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Gemini Robotics

deepmind.google

331–340 of 588 posts

Re: Gemini Robotics

#331

Google is probably the most undervalued tech company there is currently, by far : 1.) Has cutting edge in house AI models (Like OpenAI, Anthropic, Grok, etc.) 2.) Has cutting edge in house AI hardware acceleration (Like Nvidia) 3.) Has (likely) cutting edge robotics (Like Boston Dynamics, Tesla, Figure) 4.) Has industry leading self driving taxis (Like Tesla wants) 5.) Has all the other stuff that Google does. (Like…

On one hand, I agree with you, on the other, as a former Googler I think that "just needs better coaching" is a huge barrier in Google's current corporate culture and environment. Google as a whole has a long history of not being able to successfully build great products out of great tech. That seems wrong from looking at search, Gmail, Maps*, Docs*, etc., but I think these are cases where a single great insight or i…

I think you might be on to something. I heard Google Gemini has a best in class system for depicting historical figures accurately, it is extraordinarily unphased by “modern audience” political bias.

Re: Gemini Robotics

#332

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.

I guess the question is where will they get the money to order those things?

The cost of robotics is coming down, check out Unitree. A couple of robot arms would cost about the same as a minimum wageworker for 1 year right now. But of course they can go virtually 24/7 so likely 1/3rd the cost

Re: Gemini Robotics

#333
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…

Let me bring some perspective. In 1998, CMU was showing a self-driving car "driving on its own" [1] 27 years later, 99.99% of trips are driven by humans. Real-world robotics takes multiple decades to pan out. These demos are just that: demos . What you are seeing will not remotely impact your life before the 2050's, if ever. What you should be worried about, however, is you (not your job) becoming irrelevant if you d…

The fellow develops firmware and does signal processing and you come back with "learn to code", really?

Re: Gemini Robotics

#334

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 mar…

Big corporations definitely care about recycling. Sustainability is a major issue for them, not for marketing and such, but because they're thinking 50 years down the line. If they can't keep making xPhones then, they'll need to find a new product or invade a country, and both of these things need to be planned decades in advance. If recycling is a gimmick, it's more to stakeholders than consumers.

Re: Gemini Robotics

#335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I saw Musk saying a couple of days ago that we've "hit the limit of peak data" for training AI. My immediate reaction was no, surely you have not trained on every copyrighted textbook on every subject ever written. You hit the peak of easily accessible internet data that you could quickly steal to train your models.

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Re: Gemini Robotics

#336

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.

If you can recognize what garbage to yeet, you can already yeet it today. You don't need a terribly slow robot arm to do it.

Re: Gemini Robotics

#337
post #323

There's one shot that stood out to me, right at the end of the main video, where the robot puts a round belt on a pulley: https://youtu.be/4MvGnmmP3c0?si=f9dOIbgq58EUz-PW&t=163 . Of course there are probably many examples of this exact action in its training data, but it felt very intuitive in a way the shirt-folding and object-sorting tasks in these demos usually don't. (Also there seems to be some kind of video aut…

It felt extra fake - the cherry picked people lacking rudimentary mechanical skills, using the ~$50K set of Franka Emika arms vs their default 'budget' ALOHA 2 grippers, the sheer luck that helped the robots put the belt on instead of removing it from the pulley. The trick was in that the belt was too tight for an average human to put on with brute force, and disabling the tensioner or using tricks would require bett…

Yeah, they went WAY over the top when they told the human to "make it look hard." A significant distraction from how impressive the robot actually is.

Re: Gemini Robotics

#338

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."

I want to strap robot arms to paralyzed people so they could walk around, pick up stuff, and climb buildings with them.

Re: Gemini Robotics

#339
post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I see pro-AI promoters giving weird analogies that do not fit, I get a feeling that they are either management class(aka MBA types) or are not serious professionals. One key point we must first understand, coding is NOT software engineering or even programming! Writing code is the last bit, a minimal fraction of the job description(unless you are actually indie dev or working for consulting firms). The core task…

I agree with your first part but I think you are vastly underestimating how much writing code is a part of programming. I also in these discussions people, ironically, really overestimate how much “untangling requirements” is part of the day to day for the majority of programmers. There is obviously some of that but unless you are just talking about consultants that interact directly with customers, a lot of this is…

Erm no, coding happens at genesis of the product. The improvement, adjustments, maintenance is 99% of the lifetime.

If you are a professional, please tell me about how much new code you write vs perform other stuff(meetings, alignment, feature planning, system design, benchmark, bug fix, release). For me, the ratio of coding:non-coding is around 10:90 on average week. Some weeks, only code I write are the suggestions on code reviews.

Re: Gemini Robotics

#340

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?

F=ma. An arm that's powerful enough to move extremely quickly is powerful enough to hurt.
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