Altman vs. Musk: OpenAI treads on Tesla’s robot turf with investment in Norway’s 1X

Well, here’s a new thing for Musk and Altman to feud over: Late last week, the Norwegian robotics company 1X (until recently known as Halodi) announced the closure of a Series A2 funding round worth $23.5 million, with the lead investor being none other than the Microsoft-backed OpenAI Startup Fund.

1X makes a wheeled, humanoid robot called EVE—which was originally designed for research use, before being repurposed as a security bot—and is preparing to unveil a bipedal android called NEO. The new funding will support NEO’s development, as well as the “scale manufacturing” of EVE in Norway and North America, where security giant ADT already has plans to deploy it for night-patrol purposes.

The fund’s first foray into robotics will potentially take OpenAI into indirect competition with Musk’s Tesla, which has since mid-2021 been promising to launch a bipedal, humanoid robot called the Tesla Bot or Optimus—I say “potentially” because one always has to wonder with Musk’s many promises. Musk’s bot is supposedly designed to perform repetitive manual tasks in factories and other workplaces. Meanwhile, 1X’s technology is already out there. 

Here’s OpenAI Startup Fund chief Brad Lightcap: “1X is at the forefront of augmenting labor through the use of safe, advanced technologies in robotics. The OpenAI Startup Fund believes in the approach and impact that 1X can have on the future of work.” Arne Tonning, a partner at Alliance Venture, one of the Norwegian VC firms that joined the round, wrote that in addition to EVE’s security assignment, “1X is exploring opportunities and applications within retail, logistics and health care with leading customers and partners.”

Eric Jang, 1X’s vice president of A.I., recently compared his company’s work to OpenAI’s, tweeting: “Much like how OpenAI is building digital information manipulation systems (e.g. ChatGPT) by losslessly compressing Internet data, we are building a general-purpose A.I. for manipulating physical information (atoms).” 

Bringing the two together must be very exciting—unless you’re Elon Musk, in which case it must be annoying as heck. As 1X communications manager Hege Nikolaisen told me today, 1X and Tesla are starting in different markets but will likely clash down the line. “There’s no explicit rivalry right now,” she said, “but there will be as we approach our long-term goals.”

Want to send thoughts or suggestions to Data Sheet? Drop a line here.

David Meyer

Data Sheet’s daily news section was written and curated by Andrea Guzman. 

NEWSWORTHY

Future Forum closes down. Salesforce-owned Slack shuttered Future Forum, which carried out quarterly surveys of office workers globally on flexible and remote work, and repeatedly found it was popular with most workers. This comes after reports that Salesforce is mandating a return to the office for some employees and as CEO Marc Benioff pushes for workers to return to the office.

Twitter’s source code leaked. Twitter is trying to clean up after someone posted online parts of the social media platform’s source code, which provides the basis for Twitter’s platform to function. Twitter sent a copyright infringement notice to online collaboration platform GitHub, where the code was leaked. Fortune viewed the notice, in which Twitter asks to be provided with “copies of any related upload / download / access history (and any contact info, IP addresses, or other session info related to same), and any associated logs related to this repo or any forks thereof, before removing all the infringing content from Github.”

Layoffs at Microsoft. In January, Microsoft said it would lay off 10,000 people, with the cuts continuing through March. Now, those layoffs are hitting the security organization run by Charlie Bell, cofounder of Amazon Web Services who joined Microsoft in 2021, Insider reports. The move comes after Bell suggested earlier this year that his group would be spared from broader layoffs at the company. The cuts will affect hundreds of employees in the U.S.

ON OUR FEED

“When viewing a conversation on iPad, people noticed that there was sometimes a ‘Back’ button that would be visible, but which did nothing when tapped upon. That was meant as a reminder of the linear nature of time, and that no matter how much we may yearn for certain elements of the past, we must press on: ever-forward, undeterred, unyielding. Can you imagine if that were true? It was absolutely a bug. Our bad.”

—Slack, announcing an update in the app store

IN CASE YOU MISSED IT

As TikTok battles to remain in the U.S., it’s offering creators ‘free exposure’ in exchange for becoming the faces of company marketing, by Alexandra Sternlicht

Some workers are worried that ChatGPT will replace their jobs. They might be right, by Megan Leonhardt

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman calls Elon Musk a ‘jerk’ as report says the Tesla CEO was ‘furious’ about ChatGPT’s success, by Prarthana Prakash

A Wharton professor gave A.I. tools 30 minutes to work on a business project. The results were ‘superhuman’, by Steve Mollman

Tim Cook called remote work ‘the mother of all experiments.’ Now Apple is cracking down on employees who don’t come in 3 days a week, report says, by Jane Thier

BEFORE YOU GO

Iris will help file your taxes. Art collective MSCHF is releasing free software that walks users through completing federal taxes by going on dates with an anime character named Iris. The game, known as Tax Heaven 3000, features multiple endings and is suitable for singles without dependents. It also checks for eligibility for the Earned Income Tax Credit and American Opportunity Credit and takes a dig at TurboTax with a character representing the service who is an “unsavory SaaS bro.” “Corporate tax filing services like TurboTax are (by dint of extensive lobbying) predatory, parasitic bottlenecks that deliberately complicate the tax filing process in order to make it unnavigable by ordinary people,” the game’s website says. While it will be available for direct download on April 4, the game was removed from Steam last week without explanation, MSCHF’s cofounder told the Verge.