Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Gemini Robotics

deepmind.google

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

301–310 of 588 posts

Re: Gemini Robotics

#301

Post by schlauerfox »

GardenLetter27 wrote: post #252
fusslo wrote: post #239

I'm a firmware engineer that's been working in consumer electronics and I feel very bleak about my future I feel so left behind. I have extremely limited robotics and computer vision experience. I have no ML experience. The only math I know has to do with basic signal processing. When I see open roles at these companies I think the projects I'm going to work on in the future will be more and more irrelevant to societ…

At least robotics (and by extension, embedded development) is a growing field. I'd be more worried being a junior front-end mobile or web dev.

I was at the SCaLE22x linux expo in Pasadena last week and there was a company Replit that has a tool where you type the website you like and it was pretty decent. They said someone came by and in a prompt alone created a GPDR compliant cookie popup. It's another tool, it wasn't perfect, but okay for some one-off sites. It will require skills to direct and know what you want, just like always. Embrace the power, know the limits. Let the new skills enabled by the new tools empower you, reject vendor lock-in to keep yourself free to ply your trade. Just like last time around.

Re: Gemini Robotics

#302

Post by 0x457 »

delichon wrote: post #273
0x457 wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Or depending on a single engineer to be the only one with the crucial knowledge to save the ship in an emergency. This seems like it's rooted in reality.

I'd agree if you replace "knowledge" with "judgement". It seems to me that mere knowledge will become embedded in our environment.

No matter how well documented system us, how helpful error message is or how good self diagnostics are - some humans will act dumb. Access to knowledge (I assume by embedded you mean better access) is clearly not enough.

Re: Gemini Robotics

#304

Post by tsunamifury »

echelon wrote: post #250
gatinsama wrote: post #100

The problem with Google is that their ad business brings so much revenue that no other product makes sense. They will use whatever they learn with robots to raise their ad revenue, somehow.

Google uses their insane ad revenue to subsidize the Xerox Parc / Bell Labs of the current generation. Waymo, DeepMind, Gemini Robotics. They're killing it and leading the entire market. It's not just researchers. Engineers at Google get to spin up products and throw spaghetti at walls, too. Google has more money than God to throw around. Google's ad dominance will probably never go away unless antitrust action by th…

Google has been looking for post-ad post-search revenue for almost a decade now. They certainly won't dominate forever and have several signals flashing red for a few years now.

Re: Gemini Robotics

#305

Post by achierius »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #23
EncomLab wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the "Wozniak Standard" (sometimes called the Coffee Test) - Drop an AI enabled robot in front of a random house and ask it to bring you a cup of coffee. The robot would need to enter the house, locate the kitchen, locate the coffee machine, locate the coffee, locate the filters, locate the coffee mugs, locate a measuring spoon - then add the correct amount of water, the filter, the correct amount of coffee, s…

That’s a very high standard. I’d fail repeatedly.

Repeatedly? As in you would come back and tell whoever you're with "I gave up"? Like I can understand wanting to ask for e.g. "where do you keep the coffee", but if that wasn't possible -- say the host is asleep, and I'm there taking care of them -- I would certainly be able to figure it out. Just open cabinets and peek / carefully rummage around until you find what you need.

Re: Gemini Robotics

#306

Post by n_ary »

greenchair wrote: post #283

question for the robot experts: what is the limitation that makes the movements so slow? for example when it picks up the ball and puts it in the basket. why couldn't that movement be done much faster?

From university, I vaguely recall that, I had to implement a lot of feedback and correction calculations when working on industrial robotic arms. Usually too much speed causes overshooting(going the wrong trajectory or away from target). The feedback is constantly adjusted until the target is reached, hence a lot of expensive computation and readjustment from all the sensor feeds. Additionally, faster movement also has risk of damaging nearby objects when overshoot happens and also harms/degrades the joints faster. For a simpler example, think about the elevator, what would happen if it were to go up/down very fast, how would you tweak your PID controller to handle super fast movement to not throw your passengers when you need to correctly align and halt at the target floor….

Re: Gemini Robotics

#307

Post by sottol »

jwblackwell wrote: post #296

The upshot of this is that anyone will be able to order a couple of robot arms from China and then set them up in a garage, programming them with just text, like we do with LLMs now. Time to think bigger.

> Time to think bigger.

Ehh, no need - just let the LLM figure out what to build in your garage.

Re: Gemini Robotics

#308

Post by outworlder »

n_ary wrote: post #279
ethan_smith wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It definitely adds value to the conversation - we're all human, we're all unsure about the future and our place in it. I'm just scared about a future where humans (say the next generation, kids 1-5 years of age right now) lack in-depth knowledge of almost everything and it's mostly AI writing low-level code, so there are no more "human experts." We've already seen this happening where Gen Z mostly interacts with the…

> I'm just scared about a future where humans (say the next generation, kids 1-5 years of age right now) lack in-depth knowledge of almost everything and it's mostly AI writing low-level code, so there are no more "human experts." Isn’t that the ultimate goal?

It isn't. I mean, that depends on what "low level code" means. We have compilers so, to an extent, it's something desirable. But if "low level code" means everything we understand as code today, it may not be great. Human languages aren't precise enough for the kind of work that needs to be done.

But let's say it's accomplished. What will end up happening is that AI (should it work to the extent it's been hyper) will replace all the 'fun' jobs and we'll be left with either no jobs (and no income), or the most menial physical labor imaginable.

Re: Gemini Robotics

#309

Post by mbrumlow »

cjmcqueen wrote: post #276

If this makes it easier and faster to sort garbage, we could probably improve the efficiency of recycling 100x. I know there are some places that do that already, but there are so many menial tasks that could be done by robots to improve the world.

Nobody cares about the efficiency of recycling. Existing pro-recycling orgs will want no part of this and do what they can to stop it.

This is because if it becomes easy then it won’t matter and all the marketing, non profit orgs and everything goes away, making it a non problem.

While I am sure you will find people who will like these ideas and want them, they will have zero control.

At this point recycling is a marketing thing. And it’s more important that people think about the cause than solve the problem.

Re: Gemini Robotics

#310

Post by aperrien »

renecito wrote: post #272
fusslo wrote: post #239

I'm a firmware engineer that's been working in consumer electronics and I feel very bleak about my future I feel so left behind. I have extremely limited robotics and computer vision experience. I have no ML experience. The only math I know has to do with basic signal processing. When I see open roles at these companies I think the projects I'm going to work on in the future will be more and more irrelevant to societ…

Get concerned when you see a real product in the market that has a sustainable business model. The man behind the curtain here has an army of engineers, unlimited cloud nodes and basically has harvested all the data currently available in the world. It doesn't get any better than this right now. What's next? They'll ping you later on Linked-in with this awesome idea that you need to make sure runs in a $1 USD microco…

Man, we shared our knowledge via books long before the internet. And a lot of those AI models train off of thousands of books as a base before they try to incorporate less accurate knowledge from the wild internet. The cat was out of the bag on that long ago.
Post reply on HN