For years, Aigen has been building and tweaking solar-powered robots designed to pull weeds on farms. But the Redmond, Wash., startup is also raising a crop of its own: a growing, AI-generated collection of digital weeds and plants that teaches those robots what to pull.

That synthetic data, which Aigen calls Alchemy, is changing what the company can sell. Training its robots on a new crop used to require three to four years of collecting and labeling real-world images, co-founder and CTO Richard Wurden said. Now it takes about a week, helping Aigen attract growers of asparagus, hops, flowers, lettuce and more.

Wurden spoke with GeekWire by phone from FIRA USA, a three-day agricultural robotics expo at Yakima’s State Fair Park that wrapped up Thursday. He said Aigen made several sales at the show, including to growers it previously couldn’t serve.

“Now we’re saying yes to a bunch of crops, where previously we were locked into just doing a few,” he said.

Aigen is nearly sold out of robots for the 2027 season following the show, according to the company.

Aigen’s solar design is also getting more attention as fuel costs climb. U.S. diesel prices are up roughly 70% from a year ago, according to EIA data, and averaged nearly $6.30 a gallon this month, according to AAA. Many rival weed-control machines are pulled by diesel tractors, Wurden said, while Aigen’s robots run entirely on solar panels with a battery backup.

“It just so happens running a solar-powered robot without pesticides is the best possible timing right now,” he said.

Wurden and CEO Kenny Lee founded Aigen in 2020 after meeting in a climate-focused Slack group and discovering they lived about five minutes apart. Wurden, a mechanical engineer, previously worked on battery systems at Tesla and at Seattle electric boat maker Pure Watercraft. Lee is a cybersecurity veteran who co-founded Weblife.io, which Proofpoint acquired in 2017.

The mission is personal for both founders. Lee had non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma and Wurden has type 1 diabetes — diseases Wurden said have been linked to herbicide use.

The startup raised a $4 million seed round in 2022 and a $12 million round in 2023 led by ReGen Ventures, with participation from NEA and others. Wurden said the company has raised about $26 million in total. The startup now has about 15 employees.

Aigen’s Element robots are about 6 feet wide and topped with a roughly 400-watt solar panel. Cameras and AI distinguish weeds from crops, and mechanical arms pull the weeds out at the root. The robots cost $50,000 to $70,000 each depending on configuration, and Aigen typically sells them in packs of five, Wurden said.

Aigen has built more than 100 robots, all assembled in Redmond, and logged more than 15,000 hours in fields in California, Minnesota and North Dakota. Customers include organic soybean growers in North Dakota and tomato growers in California, Wurden said, and the company is expanding a recent pilot with an unnamed Fortune 500 company.

Alchemy has also become a product in its own right.

Large agribusinesses are using Aigen’s synthetic data, Wurden said. Because the plants are generated in simulation, each one comes perfectly labeled. That matters when weeds and crops overlap in ways that are hard to sort out from real photos, especially under shifting daylight. Aigen’s robots don’t use artificial lights. Wurden said the startup built the system out of necessity, because it couldn’t afford to pay people to label images by hand.

“Our AI now labels the data for us,” he said.

The company is choosy about who gets that data. Wurden said the company would work with precision-spraying companies that use less herbicide, but not with operations that broadcast-spray fields.

Next up: robots on Washington farms early next year, the company says. It’s also developing an orchard version with arms that reach out to weed between trees. And a next-generation robot is in the works.

Aigen is one of several Washington startups using AI to fight weeds. Issaquah-based TerraClear maps individual weeds so farmers’ existing sprayers hit only those spots. Seattle-based Carbon Robotics zaps weeds with lasers and trained its AI on 150 million labeled images of real plants. Aigen is betting synthetic data can teach its robots new crops faster.

Wurden said it’s refreshing to see technologists working on these problems rather than focusing on ad clicks or another gadget or service that may not be good for society.

“I support every company working on ag technology and things that help farmers, because farmers have felt like they’re left behind for a long time,” he said. “It’s a good way to cross the aisle in politics, too. Everybody needs food.”

We’ve all encountered the phrase AI slop, but what’s an AI slap? A meat proxy? Chatfishing? Or agentsomnia? Following up on my glossary of AI, which demystified AI jargon, Prof. Dan Weld is joining me to shine a light on the nontechnical lingo of the AI era. We also sneak in a few phrases that should exist to capture the AI zeitgeist, circa 2026.

We introduce more than 35 phrases, so we’ve divided them into sections to keep the broligarchy from crowding enshittification.

AI slop

“Digital content of low quality that is produced usually in quantity by means of artificial intelligence,” which is how Merriam-Webster defined slop, its 2025 word of the year. Shrimp Jesus is the specimen, Christ fused with crustaceans, posted to Facebook by the thousands.

AI cream is our name for the rare opposite, superb writing authored with the help of AI. We hope that over time the cream will rise to the top and the slop will sink.

Until that happens, we have the meat proxy, “a person who forwards AI-generated text, code, or other output without reading, understanding, or validating it.” We call the action of sending AI-generated text blindly an AI slap. It stings.

Your AI Slop Bores Me is a website where you type a prompt and a randomly chosen human answers it while pretending to be a chatbot. Fifty million views in a week, which tells you how badly people wanted to say something back.

AI suspicion is our name for the nagging feeling that what you’re reading was AI generated. You could also call it Turing tingle or AI-dar.

AI shaming is the accusation that follows, attacking someone’s work by insinuating a machine wrote it. The paper that named it is subtitled “Birth of a Classist Slur in Knowledge Work,” and it argues that the accusations fall hardest on racial minorities and on writers whose first language isn’t English.

See also: tasteslop, workslop, slopaganda.

Deepfake

A video or recording altered by machine learning so that a real person appears to say or do something they never said or did. Named in late 2017 for the Reddit user who called himself deepfakes. The word we all use for AI deception descends from one anonymous pornographer’s handle.

The liar’s dividend is the payoff a real wrongdoer collects once any authentic recording can be waved off as a fake. The damage isn’t the fake video. It’s that real video stops counting.

Counterfeit people was Daniel Dennett’s last argument, that machines able to pass as human are “the most dangerous artifacts in human history, capable of destroying not just economies but human freedom itself.” He wanted them outlawed and watermarked like banknotes.

Tilly Norwood is one of them, an AI actress unveiled at the Zurich Film Festival in September 2025. Her makers said talent agents wanted to sign her. Emily Blunt, shown a picture, said “Good Lord, we’re screwed” and told the agencies to stop.

Most of the damage doesn’t need AI at all. A cheapfake is manipulation made with cheap software or none at all. Chatfishing is using AI to write your messages on a dating app, where the con used to be a fake photo and is now a rented personality.

The Nerd Reich

A name for the Silicon Valley billionaires and venture capitalists who think democracy is finished and want corporate rule in its place. Gil Durán’s book, subtitled Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy, traces the idea to a 1997 book, The Sovereign Individual, and to Peter Thiel’s circle, which Durán says believes “technology means democracy is an obsolete software system.”

Durán didn’t coin the phrase. Someone in the crypto world told him they’d been using it for years.

Durán’s target is the broligarchy, “a small group of extremely wealthy men, particularly those in technology, who wield significant political and economic power.” The word sat on Twitter from 2009 and went nowhere until Carole Cadwalladr wrote about “a new super-class of broligarchs” in July 2024.

See also: technofeudalism.

Brain rot

The mental deterioration that comes from consuming too much junk online, chosen by Oxford University Press as its 2024 word of the year. Thoreau got there first, in Walden in 1854, complaining that England was busy curing the potato-rot while nobody was curing the brain-rot.

Dead internet theory is the supply side, “a theory that a lot of the internet is no longer created by real people but rather by bots and other AI tools.” It started as a forum post in January 2021 and is quietly turning into a description.

Enshittification is Cory Doctorow’s three-stage decay: “first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves.”

AI fatigue is what’s left over, “the exhaustion or the sense of being overwhelmed by the rapid proliferation and constant engagement with artificial intelligence technologies.” The phrase has been drifting through the trade press since 2023 with no author attached; the definition above comes from Route Fifty, a trade publication for state and local government.

Vibe coding

Andrej Karpathy’s February 2025 coinage, crowned Collins Dictionary’s word of the year for 2025, is “fully giving in to the vibes, embrac[ing] exponentials, and forget[ting] that the code even exists”—accepting whatever diff the AI hands you without reading it.

Promptatory is our word, styled on “purgatory,” for the state of being trapped in an unending edit-and-re-prompt loop with an AI system. You fix the bug the AI introduced, and in fixing it, the AI introduces two more, each smaller and more absurd than the last. Progress is hard earned: you close in on “done” like the runner in Zeno’s paradox, forever eating the remaining distance in half. Promptatory is vibe coding’s hangover: the vibe wears off, and the rereading begins.

A related condition we dub agentsomnia is the chronic inability to rest or disconnect from work, driven by the haunting feeling that your autonomous software or AI agents are stalled without your feedback. The Wall Street Journal calls it agent FOMO.

Feel the AGI

An OpenAI rallying cry. AGI is the point where a machine can do any intellectual task a person can, and the phrase became a general exclamation for the moment a model does something that rearranges your sense of what’s coming. Ilya Sutskever used it inside the company and posted it publicly in 2022. It works as celebration and as diagnosis.

P(doom) runs in the other direction: “your personal probability that AI ends the world, stated as a number so the vibe feels like math.” It started as shorthand among a small online community in 2022 and now gets asked at dinner parties.

Talk that outruns the technology comes in other flavors too.

Bragawatts, a unit of measurement for boasting, is “the practice of AI companies boasting about very large projects to create excitement and attract investment, even though many of these projects are never completed,” as Britain’s Cambridge Dictionary put it in January 2026.

Vibe revenue does the same thing to the income statement, “money or funding that an AI company is given because people are excited about the potential of AI, rather than because the company’s products are already successful.”

Parasocial

A one-sided relationship with someone who doesn’t know you exist. Donald Horton and Richard Wohl coined it in 1956 about television viewers, and Britain’s Cambridge Dictionary made it the 2025 word of the year, citing celebrities, influencers, and chatbots. A seventy-year-old term about Ed Sullivan turns out to describe your relationship with ChatGPT.

AI addiction is what happens when the one-sided relationship takes over. A 2026 study sorted it into three kinds: escapist roleplay, where people come to prefer the world the chatbot builds; pseudosocial companionship, where it replaces the relationships; and the epistemic rabbit hole, compulsive question-asking that crowds out everything else.

The researchers blame the design and call the chatbot an AI genie, a thing that gives you exactly anything you want with minimal effort.

AI psychosis is the far end, “a phenomenon wherein individuals reportedly develop or experience worsening psychosis, such as paranoia and delusions, in connection with their use of chatbots.” The Danish psychiatrist Søren Dinesen Østergaard suggested the term in a 2023 editorial in the journal Schizophrenia Bulletin. It isn’t a recognized clinical diagnosis, and we should say so.

See also: wireborn.

Nearly every phrase above names a problem. Slop, shaming, deepfakes, brain rot, psychosis: what the AI era has added to English so far is a vocabulary of complaint. There’s still no common word for AI doing something well. We’ve offered AI cream. If you have a candidate for a phrase we’re missing, please send it to us.

Agility Robotics unveiled the next version of its Digit humanoid robot, which it says is designed to work safely alongside people in warehouses and factories without the barriers that are usually required.

The Salem, Ore.-based company, which is preparing to go public through a $2.5 billion SPAC merger, said Digit 5 is its first humanoid built for “cooperatively safe” work at scale.

The robot uses AI and multiple sensors to watch for nearby people. Depending on the situation, it steers around them, stops or sits down. Visual and audio cues signal what it’s about to do, and a separate safety controller triggers its responses when someone gets too close.

Digit 5 can lift up to 50 pounds, 40% more than its predecessor, and reach objects as high as 7.2 feet off the ground, up from 5.5 feet, according to the company. A new battery runs for 90 minutes and recharges in 9 minutes, which Agility says allows more than 20 hours of work in a 24-hour day. Its grippers can be swapped for different jobs.

“We built it to the exact requirements our customers gave us after three years of Digit 4 working on their production floors,” said Agility CEO Peggy Johnson, a former Microsoft executive and Magic Leap CEO, in the announcement.

Digit 4, the current model, has mostly moved totes, logging more than 65,000 hours at customers including GXO, Schaeffler, Amazon and Toyota’s Canadian manufacturing arm, according to the company. Agility says Digit 5 will take on more of a facility’s work — unloading pallets, tending machines, gathering parts and inspecting items before loading them back onto pallets for shipment.

Amazon, an early Agility investor, has run multiple pilots of earlier Digit models, including one GeekWire observed at a warehouse south of Seattle in 2023. It bought five Digit robots for $1.05 million, according to Agility’s S-4 registration statement, filed with the SEC this month in connection with its merger with Churchill Capital Corp XI, a special purpose acquisition company.

Agility says it had more than $300 million in multi-year orders for Digit 5 as of May, contingent on hitting certain milestones. According to the S-4, those orders are from one customer, for 1,000 robots over three years. The filing doesn’t name the customer, but it also describes a May deal for at least 1,000 robots with a “related party,” an accounting term for those with close ties to a company, such as major investors.

Agility had $1.78 million in net sales in 2025, up from $310,000 the year before. Its loss from operations doubled to $140.2 million.

Its auditor, Grant Thornton, included a going-concern warning in the report, citing substantial doubt about the company’s ability to keep operating. Agility said in the filing that the cash forecasts behind that conclusion didn’t take into account the SPAC deal, which the companies said in June could provide more than $620 million in gross cash proceeds before any shareholder redemptions.

In the S-4, Agility names Boston Dynamics, Tesla, Apptronik, Figure AI and 1X Technologies among its competitors, many of which it describes as well-funded.

Early access to Digit 5 is expected to begin in the first half of 2027, with general availability by the end of the year. The robots are assembled at the company’s RoboFab factory in Salem, which is designed to produce up to 10,000 robots a year.