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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

#151

Post by Teynah »

Schiendelman wrote: post #40
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.

Humanoid robots that can do manual labor are going to be make or break for wealthy economies in the next two decades. Aging populations need help, and most successful nations do not have enough young people to do half the work they need done.

I agree they may be strategically necessary. I’m just less convinced that “commercial humanoids by 2028” means anything close to replacing a meaningful amount of labor by then

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

#152

Post by Miraltar »

scheme271 wrote: post #55
kart23 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

automating repetitive physical work doesn’t appeal to you?

Sure, but I'm not sure humanoid robots is the best form factor for this. E.g. something with a wheeled base makes movement calculations a lot easier since you don't need to deal with balance while moving.

But it needs more space to maneuver, a mostly flat ground, can't step over anything... It's simpler but less adaptable

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

#153

Post by logicchains »

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.

>We make non-humanoid robots because they're better at doing things than humanoid robots are.

They're only better at some things, and some they can't do at all. If there's going to be a mass market for household robots, people are going to want a robot that can clean their toilet, read a book to their kids, unblock their kitchen sink, and climb a ladder onto the roof to get leaves out of their gutter, not a separate robot for each job. Any non-humanoid robot would struggle to do everything around the house that a human can do.

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

#154

Post by Chu4eeno »

red75prime wrote: post #142
formerly_proven wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

You vastly overestimate how much we know about how our brains work.

Look up the neural correlates replication crisis, and e. g. the "dead salmon" study by Bennett et al.

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

#155

Post by RealityVoid »

b112 wrote: post #114
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.

https://www.1x.tech/

I have been following them since they were Halodi robotics. They're cool, but nowhere near the level of autonomy you need. My theory is that before household robots become a thing we should have self driving cars be a common occurrence, since that is a much much simpler problem.

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

#156

Post by red75prime »

Chu4eeno wrote: post #154
red75prime wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

You vastly overestimate how much we know about how our brains work. Look up the neural correlates replication crisis, and e. g. the "dead salmon" study by Bennett et al.

That is we have unknowns that might increase or decrease estimates of computational demands of a functionally equivalent ANN. Not everything that happens in the brain contributes to information processing.

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

#157

Post by sdfsdfs34dfsdf »

darkwater wrote: post #140
dyauspitr wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Are you saying autonomous driving is a solved problem, even at scale? I haven't seen any Waymo in my small town in Southern Europe yet.

> "small town" in "Southern Europe"

I've highlighted the two main issues you are currently experiencing.

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

#158

Post by Dylan16807 »

b112 wrote: post #139
Dylan16807 wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The same logic for why self-driving cars can't be cloud based, applies for robots. Something cannot be in the middle of a delicate operation and then "oops!", no network, it just stops. I don't think you understood my post. The equivalent of self-driving is the movement control I was talking about. Self-driving cars don't have high level logic, except for route planning. Which often is offloaded to the cloud. An ex…

You're missing the point. The issue is "how is the thing used" not trying to make identical break points in differing tech. A self driving car cannot have object detection, collision avoidance, human detection offloaded to the cloud. Ever. At all. A network drop can't mean it smashes into things. Or stops unsafely. The same is true with an android. Imagine it turning on an frying pan, cooking dinner, and then going o…

I'm not missing the point. I'm saying that some amount of local compute is necessary but the really big stuff can be remote.

You don't need terabytes to turn things back off.

Not that I want to trust "not setting the house on fire" and "not flooding the house" to this kind of model in the first place...

> I would be astonished if flagship model phones in 2030 weren't sold with 1TB RAM.

I'll be astonished if they have 50GB.

Have you looked at RAM size/price trends? I'm not even talking about the last year, just the pattern before that. We're not in the 80s and 90s anymore. The most recent price lows were roughly $3.50/GB in 2013, $2.50/GB in 2016, and $1.50/GB in 2023. If we're lucky the cheapest stuff will hit $1/GB in a few years, and the kind that would actually fit on a phone motherboard would be significantly more than that.

Samsung hit 16GB on their top model in 2020 and it's either been 16GB or 12GB ever since. Apple only went up to 12GB in the last year. Google offers 16GB. A couple niche offerings have 24GB. Why would these RAM numbers even double during the next four years?

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

#159

Post by elil17 »

tomkat0789 wrote: post #80
jdw64 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Realistically, when it comes to the semiconductor market, there aren't many viable options outside of East Asia. I don't mean this in the sense that East Asians were somehow "chosen," but rather that the semiconductor industry inherently requires a large number of highly educated employees working together. The problem is that the working hours inevitably end up being very long. If you actually go work at one of thos…

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?

The people in the fabs aren't PhDs, they're extremely skilled technicians. They may have a similar number of hours of experience/training as a PhD, but that training is in troubleshooting automation systems, not doing research.

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

#160

Post by darig »

ben_w wrote: post #96
p1esk wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We’re experiencing gpt-2 moment in robotics now. This means in about 2-3 years they will do useful work (cooking, repairs, cleaning, etc).

The extrapolation cannot be justified. It may be much longer or tomorrow.

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