I e been wanting to do this with a basic stuffed animal now for a while.
Just basic interactions with a child plus lessons and a voice would be game changing for the toy world.
Show HN: Shoggoth Mini – A soft tentacle robot powered by GPT-4o and RL
11–20 of 110 posts
Re: Show HN: Shoggoth Mini – A soft tentacle robot powered by GPT-4o and RL
#12This is so sick. I agree that it’s a little lame that we have all these AI capabilities right now, robotics improving, and all we can think of making is humanoid robots. Like I want a spider/squid hybrid robot running around my house
We are looking to make robotics most compatible with a humanoid world.
That being said he makes some points that alternate limb types could be interesting as well
Re: Show HN: Shoggoth Mini – A soft tentacle robot powered by GPT-4o and RL
#13This is so cool! I love the idea of adding expressivity to non verbal, non human entities.
Re: Show HN: Shoggoth Mini – A soft tentacle robot powered by GPT-4o and RL
#14Hell no! I seen this movie and I don't want any face-hugger sitting on my desk.
Hentai enthusiasts, on the other hand...
Re: Show HN: Shoggoth Mini – A soft tentacle robot powered by GPT-4o and RL
#15What a fascinating intersection of technology and human psychology!
"One thing I noticed toward the end is that, even though the robot remained expressive, it started feeling less alive. Early on, its motions surprised me: I had to interpret them, infer intent. But as I internalized how it worked, the prediction error faded Expressiveness is about communicating internal state. But perceived aliveness depends on something else: unpredictability, a certain opacity. This makes sense: living systems track a messy, high-dimensional world. Shoggoth Mini doesn’t.
This raises a question: do we actually want to build robots that feel alive? Or is there a threshold, somewhere past expressiveness, where the system becomes too agentic, too unpredictable to stay comfortable around humans?"
Re: Show HN: Shoggoth Mini – A soft tentacle robot powered by GPT-4o and RL
#16This is adorable! I did some research on tentacle robots last year. The official term is “continuum robots” and there’s actually a great deal of research into their development due to their usefulness in medical robotics. This lecture is a great overview for the curious:
https://youtu.be/4ktr10H04ak
Re: Show HN: Shoggoth Mini – A soft tentacle robot powered by GPT-4o and RL
#17I've seen enough media from Japan to know where this is heading
Re: Show HN: Shoggoth Mini – A soft tentacle robot powered by GPT-4o and RL
#18"ah, you hesitated" no more so than on every single other question.
the delay for the GPT to process a response is very unnerving. I find it worse than when the news is interviewing a remote site with a delay between responses. maybe if the eyes had LEDs to indicate activity rather than it just sitting there??? waiting for a GPT to do its thing is always going to force a delay especially when pushing the request to the cloud for a response.
also, "GPT-4o continuously listens to speech through the audio stream," is going to be problematic
Re: Show HN: Shoggoth Mini – A soft tentacle robot powered by GPT-4o and RL
#19I e been wanting to do this with a basic stuffed animal now for a while. Just basic interactions with a child plus lessons and a voice would be game changing for the toy world.
Like using phones as babysitters, just 100x worse.
I don't doubt someone's gonna invent it, but yikes. Imagine telling kiddo their beloved sentient toy is dead because mum and dad can't afford the ever-rising subscription fees anymore.
Re: Show HN: Shoggoth Mini – A soft tentacle robot powered by GPT-4o and RL
#20A Lovecraft reference, nice. I'm wondering whether a smaller model would suffice as well.
Yeah I came here to say the same thing. It seems like it would simplify things. They do say: "I initially considered training a single end-to-end VLA model. [...] A cable-driven soft robot is different: the same tip position can correspond to many cable length combinations. This unpredictability makes demonstration-based approaches difficult to scale.[...] Instead, I went with a cascaded design: specialized vision fe…
I was surprised it pinged gpt-4o. I was expecting it to use something like https://github.com/apple/ml-fastvlm (obviously cost may have been a factor there), but I can see how the direction he chose would make it more capable of doing more complex behaviours in the future w.r.t adding additional tentacles for movement and so on.