Why humanoid? Surely there must be a superior physical form factor than one mimicking human anatomy. Is it just supposed to be more psychologically acceptable?
Backward compatibility with current meatspace tooling.
South Korea to spend $1T on more memory chip production and humanoid robots
81–90 of 223 posts
Re: South Korea to spend $1T on more memory chip production and humanoid robots
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
$585B on new fabs, $357B on AI data centers, and $5.8B on humanoid robots. One of those numbers is not like the others
Androids (humanoid robots) will require loads of ram, and loads of model training under the current paradigm. So it sort of makes sense. At least, I see robots as the top of the pyramid.
Autonomous (non-teleoperated) humanoid robots that can do useful work in an unfamiliar environment do not exist. And nobody's close enough to making them to understand if they're possible with our current level of technology, let alone how.
Re: South Korea to spend $1T on more memory chip production and humanoid robots
#83The title sounds to me like: I am going to spend $1000 in groceries and dance lessons. That is, two very different things lumped together. Memory chips are like groceries, essential commodity parts, a no-nonsense investment. Humanoid robots are like dance lessons, it is cool, it is sexy, and it may pay off in the future, but the value is much less certain.
Humanoid robots that can do manual labor are going to be make or break for wealthy economies in the next two decades. Aging populations need help, and most successful nations do not have enough young people to do half the work they need done.
>Aging populations need help,
They're pretty good at helping themselves. Close to where I used to live in Bavaria we had a pilot project of communal living for the elderly in a community of about a hundred people that included people with quite severe conditions such as dementia.
Medical and care personell routinely checked in but they were largely self sufficient and did a remarkably job of taking care of themselves, maybe most importantly the were happy and quite dignified, something I cannot imagine is the case when your only contact is a humanoid robot.
Of course in an age where every solution is yet another technology rethinking social life isn't very high up the list.
Re: South Korea to spend $1T on more memory chip production and humanoid robots
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
Realistically, when it comes to the semiconductor market, there aren't many viable options outside of East Asia. I don't mean this in the sense that East Asians were somehow "chosen," but rather that the semiconductor industry inherently requires a large number of highly educated employees working together. The problem is that the working hours inevitably end up being very long. If you actually go work at one of thos…
I’ve always wondered what is unique about semiconductors that PhDs need to work like assembly line workers. I’m sure they’re not solving partial differential equations all day, but what’s so different between different batches of chips?
I think it’s more like highly skilled technicians, to scale up. Plus PhDs and other scientists to do the simulations and analyze the data for new designs.
Re: South Korea to spend $1T on more memory chip production and humanoid robots
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
Realistically, when it comes to the semiconductor market, there aren't many viable options outside of East Asia. I don't mean this in the sense that East Asians were somehow "chosen," but rather that the semiconductor industry inherently requires a large number of highly educated employees working together. The problem is that the working hours inevitably end up being very long. If you actually go work at one of thos…
I’ve always wondered what is unique about semiconductors that PhDs need to work like assembly line workers. I’m sure they’re not solving partial differential equations all day, but what’s so different between different batches of chips?
The industry inherently deals with extremely hazardous chemicals, and on top of that, during semiconductor production, there are many things that have to be recorded and tracked.
A lot of the processes are automated, but at the points where automation hasn't reached, there are quite a few things that are genuinely complex to handle.
Re: South Korea to spend $1T on more memory chip production and humanoid robots
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
Humanoid robots that can do manual labor are going to be make or break for wealthy economies in the next two decades. Aging populations need help, and most successful nations do not have enough young people to do half the work they need done.
This is the path that Japan tried to go down and it hasn't worked out yet, but we have also solved a lot more of the technical issues since they began. going to be interesting to see if we pull it off this time.
Humanoid robots barely progressed between 2000-2020. There have obviously been incremental improvements in things like dexterity, vision, self-balancing, and locomotion, but in terms of having a useful humanoid robot, Honda's ASIMO released in the year 2000 is not crazily behind what we had in 2020. So it's not surprise we haven't seen economic dividends yet in the real world.
I think AI is what could make humanoids turn from parlor tricks to huge amounts of utility, but we're really going to have to see how it plays out in the next 5-10 years.
Re: South Korea to spend $1T on more memory chip production and humanoid robots
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why not? I would love to have a set of arms that could flip the laundry from the washer to the dryer and then take it out of the dryer and fold it and put it in the basket.
I understand that particular use case sounds cool! I really do. And then you want them to put away your dishes, and they can't, even though it's just a software update , because they're across the house. And they're BIG, so you don't have room to store two anyway. And they were $20,000, so...
Back around the turn of the (20th) century, electric motors were expensive. It was not uncommon to buy one motor that could do multiple things, like this vacuum/grinder/buffer/blower/pulley:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rw_8FWJuSho
If we start making robot arms at scale, they're going to get cheap.
I'm also not sure people are really going to want bipedal robots walking around their home, blocking the hallways, recording you in your underwear, etc.
Re: South Korea to spend $1T on more memory chip production and humanoid robots
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
Androids (humanoid robots) will require loads of ram, and loads of model training under the current paradigm. So it sort of makes sense. At least, I see robots as the top of the pyramid.
Autonomous (non-teleoperated) humanoid robots that can do useful work in an unfamiliar environment do not exist. And nobody's close enough to making them to understand if they're possible with our current level of technology, let alone how.
If there's no unknown unknowns in the brain, it's most likely possible. As the universal approximation theorem and empirical results of scaling SGD+RL suggest. Whether it will be economically viable remains to be seen. The human cerebellum has a peculiar structure and 80% of the brain's neurons after all.
Re: South Korea to spend $1T on more memory chip production and humanoid robots
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
I understand that particular use case sounds cool! I really do. And then you want them to put away your dishes, and they can't, even though it's just a software update , because they're across the house. And they're BIG, so you don't have room to store two anyway. And they were $20,000, so...
Back around the turn of the (20th) century, electric motors were expensive. It was not uncommon to buy one motor that could do multiple things, like this vacuum/grinder/buffer/blower/pulley: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rw_8FWJuSho If we start making robot arms at scale, they're going to get cheap. I'm also not sure people are really going to want bipedal robots walking around their home, blocking the hallways, re…
Sure, an electric motor is like 10cm on a side. A set of robot arms that can fold laundry are like a 100cm cube. Most people aren't going to have space for two of them.
And the arms need cameras too...
Re: South Korea to spend $1T on more memory chip production and humanoid robots
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
$585B on new fabs, $357B on AI data centers, and $5.8B on humanoid robots. One of those numbers is not like the others
Androids (humanoid robots) will require loads of ram, and loads of model training under the current paradigm. So it sort of makes sense. At least, I see robots as the top of the pyramid.
If you're running a massive model for logic you're probably better off not putting it in the robot. And it'll be a long time before there's enough robots to make up a significant share of usage.
More basic movement control doesn't need loads of ram as far as I know.