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South Korea to spend $1T on more memory chip production and humanoid robots

arstechnica.com

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Re: South Korea to spend $1T on more memory chip production and humanoid robots

#111

Post by adrian_b »

redorb wrote: post #19
dolebirchwood wrote: post #12

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?

There are just a few reasons - humanoid make sense, mostly for multi purpose tasks - where if you want a robot to be multi-job, do almost everything a human can do at work -- If you want a weld you need a 1 arm robot, if a robot to weld, then stack, then push parts on a cart across the factory - then sweep up, then etc.. etc.. perhaps a humanoid is alright. There will definitely be too many people comfortable with ow…

For multi-purpose tasks, human hands and arms are excellent, but only 2 are too few for many tasks. Humans very frequently need to have specialized gripping tools in order to accomplish tasks that cannot be done with only 2 arms, or they must work in pairs.

A good mobile multi-purpose robot should have 3 arms, or 4 arms for symmetry.

Human legs are normally not necessary. A mobile robot would just need some means to raise and lower its wheels, so that it could step when ascending or descending stairs.

A human head is not useful. The place for the "brain" of a robot is in its "chest", because robots do not have the limitations of living beings, where the very slow propagation speed of the nervous signals forces the nervous systems to be concentrated in the proximity of the main sense organs.

Instead of a head, one should have a couple of mobile arms with video cameras at their end, somewhat like the mobile stalks of crab eyes.

Of the components of a human, only the hands and arms are models useful to imitate. Cephalopod-like arms would be even more versatile than human-like arms, but it is likely that they would be much more expensive at similar performances.

Having the size of a human and human-like hands and arms is good for working in environments designed for humans, but having the shape of a human has no purpose.

Re: South Korea to spend $1T on more memory chip production and humanoid robots

#112

Post by dyauspitr »

gavinsyancey wrote: post #82
b112 wrote: post #76

Earlier 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.

We said the same thing about Waymo, that it was perpetually in the future. It took them less than a decade. The robots today are functionally capable, they don’t have the right fuzzy intelligence yet. It’s purely a data problem (lack of) and a lot of people are working on it.

Re: South Korea to spend $1T on more memory chip production and humanoid robots

#113

Post by ElFitz »

numpad0 wrote: post #101
ElFitz wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why humanoid? Surely there must be a superior physical form factor than one mimicking human anatomy. There probably (certainly) is. But if you want to build a multi-purpose platform, you’ll soon be faced with a dumb challenge: nearly all interfaces (door knobs, taps, electric switches, cutlery, sponges, every single button out there, pillow cases, wrenches, hammers, signs…) are made for humans. Placed at human hand…

Those require a hand on a stick. The stick isn't so interesting. Humanoid robots are the stick part, and actually not THAT interesting.

Never said it was interesting. Just that it’s easier to sell tech that fits your customers' environments than to get customers to overhaul their environment to fit the unproven tech you want to sell them.

Re: South Korea to spend $1T on more memory chip production and humanoid robots

#114

Post by b112 »

gavinsyancey wrote: post #82
b112 wrote: post #76

Earlier 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.

https://www.1x.tech/

Re: South Korea to spend $1T on more memory chip production and humanoid robots

#115

Post by sbierwagen »

tomkat0789 wrote: post #80
jdw64 wrote: post #51

Earlier 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?

Answer: they don't, they just work them into the ground because they can.

Mainland China also has the 996 schedule for office workers purely as a cargo cult ritual, forcing people to sit at a desk at midnight and pantomime doing work.

Re: South Korea to spend $1T on more memory chip production and humanoid robots

#116

Post by b112 »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #90
b112 wrote: post #76

Earlier 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.

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.

The same logic for why self-driving cars can't be cloud based, applies for robots. Something cannot be in the middle of a delicate operation and then "oops!", no network, it just stops.

The larger the context window, the better with models. Having a few TB of RAM would be exceptionally helpful.

All this just made me realise something however. Having your robot dormant and charging, is a bit of a waste. You could have robots dormant, but its compute in use to act as a compute node. If the distribution of robots is similar world-wide, we'd need a fraction of the datacenters we have now.

Using such nodes for training purposes would be beyond advantageous. And the company which can slice up the work and having training done in batches would get the big bucks. And actually, with consumer facing products soon all laden with extra ram and gpu for local compute, that applies there too.

Imagine leasing out idle time on your desktop or even laptop for cash. There may be a market here, especially with the cost of new datacenters. Any company able to securely package compute without risking data safety is going to make a mint.

Anyone have any ideas?

Re: South Korea to spend $1T on more memory chip production and humanoid robots

#117

Post by numpad0 »

fakedang wrote: post #68
jdw64 wrote: post #51

Earlier 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 believe some of the earliest Intel fabs were in New Mexico (Shiprock and Rio Rancho). What combination of the above did New Mexico have? When New Mexico and Germany had fabs, South Korea was still a developing country ruled by a brutal dictatorship. What happened was simple - both Taiwan and South Korea and now China took concerted steps in investing into their semiconductors businesses. South Korea did this indire…

Feels like the real clash happening here is that the reality is suggesting that the values of mean educational level of the bottom 99% of workforce outweighs that of the top 1%, and that being uncomfortable to some so much so that there has to be something else. But isn't that just it?

There's a story in one of Feynman's memoir where he figures out that pausing the live system and debugging its physical RAM stack is turning out to be more time consuming than simply scheduling a new corrected task, on some particular 1940s mechanical supercomputer he was assigned to as a tech. It might not have taken Feynman to notice that, but you can assign Feynman for that, and it worked for the Manhattan project.

The parent comment isn't (just) reiterating the tired tropes, but pointing out that East Asia has an "educational base" similar to industrial base that supports its high tech. I don't think that much is so strange way of thinking. The state of ME countries(maybe except Iran) soft proves it - they don't believe in such a thing. And they don't have a semiconductor industry. Pure coincidence? I doubt it.

(And on "This isn't about Asian superiority — it's actually pointing out something bad about Asia." from jdw64, yuuup 100% it is quad plus bad - IMO a thing about East Asia is that there's zero inter-national mobility due to the notoriously high language barrier, so competitions are closed to within borders, and the bar just drift skywards indefinitely because of that. There was a massive domestic hiring freeze in Japan during the 90s that made "janitors with a PhD" actually not so rare, but none of them hit the global labor market or started companies - the Japanese bar for janitors just went up to PhDs. It is said that success of Japanese 7-11 was partially attributable to that event, that, when you happen to have all the cashiers manned 24/7 with top scientists, you can just throw million different tasks and they can handle it perfectly, put aside whether they're happily doing it)

Re: South Korea to spend $1T on more memory chip production and humanoid robots

#118

Post by Dylan16807 »

b112 wrote: post #116
Dylan16807 wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The same logic for why self-driving cars can't be cloud based, applies for robots. Something cannot be in the middle of a delicate operation and then "oops!", no network, it just stops. The larger the context window, the better with models. Having a few TB of RAM would be exceptionally helpful. All this just made me realise something however. Having your robot dormant and charging, is a bit of a waste. You could have…

> The same logic for why self-driving cars can't be cloud based, applies for robots. Something cannot be in the middle of a delicate operation and then "oops!", no network, it just stops.

I don't think you understood my post. The equivalent of self-driving is the movement control I was talking about.

Self-driving cars don't have high level logic, except for route planning. Which often is offloaded to the cloud. An extra 30 milliseconds on understanding your speech is nothing.

> Imagine leasing out idle time on your desktop or even laptop for cash.

https://vast.ai/

Re: South Korea to spend $1T on more memory chip production and humanoid robots

#119

Post by xvilka »

red75prime wrote: post #88
gavinsyancey wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Real neurons are orders of magnitude more complex than their artificial pseudo-approximation (it is all based on the century-old understanding of how neurons work). You can think of _individual_ biological neuron as an analog of the small artificial neural network. You can see this simple visual explanation on YouTube[1]. So we aren't even close. It doesn't mean the AI is impossible, it just means people underestimate the "computing power" of real brains, as well as that AI, even the future one might be totally different in how it works from the natural intelligence.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hmtQPrH-gC4

Re: South Korea to spend $1T on more memory chip production and humanoid robots

#120

Post by dist-epoch »

GuB-42 wrote: post #17

The 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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodity:

> The wide availability of commodities typically leads to smaller profit margins and diminishes the importance of factors (such as brand name) other than price.

I'm not aware of many commodities which have only 3 world-wide sellers.

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