Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

OpenAI disbands its robotics research team

venturebeat.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 128 posts

Re: OpenAI disbands its robotics research team

#31

Post by tejtm »

fartcannon wrote: post #20

This is lunacy. The first country/company to replace human labour with general bipedal robots, will reap wealth beyond imagination. The short sitedness is astonishing, if you ask me. I genuinely believe how we as a society act once human labour is replaced is first aspect of the great filter.

There are no mechanisms in place for the generated wealth to benefit the replaced people, the wealth will go mainly to vanishingly few persons self selected to be okay with gross economic inequality.

We have been at this since at least the dawn of the industrial revolution and do not have it right yet. Backing off and taking it slow now to let some cultural adjustments happen is a responsible step.

My cultural norms are repulsed by the thought of me not working as much as possible, it is how I expect my value to society to be gauged (and rewarded).

This line of reasoning will be (is) obsolete and we need another in its place globally.

I hope some may have better ideas of what these new cultural norms should look like than I with my too much traditional indoctrination.

I only know what I will not have it look like; humanity as vassals of non corporeal entities or elites.

Re: OpenAI disbands its robotics research team

#32

Post by ragebol »

TaylorAlexander wrote: post #30
ragebol wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> replace human labour with general bipedal robots No need for bipeds, car factories employ dumb robot arms, no humans needed. Not very general purpose robots though. The first country/company to create robots that can be instructed similar to a humans to do any job will indeed have great benefits, but how long until that happens? Not within any amount of time that an investor wants to see. I'm unsure if I will ever…

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 robots.

Re: OpenAI disbands its robotics research team

#33

Post by cweill »

I think the comments are confounding shutting down the robotics research team with eliminating all RL research. Most robotics teams don't use data-hungry RL algorithms because the cost of interacting with the environment is so expensive. And even if the team has a simulator that can approximate the real world to produce infinite data, there is still the issue of the "simulator-gap" with the real world.

I don't work for openAI but I would guess they are going to keep working on RL (e.g hide and seek, gym, DoTA style Research) to push the algorithmic SoTA. But translating that into a physical robot interacting with the physical world is extremely difficult and a ways away.

Re: OpenAI disbands its robotics research team

#34

Post by joe_the_user »

nradov wrote: post #25
fartcannon wrote: post #20

This is lunacy. The first country/company to replace human labour with general bipedal robots, will reap wealth beyond imagination. The short sitedness is astonishing, if you ask me. I genuinely believe how we as a society act once human labour is replaced is first aspect of the great filter.

We are decades away from being able to build a general bipedal robot that can snake out a plugged toilet or dig a trench or nail shingles to a roof. It's just not a rational goal yet. Aim lower.

I basically agree.

I'd just note that "decades away" means "an unforeseeable number of true advances away" - which could mean ten years or could mean centuries.

And private companies can't throw money indefinitely at problems others have been trying to solve and failing at. They can it once and a while but that's it.

Re: OpenAI disbands its robotics research team

#35

Post by joe_the_user »

tejtm wrote: post #31
fartcannon wrote: post #20

This is lunacy. The first country/company to replace human labour with general bipedal robots, will reap wealth beyond imagination. The short sitedness is astonishing, if you ask me. I genuinely believe how we as a society act once human labour is replaced is first aspect of the great filter.

There are no mechanisms in place for the generated wealth to benefit the replaced people, the wealth will go mainly to vanishingly few persons self selected to be okay with gross economic inequality. We have been at this since at least the dawn of the industrial revolution and do not have it right yet. Backing off and taking it slow now to let some cultural adjustments happen is a responsible step. My cultural norms…

There are no mechanisms in place for the generated wealth to benefit the replaced people, the wealth will go mainly to vanishingly few persons self selected to be okay with gross economic inequality.

That hasn't stopped the march of progress so far. Conveniently (or not), humanoid robots do not appear likely for the foreseeable future. But keep worrying, the problem you list are appearing in other fashions anyway.

Re: OpenAI disbands its robotics research team

#36

Post by jablongo »

zitterbewegung wrote: post #8
minimaxir wrote: post #4

The cynical-but-likely-accurate take is that researching language modeling has a higher ROI and lower risk than researching robotics.

I was wondering why OpenAI's gym was archived on GitHub this pivot seems more sense.

GYM is not exclusively for robotics - it’s for reinforcement learning in simulated environments, which I’m sure they will keep doing. Also it looks like it is still being maintained, so not really sure what you mean.

Re: OpenAI disbands its robotics research team

#38

Post by andyxor »

ansk wrote: post #13

Is the prevailing opinion that progress in reinforcement learning is dependent on algorithmic advances, as opposed to simply scaling existing algorithms? If that is the case, I could see this decision as an acknowledgement that they are not well positioned to push the frontier of reinforcement learning - at least not compared to any other academic or industry lab. Where they have seen success, and the direction it se…

Reinforcement learning itself is a dead-end on a road to AI. They seem to slowly starting to realize it, probably ahead of academia.

Re: OpenAI disbands its robotics research team

#39

Post by TaylorAlexander »

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…

Not yet. I have a four wheel drive robot I designed with four 4k cameras feeding in to an Nvidia Jetson Xavier. [1]

Just getting it to navigate itself using vision would mean building a complex system with a lot of pieces (beyond the most basic demo anyway). You need separate neural nets doing all kinds of different tasks and you need a massive training system for it all. You can see how much work Tesla has had to do to get a robot to safely drive on public roads. [2]

From where I am sitting now, I think we are making good inroads on something like an "Imagenet moment" for robots. (Well, I should note that I am a robotics engineer but I mostly work on driver level software and hardware, not AI. Though I follow the research from the outside.)

It seems like a combination of transformers plus scale plus cross domain reasoning like CLIP [3] could begin to build a system that could mimic humans. I guess as good as transformers are we still haven't solved how to get them to learn for themselves, and that's probably a hard requirement for really being useful in the real world. Good work in RL happening there though.

Gosh, yeah, this is gonna take decades lol. Maybe we will have a spark that unites all this in one efficient system. Improving transformer efficiency and achieving big jumps in scale are a combo that will probably get interesting stuff solved. All the groundwork is a real slog.

[1] https://reboot.love/t/new-cameras-on-rover/277

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hx7BXih7zx8

[3] https://openai.com/blog/clip/

Re: OpenAI disbands its robotics research team

#40

Post by nrmn »

andyxor wrote: post #38
ansk wrote: post #13

Is the prevailing opinion that progress in reinforcement learning is dependent on algorithmic advances, as opposed to simply scaling existing algorithms? If that is the case, I could see this decision as an acknowledgement that they are not well positioned to push the frontier of reinforcement learning - at least not compared to any other academic or industry lab. Where they have seen success, and the direction it se…

Reinforcement learning itself is a dead-end on a road to AI. They seem to slowly starting to realize it, probably ahead of academia.

Why do you believe this to be the case?
Post reply on HN