethics and policy.

You will also notice Microsoft Research, Google Brain, Amazon and others are putting more R&D into drones, robotics and automation solutions in general. If Tesla is serious about being a leader it will need to do to the same.

I like this PR a lot as I track A.I., robotics and even quantum computing now, I think it’s all coming together rather well. How robots learn is also improving and the 2020s are a major decade for that.

Research has long been a foundational part of what Boston Dynamics does, a tradition that has continued after it began working toward commercializing its technology. It’s also a big piece of what Raibert, a former professor at MIT and CMU, has focused on during his three decades with the company. Robotics on any consumer or level of scale is very formative, but demand is increasing as demographics continues to shift in Western and industrialized nations.

“Our mission is to create future generations of advanced robots and intelligent machines that are smarter, more agile, perceptive and safer than anything that exists today,” Raibert said in a release tied to the news. “The unique structure of the Institute — top talent focused on fundamental solutions with sustained funding and excellent technical support — will help us create robots that are easier to use, more productive, able to perform a wider variety of tasks, and that are safer working with people.”

It’s the classic chick or the egg Robotics race: Can Automotive companies become technologies companies before BigTech become robotics and smart car native companies? Everyone from Apple to Baidu are now working on this. Baidu and Google’s Waymo are among the leaders in the race to the Robo-taxis. What Tesla, Hyundai or even Toyota does in the future of robotics actually matters to automation and our technological future.

Think about the scale of the R&D budgets of some of these Japanese companies for a moment. Toyota reported $27.2 trillion yen in global revenue in 2021, or about $245 billion. Toyota is trying to rebrand itself as a mobility company, but why not a robotics company too? Toyota came to the United States in the late 1950s, setting up its US headquarters in California. A decade later, the Japanese automaker became the third-largest import brand in the United States. Toyota has been slow to the EV market, does it want to be slow to the robo-taxis and robotics market as well?

Hyundai for its part is a Korean maker, Korea is known for moving faster in the 2020s than Japan does. Hyundai is now push over either, since Hyundai reported sales revenue of 117.6 trillion South Korean won (or about 99 billion U.S. dollars) in 2021. They are a relatively unknown OTC stock in the U.S. $HYMTF

For a futurist like me, this is incredible news. Please visit

https://www.bdaiinstitute.com/

for more information and to submit interest in working with the Institute.

From Apple’s project Titan to whatever Tesla becomes the smart car to the future could also accelerate the adoption of robotics and robots in society and smart cities as a whole. South Korea is among the most innovative countries per capita, if not the highest roughly tied with Israel.

As of July 21st, 2022 Earnings for Hyundai were bullish. Net profit rose to 2.8 trillion won ($2.13 billion) for the April-June period from 1.8 trillion a year earlier, beating an average analyst forecast of 2.2 trillion from Refinitiv SmartEstimate. They can afford to go more into A.I. and robotics.

Hyundai already have service robots like this one:?

Thanks for reading!

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