Figure 03, our 3rd generation humanoid robot • Hacker News Board

Re: Figure 03, our 3rd generation humanoid robot

#351

Post by tim333 » Fri, Oct 10, 2025, 12:12 PM UTC

Razengan wrote: post #202

dust42 wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> 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. Would asking the robot for a seahorse emoji leave you in a puddle of blood?

Now there's an idea for Terminator 7.

Re: Figure 03, our 3rd generation humanoid robot

#352

Post by seanhunter » Fri, Oct 10, 2025, 12:14 PM UTC

jjaksic wrote: post #324

MakeAJiraTicket wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Telexistence demo isn't so bad, but I have no idea why we're trying to make human robots generally. The human shape sucks at a most things, and we already have people treating roombas and GPT like their boyfriends or pets...

Because human work is designed for humans. If you want a drop-in replacement for human workers, humanoid robots are your best bet.

That doesn’t even remotely follow. Human work is designed for humans so if you want human work done you need a human to do it.

If you want to replace the human the best bet is to redesign the work so that it can be done with machine assistance, which is what we’ve been doing since the industrial revolution.

There’s a reason the motor car (which is the successful mass market personal transportation machine) doesn’t look anything like the horse that it replaced.

Re: Figure 03, our 3rd generation humanoid robot

#353

Post by tim333 » Fri, Oct 10, 2025, 12:22 PM UTC

brailsafe wrote: post #254

robots0only wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

+100!!! Please don't fall for the HYPE. The current best neural networks only have around 60% success rates for small horizon tasks (think 10-20 seconds e.g. pick up apple). That is why there is so much cut-motions in this video. The future will be awesome but it will take time a lot of research still needs to happen (e.g. robust hands, tactile, how to even collect large scale data, RL).

> The future will be awesome Perhaps this is a bit pedantic, but what about the probable eventual proliferation of useful humanoid robots will make the future awesome? What does an awesome future look like compared to today, to you?

It would be nice to be able to have the robots knock us up a house like the Alhambra place or whatever prefered architecture you have https://s7g10.scene7.com/is/image/barcelo/history-of-the-alh...

Re: Figure 03, our 3rd generation humanoid robot

#354

Post by krapp » Fri, Oct 10, 2025, 12:23 PM UTC

xp84 wrote: post #309

krapp wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Humanoid "maid" robots will never be popular in the home until they can effectively simulate the appearance and form factor of a woman or teenage girl. It is what it is.

Bollocks. I wouldn’t care if it looked like Chewbacca if it did the household chores, had a good warranty and was repairable, and cost under $30k. I’m not f##king the robot maid, I don’t care if it looks like a girl. If I was into that, there are other types of ‘robots’ for that.

I'm not saying everyone, everywhere, wants to fuck their robot maid, I'm saying thousands of years of patriarchy, hundreds of years of popular culture, fetishization of domestic labor roles and simple human nature will have an influence on the adoption of humanoid domestic robots that companies ignore at their peril.

Some people are Honda Civic people, only concerned with utility - that's fine, I'm the same way. But the money comes from cars designed to evoke eroticism or animal aggression. The humanoid robot in the article is, aesthetically speaking, horrifying to most people. It doesn't even have a face, it doesn't look pleasant, it doesn't invite an emotional bond, it isn't friend shaped, and that isn't what most people will want, or would spend money on, regardless of how efficient it is.

Humanoid robots will have a context within the same gender and cultural dynamics as human beings, by virtue of looking and acting human enough. People already have relationships with AI, and that will only become more normalized over time. Most people will personify and anthropomorphize humanoid robots just as much as they do AI, and this will be necessary for their popular acceptance and adoption. And yes, many people will want to fuck them, or at the very least, want them to look fuckable.

Re: Figure 03, our 3rd generation humanoid robot

#355

Post by boppo1 » Fri, Oct 10, 2025, 12:36 PM UTC

542354234235 wrote: post #347

iancmceachern wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It is not the gears, motors and copper wire that are bottlenecking robots. It is the software and computing. We can already build a robot hand that is faster, stronger, more dexterous, etc. than a human hand. What we can't do right now is make the software to perceive the world around it and utilize the hand to interact with it at human levels. That is something that needs computing power and effective software. Thos…

>We can already build a robot hand that is faster, stronger, more dexterous, etc. than a human hand

Can you attach it to a humanoid body that isn't wired?

Re: Figure 03, our 3rd generation humanoid robot

#356

Post by vel0city » Fri, Oct 10, 2025, 12:45 PM UTC

mft_ wrote: post #208

sksksk wrote: post #26

The use cases in their videos are interesting, I suppose the world we live in is build for humans, so it makes sense to build a robot that is human shaped. So we don't need to buy new washing machines and redesign our house to get a robot maid. The hotel reception use case seems ridiculous though, if you get rid of a human receptionist, you lose the human element of the check in process, which people like. If you're…

So I’ve ranting for years that hotels and car rental places should automate check-in - it should take only seconds to get your key with pre-filled data and a QR code. This week, I had my first experience with exactly this at a car hire company. It was… not smooth. It took multiple attempts (with requests for help to the employees in between) to get the system to recognise our code, whereupon we learned (by way of an…

The last two times I've rented a car have been with Avis, both times in about the last year. The first of these times they had rolled out their nearly fully automated workflow. Check in on my phone, it told me which car in the lot was mine, gave me a chance to report any existing damages. Rolled to the exit, had a QR code on my phone scanned, rolled through some camera tunnel, and I was on my way. There was a guy at the exit making sure things went smoothly.

The next time their computer system was hard down. Everything by paper in person. They didn't have enough forms for tracking it all, they were literally just writing things down on blank printer paper. No idea what cars were really in the lot. Show us your reservation and your id, we'll write it all down, and here's a key. Good luck finding the car. Was complete chaos.

Re: Figure 03, our 3rd generation humanoid robot

#357

Post by 542354234235 » Fri, Oct 10, 2025, 12:48 PM UTC

krapp wrote: post #214

jayd16 wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Talking about the thinness of a humanoid, maid robot is pretty hilarious.

Humanoid "maid" robots will never be popular in the home until they can effectively simulate the appearance and form factor of a woman or teenage girl. It is what it is.

That seems like more of a reversal of causation. Women are more likely to be maids or home care workers because "domestic" work is perceived as women's work. Maids are often young women, "teenage girls" as you say, or older women because they either haven't started a family yet or have already raised their children to adulthood. This is because many women are expected to take on the majority of unpaid domestic labor while men take on the traditional wage-earning paid labor.

The sexualization of young women working domestic labor is the result of the general sexualization of most young women in most contexts. It isn't that domestic labor is some sort of pretext to get a young woman into the home. It is that once they are there, men sexualize them.

Re: Figure 03, our 3rd generation humanoid robot

#358

Post by red75prime » Fri, Oct 10, 2025, 1:06 PM UTC

ileonichwiesz wrote: post #329

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #128

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.

> Consider: this is the worst they will ever be. This is probably what people in the 18th century thought when they saw that digesting duck automaton [1]. Technological progress isn’t a magical linear thing that always leads to things getting better over time. There’s some very hard problems to solve before the promises made here can be made true, and it’s not a given that they will or even can be solved. Building th…

We aren't in the 18th century and we know a lot more about the topic. But I can't see anything that parallels physical limitations of mechanical contraptions. Sensors can be improved, stimuli processing can be improved.

Do you know something about the brain that makes it impossible to replicate its functionality technologically?

Re: Figure 03, our 3rd generation humanoid robot

#359

Post by robocat » Fri, Oct 10, 2025, 1:13 PM UTC

542354234235 wrote: post #347

iancmceachern wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It is not the gears, motors and copper wire that are bottlenecking robots. It is the software and computing. We can already build a robot hand that is faster, stronger, more dexterous, etc. than a human hand. What we can't do right now is make the software to perceive the world around it and utilize the hand to interact with it at human levels. That is something that needs computing power and effective software. Thos…

> It is not the gears, motors and copper wire that are bottlenecking robots.

It is those things that are bottlenecking the price of robots.

The price of something tends towards the marginal cost, and the marginal cost of software is close to $0. Robots cost a lot more than that (what's the price of this robot?).

Edit: In fact Figure 03 imply marginal costs matter:

  Mass manufacturing: Figure 03 was engineered from the ground-up for high-volume manufacturing

Re: Figure 03, our 3rd generation humanoid robot

#360

Post by lackoftactics » Fri, Oct 10, 2025, 1:16 PM UTC

IshKebab wrote: post #241

consumer451 wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's HN. One of the most negative places on the internet in my experience. I guess it's kind of natural because when you agree with stuff there's not much value saying "yes this is right" but if you disagree then you generally have a lot to say about why. But also I think there are a lot of curmudgeons here. Back in my day we didn't need no stinkin robots and AI and toktik . And anyway I could make a way better robot…

To be honest, the vibe of Hacker News is starting to grow on me. Yes, it's often too negative and you have to dose it, but we shouldn't view technology as magic. It's sometimes a hard pill to swallow, but even the creators of AI, robotics, and cloud innovations can be blind to the significant roadblocks that lie ahead; progress isn't linear.

I remain excited about AI and my master's thesis on fine-tuning transformers with LoRA. However, Hacker News has encouraged me to dive deeper and recognize that current architectures may not be sufficient. Additionally, Richard Sutton was a revelation for me in understanding how gradient descent truly works.