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Hyundai buys Boston Dynamics

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Re: Hyundai buys Boston Dynamics

#201

Post by chadash »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #193
SoftTalker wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems like a mistake. AI in its current form has limited usefulness for most people. Not something I would pay for to use outside of work. But a household robot that could clean, wash and fold the laundry, do the dishes, maybe even be a chauffeur... that would be huge. I think a lot of people would pay new-car money for something like that.

> But a household robot that could clean, wash and fold the laundry, do the dishes, maybe even be a chauffeur... that would be huge. Except they can't. I get it, merging advanced AI with robotics has made huge leaps in the past few years, but building a truly autonomous laundry robot is an incredibly difficult problem that still feels many years away. And I've seen all the "folding robots" over the past few years, an…

> There is a surprisingly low threshold on what people are willing to pay for labor saving devices.

A lot of people gladly pay humans to launder their clothes, so the market is there. But the current iteration of wash/dry combo machines doesn’t solve the main issue. I don’t mind transferring my clothes from the washer to the dryer, because that takes 60 seconds. It’s folding and putting away the clothes that makes laundry a chore.

Re: Hyundai buys Boston Dynamics

#203

Post by queueueue »

fragmede wrote: post #168
OtherShrezzing wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> robot maid that could clean, wash and fold the laundry, do the dishes, etc. would be huge. I think a lot of people would pay new-car money for something like that. Once you take maintenance of a machine with price-parity to a new car into consideration, it’s surely cost competitive to just hire a human to do all those things. The price needs to fall drastically below new-car territory before it’s competitive with m…

Humans are messy to deal with. Say you're rich enough to afford a personal chef. Unless you're an inhuman monster, their problems become your problems as well. So if your chef is out because their mother is sick and needs someone to take care of her, you pay for a nurse for your chef's mom, so that you have your chef. A robot servant is still gonna need maintenance, sure, but it's a bit easier to be callous to a robo…

But for now, humanoids are still relatively incompetent. So if you're rich enough and you want things done like cleaning and cooking, it's more convenient to hire a human and give them specific instructions instead of buying a robot that can currently do only half the things they want to get done. Or they just want a nice gadget.

Re: Hyundai buys Boston Dynamics

#204

Post by cpgxiii »

ACCount37 wrote: post #164
cpgxiii wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Could be in principle" and "could be in practice, under technical and economical considerations in play" are two very, very different beasts. > Everyone in the industry learned that the hard way. The auto industry is notorious for making incredibly myopic choices to save money/make money in the near term versus long-term investments. The relationship between automakers and their suppliers/vendors is basically a ce…

Vertical integration is superior if you can pull it off. Big fucking "if". There's a reason why automakers don't usually do it. The name of the reason is: corporate rot. They don't have the organizational backbone that wouldn't let their "in-house manufacturing" rot away into inefficiency and waste. Not that it has much to do with why automation fails to penetrate certain tasks. The reason why "long tail" tasks are o…

> Not that it has much to do with why automation fails to penetrate certain tasks. The reason why "long tail" tasks are often beyond automation is: piss poor ROI, calculated correctly.

I actually don't think any of the big automakers have ever really, in-depth considered the ROI of "traditional" assembly automation (i.e. anything SoTA pre-2020), with experts in all parts of the process in same room. It's easy to assume that these companies must make careful measured decisions based on evidence, but in practice big decisions are made by small groups within the C-suite, often pretty divorced from the reality on the ground.

For example, many of the big asian automakers seem to have completely ignored the well-understood effects of their demographic crises (i.e. significantly aging population) on the future of their workforce (i.e. they are having trouble retaining and hiring new workers as the older generation retires) and this totally changes the economics of automation! Now they are all having to play catch-up, having realized that they must automate, at whatever the cost, because the issue is not "robots must be cheaper than human labor" it is "we might not be able to afford human labor at all".

Re: Hyundai buys Boston Dynamics

#206

Post by theptip »

glaslong wrote: post #192
dgellow wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That feels so low of a price when compared to the insane valuation people attribute to Tesla robots

The problem is Boston Dynamics makes actual robots, which are much more limited than robots constructed from pure hype.

> If you show revenue, people will ask 'HOW MUCH?' and it will never be enough. The company that was the 100xer, the 1000xer is suddenly the 2x dog. But if you have NO revenue, you can say you're pre-revenue! You're a potential pure play... It's not about how much you earn, it's about how much you're worth. And who is worth the most? Companies that lose money!

Being less cynical, I do think it’s fair to say that they just didn’t quite find PMF; they aren’t good enough for factory work, Spot is niche, and Atlas is too scary for in-home.

The robot butler business model just hasn’t been tested in the same way AFAIK.

Re: Hyundai buys Boston Dynamics

#207

Post by TeMPOraL »

thegrim33 wrote: post #162
SoftTalker wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems like a mistake. AI in its current form has limited usefulness for most people. Not something I would pay for to use outside of work. But a household robot that could clean, wash and fold the laundry, do the dishes, maybe even be a chauffeur... that would be huge. I think a lot of people would pay new-car money for something like that.

Well, that assumes that if you just keep throwing more data and compute at large language models you'll end up with something akin to AGI to control those robots. Which is far from guaranteed.

LLMs already solved the "System 2" part of this, to borrow from Kahneman, it's the "System 1" part that's lagging behind here. Current Claude/Gemini/ChatGPT is more than enough to tell a robot what chores to do, what to do with a thing, how, where to put it, etc. but what's still missing is the ability to reliably translate those goals to movements of a robot in diverse and tight environment that is a typical house or apartment, with any kind of reliability and safety.

Re: Hyundai buys Boston Dynamics

#208

Post by fooker »

cpgxiii wrote: post #133
fooker wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How long ago was your robotics experience? An Amazon warehouse or Tesla factory tour would likely change your mind. I had to do both of these in the last year and not a lot of humans around…

> How long ago was your robotics experience? This is over the last decade at one of the largest automakers in the world. Naturally there is significant variation between individual lines and plants; some are newer and more automated, some are older and much less automated. Are some cars being built on more automated lines? Yes. But a great many, probably the vast majority, are being built with fairly low assembly* au…

> probably the vast majority

Agreed, and hence I suggested an amazon warehouse tour (they offer one for their flagship robotics 'research' warehouse) to anyone, or a Tesla factory tour (might need to talk to someone, fairly manageable).

This reminds me of the quote, "the future is already here – it's just not very evenly distributed."

Re: Hyundai buys Boston Dynamics

#209

Post by stainablesteel »

Hugsbox wrote: post #31

I don't understand why they would implement humanoid robots instead of purpose-built robots. The human form is not the most optimal way to do most tasks, especially as it relates to manufacturing. Robots don't need to look like humans, they need to be useful . Seems like putting in an awful lot of extra unnecessary work to end up with a worse result.

they don't need to use the whole humanoid, they can take the legs or abdomen alone and use them as is

the human frame is just an experimental proxy for functionality, which turned out to be promising

two arms alone is the purpose-built robot you're referencing

Re: Hyundai buys Boston Dynamics

#210

Post by fooker »

thomasikzelf wrote: post #132
fooker wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How long ago was your robotics experience? An Amazon warehouse or Tesla factory tour would likely change your mind. I had to do both of these in the last year and not a lot of humans around…

I have visited factories for work and my experience is the same. There is so much stuff that could easily be automated but is not because it is too expansive for too little value to make a custom one off machine. The big high volume things will be automated but these machines will have 90% success rate and lot's of stuff that needs to be done by hand. You can search for factory tours on youtube to get an idea. Here a…

The Amazon video is from four years ago, and the Tesla one from 1.5 years ago.

Things have been moving pretty fast in the last year when it comes to semi-bipedal robots doing the long tail of previously unreachable tasks.

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