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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

#141

Post by imtringued »

ElFitz wrote: post #54
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?

> 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…

Most fixed infrastructure like switches and buttons that can be operated with a single hand are amenable to any robot with at least one hand. We've had Sawyer demonstrations operating tools clearly designed for humans for more then a decade ago and Mobile Aloha had demonstrations showing how it can operate the switches of an elevator just fine. None of these are humanoid robots.

The moment you have mobile tools, whats the point in forcing the robot to hold them using a human hand? You can put them on a tool changer now or have a gripper that works for the specific task. Why does a robot need to hold a wrench using a humanoid hand?

>Nearly all environments (houses, streets, sidewalks, factory floors, offices, toilets, bathtubs,…) are made for humans. Wide enough and tall enough (or short enough, for bathtubs) to accommodate human bodies.

Uhm, now we're getting into stupid territory. All of those environments have flat floors. Flat floors are not an environment that are exclusively built to accommodate human bodies... The flat floor is designed for ultimate flexibility. It can be used for anything. Furniture, wheelchairs, wheeled robots, furniture on rolls, animals, and also humans.

All of the environments you've listed should preferrably be wheelchair accessible for disabled people (in terms of locomotion at least).

>So until we can find one or more form-factors superior enough to justify we adapt everything around it

Is this some kind of joke? Factories already make heavy use of UGVs and stationary robot arms and build custom end effectors for them. It's also an extreme strawman to suggest that wireless/electronic interfaces require finding a "superior form-factor" to the point that it feels insulting. There's also often an easy wheelchair accessible equivalent. E.g. a button to activate the electronic door opener at wheelchair level can still be at a comfortable height for standing people.

>And then, once you have happy-ish customers, figure out which of these human attributes and shapes aren’t actually needed to do the job.

So solve the impossible (come on you know it's hyperbole) first, only then can you build a simpler system.

I think its incredibly unreasonable to suggest that you need to solve every single problem ever encountered in human existence to be allowed to solve one much simpler problem.

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

#142

Post by red75prime »

formerly_proven wrote: post #137
red75prime wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...assuming that modelling the physical structure of the brain is the only way to model its functions.

Building a "NN with similar capability as the brain" is not modelling its physical structure. The assumption is not made.

Let's define the terms. What does it mean "with similar capacity"? As far as I understand xvilka was taking about the number of artificial neurons required to model a biological neuron times the number of biological neurons in the human brain. It is modelling its physical structure (on a neuronal level).

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

#143

Post by imtringued »

Schiendelman wrote: post #42
jayd16 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand the argument but its honestly ridiculous in my eyes. How about a set of arms that can reach into dishwasher and stack dishes and a washer/dryer to fold laundry... Except even without solving the bipedal movement, that doesn't exist at a consumer price point. Why are we pretending the hardest version of this is close to existing?

It doesn't need to be at a consumer price point first, it needs to replace a human at an existing warehouse or manufacturing role first, and that's achievable in the next two years at this point. When you have arms that can reach into the dishwasher, you're also going to want them to put away your dishes. And so suddenly they need to get up high. And you're not going to have a SECOND set of arms at your washer/dryer…

Ok, so your idea is to sell a machine without software and then hand wave the software part away by saying it will be released at a later date? Sounds like a scam to me. You'll just end up with another AMD situation where the company is only interested in selling the hardware and has zero interest in developing the software, because it costs money and can only ever generate revenue by selling more hardware, which will make the hardware focused company feel vindicated in deciding to not put effort into the software.

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

#144

Post by imtringued »

kakacik wrote: post #128
razorbeamz wrote: post #126

What is the big push for humanoid robots? We make non-humanoid robots because they're better at doing things than humanoid robots are.

musk does it, so it must be good (TM), or something about cargo culting

I generally don't like the phrase cargo culting, but building a humanoid robot is probably the ultimate form of cargo culting.

The idea is this: You build a robot in the shape of a human with the hope that by building the robot well enough in the image of humans, it will become sentient and intelligent on its own.

That is literally the pitch of every single humanoid robot company on the planet.

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

#145

Post by logicchains »

dyauspitr wrote: post #112
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.

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.

It's not just a data problem, it's a hardware problem. Transformer-based robots require even more processing power than plain LLMs, as they also need to process visual and spatial/touch input. We don't have GPUs capable of fast inference on a SOTA LLM that would fit in a robot brain form factor, let alone also run fast enough spatial and visual processing. And there's currently nothing even approaching a feasible solution for cooling such a device.

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

#146

Post by imtringued »

DennisP wrote: post #52
yalogin wrote: post #25

Why is the whole world jumping on to humanoid robots? What am I not seeing that requires this level of investment in it?

For the optimistic case, read this piece by RethinkX: https://www.rethinkx.com/blog/rethinkx/the-disruption-of-lab... (Fwiw, >20 years ago RethinkX correctly projected the exponential cost declines of solar and batteries, when everybody else was drawing straight lines.)

Your "Fwiw" feels meaningless and hollow. The fact that there are stupid people out there, doing stupid things does not make you a savant just because you didn't make the same mistake.

This person clearly hasn't spent much time educating themselves how high volume manufacturing works, nor have they spent much time on flexible manufacturing systems either.

The entire article boils down to "Humanoids! Humanoids! HUMANOIDS!"

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

#148

Post by Teynah »

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.

I think there's a reason they're being lumped together. Memory is the reliable industrial bet. Humanoids are the speculative "what will all this AI hardware actually enable?" bet

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

#149

Post by jdw64 »

sbierwagen wrote: post #115
tomkat0789 wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You're not wrong, but from what I understand, the issue really comes down to on-site personnel and supervisory staffing.

As for the 996 culture, I agree to some extent. My Chinese friends hated it too. But in China, there's this thing called neijuan (involution / the rolled up scroll). there are just so many job seekers that people are forced to endure it. What neijuan means here is "Eating one's own flesh" basically knowing that this competition is damaging to everyone involved but doing it anyway.

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

#150

Post by atwrk »

cherryteastain wrote: post #14
whatever1 wrote: post #4

I wonder how Germany missed the semi manufacturing train? They had literally everything: universities, manufacturing culture, expertise and supporting supply chains, cash. I forgot, they also had ASML, freaking next door!

They had a large memory manufacturer, Infineon, who spun out their memory division as Qimonda which then went bankrupt [1]. They were the 2nd largest in the world at one time apparently. Looking back, it's easy to say the German govt should have thrown them a billion or two to keep them afloat. However, state intervention was very unpopular at the time in economic circles, and there was much furor over bailouts follo…

> Looking back, it's easy to say the German govt should have thrown them a billion or two to keep them afloat. However, state intervention was very unpopular at the time in economic circles, and there was much furor over bailouts following the 2008 crisis.

Absolutely, Germany essentially abandoned its position in industrial leadership solely due to neoliberal ideology. Just compare the trajectories of Germany and China in the last 20 years. One country planned and implemented a proper industrial policy, the other hummed and hawed about the infallibility of the market and thus essentially just gave up.

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