Earlier quoted context omitted.
Tesla is the only company to have high-margin mass-market EVs.
True, but their margins only exist because of protectionist US laws (i.e. 100% tariff on Chinese competitors).
What does that have to do with margins?
Gemini Robotics 2 brings whole body intelligence to robots
231–240 of 583 posts
Re: Gemini Robotics 2 brings whole body intelligence to robots
#232I've kind of given up on humanoid robotics, because of how bad the actuators are. There has been no innovation in robotic actuators since Honda's Asimo. There's just no way that someone wants a 80kg wobbling tin can in their home or workplace. My bet is that the final robotic revolution will use genetically modified human/animal bodies with replaced brains. You'll have to stretch your ethics a bit, but if you grow a…
That seems like a problem orders of magnitude harder than making a humanoid robot. We haven't even figured out how to make hamburgers without cows at a marketable price yet.
Re: Gemini Robotics 2 brings whole body intelligence to robots
#233Is anyone building non-humanoid robots? Feels like humanoid is limiting the creativity of building a truly useful robot in today's age
Humanoid robots can be dropped in wherever human labor is currently used. That makes them extremely easy to sell to industry. This unlocks, in principle, a large chunk of the potential untapped industrial automation market that still relies on human labor because the ROI of redesigning production lines didn't make sense.
These humanoid robots would cost $10-100k to make and would require costly maintenance for them to do the job people in poor countries do for a dollar. I don't say we won't come to it eventually, but not in near future
More realistically it seems that llms in several years could help dramatically decrease costs of automation and make it available for more industries
Re: Gemini Robotics 2 brings whole body intelligence to robots
#234I've kind of given up on humanoid robotics, because of how bad the actuators are. There has been no innovation in robotic actuators since Honda's Asimo. There's just no way that someone wants a 80kg wobbling tin can in their home or workplace. My bet is that the final robotic revolution will use genetically modified human/animal bodies with replaced brains. You'll have to stretch your ethics a bit, but if you grow a…
Cortical Labs has been doing work in this area. They had a Doom demo a while ago.
I think it's a matter of tradeoffs. Perhaps you'd have biological version as a versatile all-around thing, but many tasks don't require that so likely the tin variants are more durable for many tasks. Also, in terms of reasoning, the brain bandwidth is very low and high latency so there are advantages to silicon chips there.
It's interesting to learn actuators are "behind". I kept seeing cool stuff in the 3D printing space and thought there's a lot of progress. I'd love to learn more.
Re: Gemini Robotics 2 brings whole body intelligence to robots
#235I've kind of given up on humanoid robotics, because of how bad the actuators are. There has been no innovation in robotic actuators since Honda's Asimo. There's just no way that someone wants a 80kg wobbling tin can in their home or workplace. My bet is that the final robotic revolution will use genetically modified human/animal bodies with replaced brains. You'll have to stretch your ethics a bit, but if you grow a…
That is a truly terrifying future to imagine. Fortunately I would hazard to guess the medical technology to accomplish something like this is very, very far away. Not only because of the raw technological challenge, but also the barriers to development that scientists, doctors, and engineers would face before even being allowed to conduct experiments.
I do agree though the humanoid form is a dead end for robots. Just build giant cubes that process inputs and give outputs, like a dishwasher. Why wash dishes with meat wand tentacles or try to recreate meat wand tentacles when you can accomplish the job in a wholly different way with far greater efficiency...?
Where's the clothes foldeing cube? Analogous to the clothes washer and clothes dryer.... the clothes folder...
Why stop at dishwashing...? Sell an entire integrated robotic kitchen.
Re: Gemini Robotics 2 brings whole body intelligence to robots
#236Earlier quoted context omitted.
And protein folding + Nobel Prize
Google DeepMind disbands its Nobel-prize winning AlphaFold team https://www.engadget.com/2225849/google-shuts-down-alphafold... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49098375
I won't comment much on this, but I'd say these articles are 2-3 years late and reduces the agency of the people, who in many cases moved to Gemini because they wanted to work on LLMs
Re: Gemini Robotics 2 brings whole body intelligence to robots
#237I'm a researcher at Deepmind that contributed to these models. (And the opinions here are my own) Just want to say, Deepmind is a great place to work and the only (Edit: one the few unique labs!) lab where you can move from large frontier models (Gemini), frontier open models (Gemma), robotics (what you see here), science (weather, biology, more) and basically any other topic related to intelligence. It's really an i…
Good stuff, yay, good. I do want to pick a nit in this one, > and the only lab where I do think Allen Institution for AI (AI2) is has coverage across most of these domains ( albeit their frontier isn't nearly so far out, hopefully the $152m NSF awarded them + Nvidia is a fruitful partnership there). For example, robotics: MolmoBot, MolmoSpaces, MolmoAct, https://allenai.org/embodied-ai
Totally fair and thank you for nit picking! I edited my comment. AI2 is doing amazing stuff, I read their papers and code all the time and appreciate how open they are.
Re: Gemini Robotics 2 brings whole body intelligence to robots
#238Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Most people finance vehicles that cost much more than 20K. I'd gladly pay or finance a robot that could have dishes clean, laundry folded, and carpets vacuumed by the time our family got home.
I don't think a cleaning robot and a vehicle are in the same category, as vehicles are more a necessity (at the very least to get to and from your jobs, to buy groceries, etc) and a cleaning robot is squarely a luxury.
Re: Gemini Robotics 2 brings whole body intelligence to robots
#239Earlier quoted context omitted.
And protein folding + Nobel Prize
And AlphaGo Zero .. probably the first real-world deployment of a self-improving system that beat humans.
I think that credit might go to IBM:
Re: Gemini Robotics 2 brings whole body intelligence to robots
#240Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you had asked HN 3 years ago what would code-generating market would be, they would have used the exact same reasoning and given us the opinion "Why no one will pay for glorified auto-complete"
Thr pharma parallel to what tech is doing is replacing clinical trials with AI review. Im not so sure its the same thing.
The idea that AI curing cancer, heart disease, aging (you get the idea) won't be a money maker because "clinical trials" is absurd. Of course it will be. Obviously it isn't the same thing as coding agents. But a lot of money makers aren't the same things as coding agents.