Live data from Hacker News

Gemini Robotics 2 brings whole body intelligence to robots

deepmind.google

111–120 of 583 posts

Re: Gemini Robotics 2 brings whole body intelligence to robots

#111
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm bearish that they'll be economically viable in the house for a very long time. For businesses the bar for adoption is very low: If the thing can work repetitive jobs for 24 hours a day and replace 3 shifts, the purchase bar is nominally anything less than 3 x human salary if your budgeting horizon is 1 year. That's a high number, and probably fairly easy to achieve. For homes, it's a very different bar. You'd hav…

>You'd have a hard time convincing most American families to purchase anything with a >$1000 price tag. Like cars, they'll likely purchase them through finance deals, with a monthly payment. Or perhaps even rent/lease them.

At that point why not have a human cleaning service it will probably be cheaper

Re: Gemini Robotics 2 brings whole body intelligence to robots

#112
post #56

Relevant: A San Francisco company is advertising humanoid robot housecleaning services[1]. However those 'bots require local supervision and a human controller watching through its video feed. Presumably that company could use the Gemini Robotics product to eliminate the remote controller. [1] https://www.tau-robotics.com/

I actually like Tau's videos a lot better than Google's. An agile robot getting out of a car carrying a tote is actually novel and difficult and useful. In contrast, what Google is showing here is mostly glorified pick and place with low success rates on a needlessly complex robot and a voice LLM slapped on top to pre-announce its moves like an anime character, with fancy video editing and bubbly music to distract you from how slow it is.

Sure Tau is teleoperated, but teleoperating an agile movement like that is actually really hard to get right and still involves AI to keep the robot balanced. Tau is a lot closer to real deployment than Google, and when it performs useful tasks it is simultaneously collecting the data to eventually automate those tasks.

Re: Gemini Robotics 2 brings whole body intelligence to robots

#113
post #40
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For house keeping tasks the robotics companies love showing off... it honestly doesn't matter if it takes a robot longer than a human to clean your house. As long as it gets done before you get home from work, no big deal.

I'm bearish that they'll be economically viable in the house for a very long time. For businesses the bar for adoption is very low: If the thing can work repetitive jobs for 24 hours a day and replace 3 shifts, the purchase bar is nominally anything less than 3 x human salary if your budgeting horizon is 1 year. That's a high number, and probably fairly easy to achieve. For homes, it's a very different bar. You'd hav…

Unitree's R1 humanoid robot is only about $6000, and it's still a nascent, smallish scale technology. They will come down.

If the future home robots are any good, it saves you from buying a dishwasher and robot vacuum. It can replace a maid/cleaning service and gardener/lawn-mowing service. For anyone paying for those services, it pays for itself.

$1000 isn't that high. Probably about a third of American households have an appliance over $2000, which is still a massive market.

Re: Gemini Robotics 2 brings whole body intelligence to robots

#115
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm bearish that they'll be economically viable in the house for a very long time. For businesses the bar for adoption is very low: If the thing can work repetitive jobs for 24 hours a day and replace 3 shifts, the purchase bar is nominally anything less than 3 x human salary if your budgeting horizon is 1 year. That's a high number, and probably fairly easy to achieve. For homes, it's a very different bar. You'd hav…

Robot lawnmowers are mostly over $1000 already and they only do one thing. Heck, a lot of lawnmowers are over $1000. You can pay over $500 for an automatic cat litter box. Robot vacuums can be cheap but run to $600 or so. Household appliances is a robust sector where people have a proven track record of spending a lot of money.

For all of these things, then what's the point of having a humanoid robot then? The last thing is a folding laundry bot that I would happily also pay $1000 for.

Re: Gemini Robotics 2 brings whole body intelligence to robots

#117
post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>You'd have a hard time convincing most American families to purchase anything with a >$1000 price tag. Like cars, they'll likely purchase them through finance deals, with a monthly payment. Or perhaps even rent/lease them.

Cars are an absolute necessity in the US unless you live in one of the small handful of cities that have viable public transit. Different thing altogether. Robots aren't a necessity, and for a price tag in the tens of thousands, most people will just mop their own floors and do their own laundry.

> Robots aren't a necessity, and for a price tag in the tens of thousands, most people will just mop their own floors and do their own laundry.

And (regardless of the costs involved) if I were going to pay money to not do this stuff myself, I'd rather pay a human to do it because I know there are humans out there that could use the work and I value them much more than I value Google and other corporations making even more obscene amounts of money selling future e-waste.

Re: Gemini Robotics 2 brings whole body intelligence to robots

#118
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm bearish that they'll be economically viable in the house for a very long time. For businesses the bar for adoption is very low: If the thing can work repetitive jobs for 24 hours a day and replace 3 shifts, the purchase bar is nominally anything less than 3 x human salary if your budgeting horizon is 1 year. That's a high number, and probably fairly easy to achieve. For homes, it's a very different bar. You'd hav…

I'm not sure. I think house cleaning/chores require at least a "part-time" job's work of work for the average household (especially with children). We may be atypical, but my partner and I don't want to hire out a cleaning service and deal with the whole human component. But, I think we'd gladly pay 15k+ if it allowed us to take on the additional gainful workload. Even at a 20k price tag, I suspect we would likely ha…

If you can even afford 20K you're in the top 10% of the US population. It's not a very big market, and even selling to that market is hard. Probably only 10% of that 10% will actually buy, and all of a sudden you're selling to 1%.

Selling to businesses is much easier, 99% of businesses can afford 200K if it replaces 3 x 70K humans.

Re: Gemini Robotics 2 brings whole body intelligence to robots

#119
post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The list of plausible answers is long enough as to question why you felt the need to include the word honestly, irony? One example: social anxiety.

Not irony: why manage machines with all the issues that go with that instead of people?

Tell me you are not an introvert without telling me...

I don't want a person I barely know regularly going all over my apartment. What if they discover... nevermind.

A robot, on the other hand? Hell yeah!

Post reply on HN