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OpenAI disbands its robotics research team

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Re: OpenAI disbands its robotics research team

#101

Post by NalNezumi »

modeless wrote: post #81
iandanforth wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're demonstrably wrong. I can waldo any number of commercially available arms to do work humans do today. Surgeons waldo precise robots to conduct surgeries as a matter of course. Every piece of construction machinery operated by a human today is an incredibly useful robot lacking sufficiently capable software. "When the hardware is ready, the software will be comparatively easy to develop." I take it you've never…

> I can waldo any number of commercially available arms to do work humans do today Not for everyday tasks with anywhere near the efficiency, reliability, speed, and cost that humans have without robots. You can't waldo any robot to do the laundry or the cooking in a normal home anywhere near as well as a human can do it. (I'd love to see you try!) Sure, you can make a robot that can do work humans can't. You can make…

This is just moving the goal post of your argument.

But the "Hardware lags behind" only makes sense to Sci-fi like expectations of robot agility but the software isn't even remotely close to embody that hardware. Even In the real world robotics applications TODAY this statement falls flat by one simple demonstration:

Use existing arm + teleoperation and conduct X amount of tasks (could be a mobile robot too, or a car for that matter). Now find a software that have same versatility in task execution as the human.

Most softwares for simple robotics manipulation tasks lose out to human operating it directly, bar efficiency maybe, in an static controlled environment even using the same control and perception system. Yet human controlling these arms directly show that the hardware is capable enough to conduct those tasks.

The "hardware lags behind" statement is if anything just a convenient excuse from the software / automation developers in Robotics, (also being one of them myself) shifting the blame to others, or have a sense of false highground.

The need of Lidar on early self driving cars was the same motivation; somehow softwares couldn't just use camera but needed an additional 6th sense, that humans don't even need, and still performed quite bad.

Re: OpenAI disbands its robotics research team

#102

Post by [deleted] »

roombad wrote: post #85
modeless wrote: post #68

I think most people believe that the problem with robots is that we don't have the right software, and if we just knew how to program them then today's robots could be incredibly useful in everyday life. From that perspective, this move from OpenAI seems dumb. That belief is wrong. Today's robots can't be made useful in everyday life no matter how advanced the software. The hardware is too inflexible, too unreliable,…

I don't think it's really true to say that the issue is hardware or software. There is lots of robotics in everyday life, from autonomous vacuums in our homes to autonomous factories producing the goods we consume. The reason we don't have millions of little robots buzzing around us is... there's very little need for it. The average human spends most of their time barely engaged, our brains and bodies are operating f…

[deleted]

Re: OpenAI disbands its robotics research team

#103

Post by justicezyx »

modeless wrote: post #68

I think most people believe that the problem with robots is that we don't have the right software, and if we just knew how to program them then today's robots could be incredibly useful in everyday life. From that perspective, this move from OpenAI seems dumb. That belief is wrong. Today's robots can't be made useful in everyday life no matter how advanced the software. The hardware is too inflexible, too unreliable,…

I think self driving car is an incredibly useful robots where massive adoption is under way (very early stage still); and in many less challenging areas, self driving capable vechles have been taking over.

Re: OpenAI disbands its robotics research team

#104

Post by trainsplanes »

modeless wrote: post #68

I think most people believe that the problem with robots is that we don't have the right software, and if we just knew how to program them then today's robots could be incredibly useful in everyday life. From that perspective, this move from OpenAI seems dumb. That belief is wrong. Today's robots can't be made useful in everyday life no matter how advanced the software. The hardware is too inflexible, too unreliable,…

Robotics software is incredibly complex. Even with machinery that was a perfect replica of a human body to the most minute details, throwing some ML algorithms at it wouldn’t get us anywhere.

If it worked that way, my job would be much easier.

Re: OpenAI disbands its robotics research team

#105

Post by [deleted] »

andyxor wrote: post #66
vladTheInhaler wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm going to need you to unpack that a bit. Isn't interacting with an environment and observing the result exactly what natural cognition does? What area of machine learning do you feel is closer to how natural cognition works?

> What area of machine learning do you feel is closer to how natural cognition works? None. The prevalent ideas in ML are a) "training" a model via supervised learning b) optimizing model parameters via function minimization/backpropagation/delta rule. There is no evidence for trial & error iterative optimization in natural cognition. If you'd try to map it to cognition research the closest thing would be behaviorist…

[deleted]

Re: OpenAI disbands its robotics research team

#106

Post by rwallace »

TchoBeer wrote: post #97
an_opabinia wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> alpha go is special The VC community is in denial about how much Go resembled a problem purpose built to be solved by deep neural networks.

Are you suggesting that Go literally was purpose built for this?

There is a sense in which it was: out of all the games that have ever been designed, or that it would be logically possible to design, humans selected Go as one of the relatively few to receive sustained attention, in part because it is particularly well suited to the deep neural network that is the visual cortex. So it is not a coincidence that it is also well suited to artificial deep neural networks.

Re: OpenAI disbands its robotics research team

#107

Post by unishark »

andyxor wrote: post #66
vladTheInhaler wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm going to need you to unpack that a bit. Isn't interacting with an environment and observing the result exactly what natural cognition does? What area of machine learning do you feel is closer to how natural cognition works?

> What area of machine learning do you feel is closer to how natural cognition works? None. The prevalent ideas in ML are a) "training" a model via supervised learning b) optimizing model parameters via function minimization/backpropagation/delta rule. There is no evidence for trial & error iterative optimization in natural cognition. If you'd try to map it to cognition research the closest thing would be behaviorist…

The place/grid/etc cells fall generally under the topic of cognitive mapping. And people have certainly tried to use it in A.I. over the decades, including recently when the neuroscience won the Nobel prize. But in the niches where it's an obvious thing to try, if you can't even beat ancient ideas like Kalman and particle filters, people give up and move on. Jobs where you make models that don't do better at anything except to show interesting behavior are computational neuroscience jobs, not machine learning, and are probably just as rare as any other theoretical science research position.

There is a niche of people trying to combine cognitive mapping with RL, or indeed arguing that old RL methods are actually implemented in the brain. But it looks like they don't much benefit to show in applications for it. They seem to have no shortage of labor or collaborators at their disposal to attempt and test models. It certainly must be immensely simpler than rat experiments.

Having said that, yes I do believe that progress can come considering how nature accomplish the solution and what major components we are still missing. But common-sense-driven tacking them on there has certainly been tried.

Re: OpenAI disbands its robotics research team

#108

Post by machiaweliczny »

ragebol wrote: post #32
TaylorAlexander wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One thing that struck me recently was that the famous imagenet competition that was won by a neural net took place in 2012. So we have made fantastic advances in ten years. But I'd still say at best robots like you describe are 20 years away, and that's a long time horizon for a small organization.

Has robotics had such an 'ImageNet moment'? Nothing springs to mind, just slow advancement over decades. If suddenly robot manipulators could grasp any object, operate any knob/switch, tie knots, manipulate cloth, with the same manipulator, on first sight, that would be quite a feat. But then there's still task planning which is a very different topic. And ... and .... So much still to develop for generally useful ro…

I thing we might get biobots faster than mechanical ones. With recent advancements it seems that reusing biological hardware is simpler with our current software capabilities.
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