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Figure 03, our 3rd generation humanoid robot

figure.ai

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Re: Figure 03, our 3rd generation humanoid robot

#131

From the Figure Master Plan: "Today, manual labor compensation is the primary driver of goods and services prices, accounting for ~50% of global GDP (~$42 trillion/yr), but as these robots “join the workforce,” everywhere from factories to farmland, the cost of labor will decrease until it becomes equivalent to the price of renting a robot, facilitating a long-term, holistic reduction in costs.” Renting a robot? What…

Plus looking at the cost of labor strictly as a burden and not as something that supports the working class is a special kind of pathology.

Re: Figure 03, our 3rd generation humanoid robot

#132
post #78

All of the examples in videos are cherry picked. Go ask anyone working on humanoid robots today, almost everything you see here, if repeated 10 times, will enter failure mode because the happy path is so narrow. There should really be benchmarks where you invite robots from different companies, ask them beforehand about their capabilities, and then create an environment that is within those capabilities but was not u…

How does this square with the video where they showed it running continuously for an hour doing an actual Amazon package sorting job? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lkc2y0yb89U

Re: Figure 03, our 3rd generation humanoid robot

#133
I’d really like to understand the total compute cost it takes to accomplish these tasks. I assume the compute is happening in a DC somewhere and not all onboard. Is the total cost of compute plus electricity to power the machine less than the cost of human labor to do the same task? At some point it’ll be less. If so, far out in the future until the prices make economic sense

Re: Figure 03, our 3rd generation humanoid robot

#135
post #78

All of the examples in videos are cherry picked. Go ask anyone working on humanoid robots today, almost everything you see here, if repeated 10 times, will enter failure mode because the happy path is so narrow. There should really be benchmarks where you invite robots from different companies, ask them beforehand about their capabilities, and then create an environment that is within those capabilities but was not u…

How does this square with the video where they showed it running continuously for an hour doing an actual Amazon package sorting job? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lkc2y0yb89U

> How does this square with the video where they showed it running continuously for an hour doing an actual Amazon package sorting job? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lkc2y0yb89U

The video shows several of glitches. From the comments:

  14:18 the Fall
  28:40 the Fall 2
  41:23 the Fall 3 
Also many of the packages on the left are there throughout the video.

But then I think lots of this can be solved in software and having seen how LLMs have advanced in the last few years, I'd not be surprised to see these robots useful in 5 years.

Re: Figure 03, our 3rd generation humanoid robot

#136

Folks are very critical. Consider: this is the worst they will ever be. You improve one robot at one task, they all can share that training. It will only get better from here.

I know that a video can be faked, cherry-picked, etc. Even knowing all that, I find this to be significant advancement, scary, and very cool.

People being super negative about this is a bit surprising to me.

Re: Figure 03, our 3rd generation humanoid robot

#137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.figure.ai/company "Building Figure won’t be an easy win; it will require decades of commitment and ingenuity." "Our focus is on what we can achieve 5, 10, 20+ years from now, not the near-term wins." At least it's not Musk's forever "next year".

> At least it's not Musk's forever "next year". The problem with the principled approach to high-uncertainty projects is that if you slowly execute on a sequential multi-year plan, you will almost certainly find out in year 9 that multiple of the late-stage tasks are much harder than you thought. You just don't know ahead of the time. Just look at how many corporations and research labs had decades-long strategies to…

> Musk's approach is that if you have an infinite supply of fresh grads who really believe in you and are willing to work crazy hours, giving them a "next year" deadline is more likely to give you what you want than telling them "here's your slow-paced project you're gonna be working on for the next decade". And I guess he thinks to himself that some of them are going to burn out, but it's a sacrifice he's willing to make.

This feels incredibly generous. I'm pretty sure his approach is that he needs to keep the hype cycle going for as long as possible. I also believe it's partially his willingness to believe his own bullshit.

Re: Figure 03, our 3rd generation humanoid robot

#138
> Figure 03 was engineered from the ground-up for high-volume manufacturing. In order to scale, we established a new supply chain and entirely new process for manufacturing humanoid robots at BotQ.

If they make a hundred of these, it'll be impressive. If they make a thousand it'll be scary.

Re: Figure 03, our 3rd generation humanoid robot

#139
The weakest point of any robot now is the energy source. Even with the most advanced AI and body it will be tethered to the power network or some big battery. It will negatively affect potential adoption outside of the places like warehouses, factories, hotels, malls, bars, etc.

Re: Figure 03, our 3rd generation humanoid robot

#140
People comparing this to GPT-2 is very interesting. While it sounds like a nice analogy or even a good story to investors, the fundamentals are very different.

To train GPT, all of the training data (the internet of text, scanned books, etc) had already existed, even before the GPT project began. Arguably, the compute required (for GPT-3) also already existed, even before GPT-2.

The GPT project really just came down to investing in all of the pieces to take the ideas from a 2017 research paper to the next level. Nobody knew if X thousand GPUs, plus all of the internet's text, plus neural network transformers, would work out. But somebody took a risk in putting together the existing pieces, and proved that it can.

There's no analogy here to humanoid robotics. Not only is the data required for neural network operated humanoids close to non-existent (at the scale needed), but the nature of the data itself is enormously more complicated that taking a list of tokens in a vocabulary, and outputting 1 more token from the same vocabulary.

That being said, I still applaud the ambition of the Figure team. While I think it's clear they are presenting incredibly cherry-picked examples, they aren't trying to mislead consumers with a product for sale (because... they can't). Instead, they are productizing important research to investors, who would otherwise waste money on less important and less ambitious projects. So overall I find projects of this nature to be a net positive for technical innovation.

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