341–350 of 417 posts
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.
Can we just slap some arms on a washer/dryer combo unit if we think that'll work? We skip having to design bi-pedal balance, increase the power envelope, and greatly reduce scope and cost. Surely there's a market for an appliance that can load, wash, dry, fold where the only human interaction is dumping the clothes and soap within arm's reach.
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> I'm not sure that task needs a humanoid robot An industrial robot arm with air powered suction cups would do the trick... https://bostondynamics.com/products/stretch/ ... ... So the task they work best at is the task there is already cheaper better robots specialized for.
I feel like we're entering the era of general and inefficient solutions to problems. Like LLMs being used to pick values out of JSON objects when jq would do the job 1000x more efficiently. This is what this whole field feels like right now. Let's spend lots of time and energy to create a humanoid robot to do the things humans already decided humans were inefficient at and solved with specialised tools. Like people s…
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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 havin…
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> I'm not sure that task needs a humanoid robot An industrial robot arm with air powered suction cups would do the trick... https://bostondynamics.com/products/stretch/ ... ... So the task they work best at is the task there is already cheaper better robots specialized for.
I feel like we're entering the era of general and inefficient solutions to problems. Like LLMs being used to pick values out of JSON objects when jq would do the job 1000x more efficiently. This is what this whole field feels like right now. Let's spend lots of time and energy to create a humanoid robot to do the things humans already decided humans were inefficient at and solved with specialised tools. Like people s…
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There were plenty of digital circuit engineers back in the 90s that said microprocessors were general and inefficient solutions to problems. And if you needed it programmable, well an FPGA was still almost as general and far more efficient than a microprocessor. Guess what won.
As a hardware engineer I hear this a lot from software/electrical folks. It's Moore's law that largely drove what you describe. Moore's law only applies to semiconductors. Gears, motors and copper wire are not going to get 10x faster/cheaper every 18 months or whatever. 10 years from now gears will cost more, they will cost what they cost now plus inflation. I've literally heard super smart YC founders say they just…
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There were plenty of digital circuit engineers back in the 90s that said microprocessors were general and inefficient solutions to problems. And if you needed it programmable, well an FPGA was still almost as general and far more efficient than a microprocessor. Guess what won.
As a hardware engineer I hear this a lot from software/electrical folks. It's Moore's law that largely drove what you describe. Moore's law only applies to semiconductors. Gears, motors and copper wire are not going to get 10x faster/cheaper every 18 months or whatever. 10 years from now gears will cost more, they will cost what they cost now plus inflation. I've literally heard super smart YC founders say they just…
Crazy to me how negative the comments are here. None of this was even remotely possible less than 5 years ago. Now, we're demoing consumer-facing robotics that will soon, within a couple iterations, be able to perform most of your household tasks without issue. The frog boils quickly.
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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…
They didn't go nowhere; they just didn't result in human-like AI. They gave us lots of breakthroughs, useful basic knowledge, and knowledge infrastructure that could be built off for related and unrelated projects. Plenty of shoot for the moon corporations didn't result in human-like AI either, but also probably did go nowhere, since they were focused on an all or nothing strategy. The ones that do succeed in a moonshot relied on those breakthroughs from decades-long research.
I'm not going to get into what Musk has been doing because I'm just not,
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Three mistakes in an hour isn’t terrible, especially if that’s the last generation. As another commenter put it, this is the worst it’s ever going to be.
> this is the worst it’s ever going to be. People keep parroting this line, but it's not a given, especially for such an ill-defined metric as "better". If I ask an LLM how its day was, there's no one right answer. (Users anthropomorphizing the LLM is a given these days, no matter how you may feel about that.)