November 30th of last year, as the RICO trial was underway, was the last day for most of Mycroft’s staff. That layoff was one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do. This week will be the last for one of our two remaining developers. This leaves us with one developer and one attorney on staff. Barring an immediate and substantial investment I expect the company will have no employees come March.
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It is very difficult for me to come to the conclusion that Mycroft has no future. However, to be clear, all current investors should now be prepared to write their investment down to zero.
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Michael Lewis
Hey all, just a heads up that there are 5 Mark II’s left… I’m assuming anyone here that wanted one would have bought one by now, but if you’ve been on the fence get in there quick: Mark II - Mycroft
It is very difficult for me to come to the conclusion that Mycroft has no future. However, to be clear, all current investors should now be prepared to write their investment down to zero.
Still, I haven’t completely given up hope. Mycroft’s mission remains as important as ever and in some respects the company is in a better position than when I joined:
We have a solid hardware platform and we’ve largely resolved the uncertainty around the patent infringement claims.
We have enlisted the assistance of Neon Gecko, a long-time partner of Mycroft, to moderate source-code contributions from the community. This will ensure that the existing code base that is most useful to its users will continue being a living, evolving resource without Mycroft expending resources on it directly.
Due to significant layoffs at major tech companies there hasn’t been a better time to hire machine learning experts in the field of voice for many years.
We’ve written the roadmap for revenue-generating online services and have a plan for developing those with a focus on opportunities that can be quickly tried and iterated.
And finally, no other voice assistant company has emerged that satisfies the privacy prerequisites for building a trustworthy personal digital assistant that will give us mere humans a chance of being relevant in our increasingly AI-dominated future, or protection from the surveillance-capitalism based tech giants and increasingly authoritarian-leaning governments, or, well … privacy.
For all these reasons, I am continuing to explore ways to continue Mycroft’s mission.
Must be tough as hell right now for all of you. I’m late to the party, didn’t even know a FOSS AI speaker had been created, and now I know I’ll make my own using RaspPi until you all are back up and running.
The worst part is that the world doesn’t even know it needs Mycroft right now, it’s still caught up in the maelstrom of attention economies and trying to ignore the fact that the world is burning and the human species has to deal with that, cos we caused it.