Live data from Hacker News

Gemini Robotics

deepmind.google

71–80 of 588 posts

Re: Gemini Robotics

#71

I read too much scifi, and almost none of it has updated on the current state of AI. For example spaceships swarming with low skill level crew members that swab the decks and replace air filters. Or depending on a single engineer to be the only one with the crucial knowledge to save the ship in an emergency. If scifi authors aren't keeping up it's hard to expect the rest of us to. But the macro and micro economic cha…

Vernor Vinge has argued that far-future SF makes no sense because of the "wall across the future" that The Coming Technological Singularity will create. [0]

If you're open to Theory Fiction, you can read Nick Land. Even his early 1990s texts still feel futuristic. I think his views on the autonomization of AI, capital, and robots - and their convergence - are very interesting. [1]

[0] https://edoras.sdsu.edu/~vinge/misc/singularity.html

[1] https://retrochronic.com/

Re: Gemini Robotics

#72

I read too much scifi, and almost none of it has updated on the current state of AI. For example spaceships swarming with low skill level crew members that swab the decks and replace air filters. Or depending on a single engineer to be the only one with the crucial knowledge to save the ship in an emergency. If scifi authors aren't keeping up it's hard to expect the rest of us to. But the macro and micro economic cha…

Ian Banks' Culture series is the only one that comes to mind.

Yeah it really makes you think about what life would be like if intelligence could infuse anything- be it a ship or a datapad- even if his vision wasn't quite how I imagine it would turn out.

I've also seen it suggested that Harry Potter might be a more realistic look at what proliferated AI might be like.

Re: Gemini Robotics

#73

Robotics has been trying the same ideas for the last who knows how many years. They still believe it will work now, somehow. Perhaps it goes beyond the brightest minds at Google that people can grasp things with their eyes closed. That we don't need to see to grasp. But designing good robots with tactile sensors is too much for our top researchers.

Tactile input is a nice-to-have but unnecessary. A human can pilot a robot through image sensors alone.

I think this is correct, to an extent. But consider handling an egg while your arm is numb. It would be difficult.

But perhaps a great benefit of tactile input is its simplicity. Instead of processing thousands of pixels, which are passive to interference from changing light conditions, one only has to process perhaps a few dozen tactile inputs.

Re: Gemini Robotics

#74

Anyone else is just not interested in deepmind? They keep releasing "breakthrough" after "breakthrough" with zero code release. I just checked and I still can't do anything with alphaproof, almost a year later. They might as well tell me they solved world hunger, can stop aging and discovered a way to travel FTL.

They have a tendency to make impressive blog posts way, way before they can figure out how to make products. In the spirit of openness it's nice to know what they're working on, but yeah it's important to add a couple years to any availability estimation.

Re: Gemini Robotics

#75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

For the most part that's been on known objects, these are objects it has not seen.

Not specifically trained on but most likely the Vision models have seen it. Vision models like Gemini flash/pro are already good at vision tasks on phones[1] - like clicking on UI elements and scrolling to find stuff etc. The planning of what steps to perform is also quite good with Pro model (slightly worse than GPT 4o in my opinion)

1. A framework to control your phone using Gemini - https://github.com/BandarLabs/clickclickclick

Re: Gemini Robotics

#76
post #51

Robotics needs to become affordable for indie developers be able to hack them almost like Raspberry Pi projects.

it's about to reach that point soon actually. There is no reason these models can't be optimized/distilled. And actuators be cheaper (it's happening already).

Re: Gemini Robotics

#77
What's interesting is the vision language capability they have. Being able to verbally describe tasks and determine if a task was completed means they might be able to do self-play for a massive number of different tasks to improve motor skills.

Re: Gemini Robotics

#78
post #35

The problem with Google is that they keep putting out "videos" but almost ship an actual product. I'm not sure what's the end goal of this other than "get some people excited" or "justify R&D spend to shareholders". This is a great achievement and I'm not underestimating the work of the people involved. But similar videos have been put together by many research labs and startups for years now. I feel like Google's a…

>GOOG is around the same price as it was in 2022 Even after the massive total market correction in the last few weeks, the earliest that GOOG was the same price as today is not even a full year ago. In fact, it's up 90% since 2022.

What?

Any stock market source would tell you GOOG was ~140 USD at the start of 2022. Today it is ~170 USD. A 20% increase over three years, about the same rate as inflation and S&P.

This is extremely trivial to verify. Was this written by a GPT bot?

Re: Gemini Robotics

#79

The problem with Google is that they keep putting out "videos" but almost ship an actual product. I'm not sure what's the end goal of this other than "get some people excited" or "justify R&D spend to shareholders". This is a great achievement and I'm not underestimating the work of the people involved. But similar videos have been put together by many research labs and startups for years now. I feel like Google's a…

I'm cynical, but several hundred thousand patents are issued every single year, if you don't get one then your competitors will. You don't have to release a profitable product, but to compete over the next several decades you are going to need to own valuable land in remote territories where patent wars being fought today. I'm guessing Google's meta-strategy is a type of patent-colonialism.

>You don't have to release a profitable product

I see, are you a VC in the valley?

Re: Gemini Robotics

#80

I read too much scifi, and almost none of it has updated on the current state of AI. For example spaceships swarming with low skill level crew members that swab the decks and replace air filters. Or depending on a single engineer to be the only one with the crucial knowledge to save the ship in an emergency. If scifi authors aren't keeping up it's hard to expect the rest of us to. But the macro and micro economic cha…

In The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler there are fleets of fishing boats that are all controlled by AI to maximize the catch. Each boat also has it's own AI that can act somewhat independently, but they all communicate with the main corporate AI as well as with other boats in the vicinity. Initially the boats are all fully automated and have robots doing all the work, but in the ocean environment the robots tend to break down a lot due to corrosion. At some point the AI in charge of the fleet figures out that it can use kidnapped humans in place of the robots. The humans are kidnapped and drugged so that they don't wake up until the ship is well out at sea. Even after that they're kept drugged to some extent so that they aren't inclined to escape. They're given just enough food to enable them to do their work and no more. When they become sick they're thrown overboard and new kidnappees replace them.

This is just one of the side plots of the book, I think it could've been the whole plot of a book.

Post reply on HN