Laprade and Phillips: Instant Pot was a triumph cooked up in Ottawa
During the summer, we'll carry occasional excerpts from Ottawa Made, a recently published compendium of stories about curious inventions, people and places in the national capital. Today: the origins of the Instant Pot.
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Many parents find it challenging to prepare a wholesome, hot meal for their families each evening. Robert Wang and his wife, both entrenched in tech careers in Ottawa, were no exception. Balancing work with the needs of their young children, aged four and eight, was a daily struggle.
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One day Wang set out to resolve this common parental dilemma. The result was the Instant Pot.
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This innovative appliance could perform a multitude of cooking functions, from pressure cooking and slow cooking to steaming and even making yogurt. Wang's invention was an immediate hit, its popularity buoyed by numerous online communities dedicated to the appliance. Enthusiastic cooks shared recipes, shortcuts, and tips, and a variety of cookbooks soon followed.
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Instant Pot's marketing emphasized not only the time saved in meal preparation and clean-up, but also the energy efficiency compared to traditional cooking methods. Health-conscious consumers were particularly targeted, with promotions highlighting the retention of more nutrients due to shorter cooking times
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'My hero is Steve Jobs… He excelled in design and truly understood his customers' needs,' Wang said in a 2018 interview with CNBC.
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Emigrating from Harbin, China, in the mid-'90s, Wang drew inspiration from the electric pressure cookers popular in his homeland, which featured microprocessors and multiple sensors. He soon identified a flaw in the design of the Crock Pot, which he saw as his main competition. With the Crock Pot, you needed to plan dinner amidst the hectic morning routines of a young family.
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After 18 months and an investment of $300,000 from his personal savings, Wang launched the first Instant Pot on Amazon in 2010. Initially partnered with two unnamed associates, Wang continued solo for six months after they abandoned the project before welcoming two new partners, former Blackberry employees Yi Qin and Dongjun Wang.
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A significant challenge was the limited kitchen space available to homeowners, prompting the team to create a device that offered numerous functions. Some models boasted as many as 10 different uses including cake-making.
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The first Instant Pot sold for $140 (U.S.) and the product's success reached a high point in 2015, when 215,000 units were sold on Amazon Prime Day, more than any other product.
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Winnipeg Free Press
an hour ago
- Winnipeg Free Press
Signs of thaw as the Indian and Chinese foreign ministers meet in New Delhi
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Winnipeg Free Press
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As ever, we are living on borrowed time. There's the familiar old threat of global nuclear war and the growing risk of global climate catastrophe, plus not-quite-world-ending potential disasters like global pandemics and untoward astronomical events (asteroid strikes, solar flares, etc.) Lots to worry about already, if you're that way inclined. So it's understandable that the new kid on the block, artificial intelligence, has been having some trouble making its presence felt. Yet the so-called godfather of artificial intelligence, scientist Geoffrey Hinton, who last year was awarded the Nobel Prize for his work on AI, sees a 10 per cent to 20 per cent chance that AI will wipe out humanity in the next three decades. We will come back to that, but let's park it for the moment because the near-term risk of an AI crash is more urgent and easier to quantify. This is a financial crash of the sort that usually accompanies an exciting new technology, not an existential crisis, but it is definitely on its way. When railways were the hot new technology in the United States in the 1850s, for example, there were five different companies building railways between New York and Chicago. They all got built in the end, but most were no longer in the hands of the original investors and a lot of people lost their shirts. We are probably in the final phase of the AI investment frenzy right now. We're a generation on from the dot-com bubble of the early 2000s, so most people have forgotten about that one and are ready to throw their money at the next. There are reportedly now more than 200 AI 'unicorns' — start-ups valued at US$1 billion or more — so the end is nigh. The bitter fact that drives even the industry leaders into this folly is the knowledge that after the great shake-out not all of them will still be standing. For the moment, therefore, it makes sense for them to invest madly in the servers, data centres, semiconductor chips and brainpower that will define the last companies standing. The key measure of investment is 'capex' — capital expenditure — and it's going up like a rocket even from month to month. Microsoft is forecasting about US$100 billion in capex for AI in the next fiscal year, Amazon will spend the same, Alphabet (Google) plans US$85 billion and Meta predicts between US$66 and US$72 billion. Like $100 million sign-on fees for senior AI researchers who are being poached from one big tech firm by another, these are symptoms of a bubble about to burst and lots of people will lose their shirts, but it's just part of the cycle. AI will still be there afterwards and many uses will be found for it. Unfortunately, most of them will destroy jobs. The tech giants themselves are eliminating jobs even as they grow their investments. Last year 549 US tech companies shed 150,000 workers and this year they are disappearing even faster. If that phenomenon spreads across the whole economy — and why wouldn't it? — we can get to the apocalypse without any need for help from Skynet and the Terminator. People talk loosely about artificial general intelligence (AGI) as the Holy Grail, because it would be as nimble and versatile as human intelligence, just smarter — but as tech analyst Benedict Evans says, 'We don't really have a theoretical model of why (current AI models) work so well, and what would have to happen for them to get to AGI. 'It's like saying we're building the Apollo program but we don't actually know how gravity works or how far away the Moon is or how a rocket works, but if we keep on making the rocket bigger maybe we'll get there.' So the whole scenario of a super-intelligent computer becoming self-aware and taking over the planet remains far-fetched. Nevertheless, old-fashioned 2022-style 'generative' AI will continue to improve, even if large language models are really just machines that produce human-like text by estimating the likelihood that a particular word will appear next, given the text that has come before. Aaron Rosenberg, former head of strategy at Google's AI unit Deep Mind, reckons that no miraculous leaps of innovation are needed. 'If you define AGI more narrowly as at least 80th-percentile human-level performance (better than four out of five people) in 80 per cent of economically relevant digital tasks, then I think that's within reach in the next five years.' That would enable us to eliminate at least half of the indoor jobs by 2030, but if the change comes that fast it will empower extremists of all sorts and create pre-revolutionary situations almost everywhere. That's a bit more complicated than the Skynet scenario for global nuclear war, but it's also a lot more plausible. Slow down. Gwynne Dyer's new book is Intervention Earth: Life-Saving Ideas from the World's Climate Engineers.
