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Our First Generalist Policy

physicalintelligence.company

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Re: Our First Generalist Policy

#41

Post by torlok »

bamboozled wrote: post #18
virgildotcodes wrote: post #15

I wonder at the long term vision for humanity. We have AI replacing a lot of art, writing, coding, etc. We have a bunch of robotics companies racing to replace physical human labor. Waymo and Tesla replacing drivers. What role do the majority of people realistically play in this world?

I was down voted before for asking a similar question, I have no idea what the plan is but I struggle to understand what the future looks like when we literally have nothing to do. Why would I even bother with a hobby when a robot can do everything 10x better? Maybe just "enjoy nature" would be the best bet if we survive the robot wars.

Can't you just enjoy things you like doing? Not everything needs to be a grind or a side hustle.

Re: Our First Generalist Policy

#42

Post by Animats »

jiggawatts wrote: post #27
owenpalmer wrote: post #11

At 2:54, it struggles to pick up the cloth for 10 seconds (100 seconds real-time). This may just be a software fix, but I wonder about the idea of exchanging tools for different tasks. In this case some kind of pincher-vacuum or roller-grip might have done the job better.

Picking up cloth with a robot remains firmly in the “unsolved hard problems” bucket. Use that to gauge the believability of industry heads predicting the timeline of “robots in every home”. I’m not even particular skilled at laundry but I can easily manipulate clothes in complex ways at speed. I can use a sudden flick to turn things inside out, or flat-fold a mattress cover. I suspect we’re at least five years away f…

> I suspect we’re at least five years away from those rather ordinary capabilities in robots.

Maybe. Here's a robot at Berkeley folding towels in 2010.[1] A Willow Garage robot folding jeans in 2012.[2] Foldimate in 2017.[3] Even boring old Chicago Dryer had this working by 2021.[4]

They're all really slow. That's because they have no understanding of dynamics. The item has to come to a full stop between operations. Chicago Dryer got past that problem with a sequence of steps at different stations, each station taking about one second. That yields a useful commercial machine for large laundries.

It's just a demo problem, though. The approach is interesting. They're trying to use LLM technology on a completely different kind of problem. For that, you need a lot of training data.

If you're going to do things in this way, you need data from the inside of doing it. That's hard to acquire, but not impossible. They claim to use "robotic training data". Not sure if this is from robots being operated by humans as teleoperators. Others have tried that. There's a Stanford project that looks very similar. Something like this has been used to train quadrotor drone controllers. There's no obvious cheap way to acquire lots of data of this type, though. You have to run your own experimental setup and log.

Motion tracking from vision on a squirrel colony would be interesting as a data source. Squirrels are very agile and easy to observe. Then run the skeleton movement data back through a simulator and try to extract the forces the muscles are exerting. Now you have something usable for training an agile robot. Maybe sports videos could be used for training.

[1] https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~pabbeel/papers/Maitin-Shep...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MOtbcYE4Z4o

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C76osXtpLeM

[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YpTuwKu5fY0

Re: Our First Generalist Policy

#43

Post by shiroiushi »

petra wrote: post #25
virgildotcodes wrote: post #15

I wonder at the long term vision for humanity. We have AI replacing a lot of art, writing, coding, etc. We have a bunch of robotics companies racing to replace physical human labor. Waymo and Tesla replacing drivers. What role do the majority of people realistically play in this world?

What roles did monks praying play in this World? What role do people in the Fashion industry(for ex.) play in this World? It's all a bunch of made up stories. We'll make up other stories.

People in the fashion industry do the same thing, basically, that architects and car body designers and other product designers do: they design the clothes that people wear. Apparently, people don't want to just keep wearing the same designs that were popular in 1950 or 1850 or even 10 years ago, so clothing designers create new designs. Many of them go nowhere, but some are popular are sell well. Over time, this results in fashion trends changing, which is why you can look at photographs of people in the 1980s or 2000s and see that their clothing styles are noticeably different from now. Of course, this generally seems to be more noticeable to women than men as they generally have a greater interest in being fashionable (though plenty of men do too, though probably far, far less among the crowd that frequents HN).

Re: Our First Generalist Policy

#44

Post by bamboozled »

torlok wrote: post #41
bamboozled wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was down voted before for asking a similar question, I have no idea what the plan is but I struggle to understand what the future looks like when we literally have nothing to do. Why would I even bother with a hobby when a robot can do everything 10x better? Maybe just "enjoy nature" would be the best bet if we survive the robot wars.

Can't you just enjoy things you like doing? Not everything needs to be a grind or a side hustle.

I do, but I also enjoy the fact I'm making something, what is the point of making something when I can have something else make it. It's similar to deciding to dig up my front yard by hand to build a new garden rather than use a machine. You can do it, but you know it's pointless. Now imagine when EVERYTHING is like that?

It will be strange.

Re: Our First Generalist Policy

#45

Post by shiroiushi »

RoadRunner_23 wrote: post #19
virgildotcodes wrote: post #15

I wonder at the long term vision for humanity. We have AI replacing a lot of art, writing, coding, etc. We have a bunch of robotics companies racing to replace physical human labor. Waymo and Tesla replacing drivers. What role do the majority of people realistically play in this world?

Imagine these kind of robots in the home of of 2 or more kids. Roomba doing vacuuming, this robot doing laundry and folding. Parents would be spending quality time with her kids, helping them with their homework or helping with their practice - sports or music, instead of getting frustrated looking pile of laundry and kids don't have nothing to wear. Kids now have more questions due to quality engagement. So they wou…

>Roomba doing vacuuming

This is a bad example I think: Roomba seems to be dying, as other competitors are making vacuum robots that look similar yet are technically far superior. It's almost like talking about spreadsheets and giving Lotus as the canonical example.

Re: Our First Generalist Policy

#46

Post by bamboozled »

emmanueloga_ wrote: post #40
bamboozled wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was down voted before for asking a similar question, I have no idea what the plan is but I struggle to understand what the future looks like when we literally have nothing to do. Why would I even bother with a hobby when a robot can do everything 10x better? Maybe just "enjoy nature" would be the best bet if we survive the robot wars.

I don't get this feeling... wouldn't you want to play soccer like Messi? Or play guitar like Hendrix? (etc..). There can be pleasure in being a spectator, but being a performer, at least to me, is 1000 times more fulfilling. I don't care if someone else can do it, even a robot... I want to do that myself! A society with more space for personal ambitions and less need to hustle for food sounds great to me.

I know all this, it's basic common sense, but when you REALLY think about what you're saying, it's still strange.

Likely a humanoid robot will be able to play guitar 1000x better than hendrix, then what's the point in you becoming as good as Hendrix, so you can play guitar for yourself in your basement?

The difference between today and the future is, today there are still things humans can do better than machines and robots, when there isn't, it will be weird.

Re: Our First Generalist Policy

#47

Post by XorNot »

bamboozled wrote: post #18
virgildotcodes wrote: post #15

I wonder at the long term vision for humanity. We have AI replacing a lot of art, writing, coding, etc. We have a bunch of robotics companies racing to replace physical human labor. Waymo and Tesla replacing drivers. What role do the majority of people realistically play in this world?

I was down voted before for asking a similar question, I have no idea what the plan is but I struggle to understand what the future looks like when we literally have nothing to do. Why would I even bother with a hobby when a robot can do everything 10x better? Maybe just "enjoy nature" would be the best bet if we survive the robot wars.

You can pick up any hobby now and there'll be someone who's 10x better then you at it.

Re: Our First Generalist Policy

#48

Post by bamboozled »

bithive123 wrote: post #24
bamboozled wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was down voted before for asking a similar question, I have no idea what the plan is but I struggle to understand what the future looks like when we literally have nothing to do. Why would I even bother with a hobby when a robot can do everything 10x better? Maybe just "enjoy nature" would be the best bet if we survive the robot wars.

What do you do now when there is nothing you have to do? Are all hobbyists doing it to be "better" than someone else? If I get to choose between the status quo, where I have to work for 30+ years to have a chance at an uncertain retirement, or spending the rest of my life exploring the question of what to do with my time, I know which I'd pick.

Society is imposing the 30+ year working requirement on us. It's not really required nor as it been for basically ever. We don't need advanced robots to stop that madness.

Re: Our First Generalist Policy

#50

Post by XorNot »

OrigamiPastrami wrote: post #3
cryptoz wrote: post #2

At 1:50, the guy gives the robot a glass to pick up and then immediately nopes out of there. Wonder if previous demos resulted in a broken glass haha. Also at 2:08 the upside-down container gets flipped quickly. I wonder if that was a known limitation of the robot at the time or if the person just had a desire to flip it right-side up (to be polite? haha). I'm commenting on these tiny details and laughing a lot becau…

> Doesn't it seem like in If you buy the hype, sure. I know many startups that have already gone bust working on this. I've also seen lots of similar attempts in laboratories around the world going back well over a decade. > One last note, they call this generalist, but each of the examples is quite specific from a macro perspective. Yes the robot can fold maybe any pile of crumpled laundry now and that is generalist…

Conversely it's hard until it's not. Quadcopters were hard until now they're a disposable item purchased in bulk.

The point of a model like this is targeting that very notion: that with the right software, and enough computer power, you should be able to learn a pretty wide range of available capability (i.e. humans can do this anyway - we drive, we fly planes, we operate heavy machinery - that's us being the software but it's not clear that you need the whole human to get the effect).

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