Comment by skrebbel
11 hours ago
Why not? Huge companies like Schlumberger work on a similar model. I mean these are not AI businesses (yet) but commercially the model is the same: develop gear in house and rent it out together with the specialists who operate it.
In practice, what this means is that a relatively immature startup takes on immense technological risk by having to invest in the capex and deploy a solution, all while being at the mercy of their customers to give them enough time and access to get the solution to any reasonable production standard. Usually robotics companies never get to that mark.
I believe theres on the order of 100s of millions in losses across a number of robotics companies that have attempted this in the last 10 years.
Why not? Extreme superiority of the Chinese supply chain network startup energy price market
Most AI is not subscription but pay-per-use (I guess for an industrial robot that would mean pay per action the robot does), and that is a big part of why everybody piles into AI.