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

Hyundai buys Boston Dynamics

startupfortune.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

411–420 of 431 posts

Re: Hyundai buys Boston Dynamics

#411

Post by glitchdout »

XorNot wrote: post #381
glitchdout wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

War in Ukraine does not validate that assessment: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XiGwWwcnT7M

War is the definition of "not cheap" because the stakes are so high (you die). Ukraine is building what it can with anything it can get and also in a constant race to adapt and develop superior designs. You're not seeing "cheaper": you're seeing a literal arms race.

Your sentences do not agree with each other.

"building what it can with anything it can get" is the definition of cheaper.

If it was easier or cheaper to create a multi-purpose robot to control vehicles and deliver bombs that's what we'd see Ukraine doing.

Re: Hyundai buys Boston Dynamics

#412

Post by cpgxiii »

kulahan wrote: post #294
cpgxiii wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't need robotics experience, I need automaker experience. Their software is universally terrible. If you had any auto industry experience, you would know that the people responsible for the design and build of the physical car and the people responsible for the user-facing software are very separate (in fact, the user-facing software might be entirely contracted out). > What... positive experience do you have…

>commenting on an article about one of the largest automakers in the world buying out the remaining stake in the robotics development company enhance: >commenting on an article about one of the largest automakers in the world buying ENHANCE: >buying It does not support your point to show that Hyundai is purchasing the company that actually built the robots. If you want to make your point about how laughable it is tha…

> companies don't tend to be in the business of making highly advanced robots

I think you've gotten hung up on the idea that making robots is the essential part of the problem. I'm not going to go as far as much of the ML community and say that making hardware is secondary, but the software side is where most of the latest and greatest work is happening. Better hardware is not going to magically solve all the outstanding problems of manipulation. Better software might solve them entirely independent of hardware so long as the hardware is "good enough". I think there is a general sense that the field that robotics is approaching the equivalent on the mid 2000's with respect to computing architectures - there are still first-party RISC UNIX workstations on the market (e.g. Apple, IBM, Sun) but the incoming tide of commodity x86 platforms is clear for all to see. There are still some gains to be had by designing everything in-house, but the marginal gains versus off-the-shelf components or even full systems are steadily narrowing. There is every reason to believe that COTS hardware capabilities will continue to mature and become more commoditized.

Of course, the purchase here that actually mattered happened several years ago; this headline is just the final piece. BD and Hyundai have been working fairly closely on Altas applications to auto manufacturing for some time, never mind the additional research being done at BDAII/RAII.

Re: Hyundai buys Boston Dynamics

#413

Post by coryrc »

roenxi wrote: post #399
chairmansteve wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Ukraine they are using tracked autonomuous vehicles for the same tasks. Much cheaper.

It is remarkable how rarely alternative movement styles like slug crawling, flying or rolling get used in the animal kingdom to move around compared to 2-8 legs. If a company can figure out how to do legs and manufacture them cheaply I expect there'd a be a lot of money in that; they must have some sort of practical advantage somewhere in warefare. Although the tracked drones we see starting to appear in war are terr…

Because biological slip rings don't scale, not because it wouldn't be more efficient on an energy standpoint.

Re: Hyundai buys Boston Dynamics

#414

Post by XorNot »

glitchdout wrote: post #411
XorNot wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

War is the definition of "not cheap" because the stakes are so high (you die). Ukraine is building what it can with anything it can get and also in a constant race to adapt and develop superior designs. You're not seeing "cheaper": you're seeing a literal arms race.

Your sentences do not agree with each other. "building what it can with anything it can get" is the definition of cheaper. If it was easier or cheaper to create a multi-purpose robot to control vehicles and deliver bombs that's what we'd see Ukraine doing.

No because Ukraine needs things right now. Cheap is a secondary requirement to survival.

So the reason you see a lot of drone designs is because they're constantly innovating to try and build something effective: which is not cheap. Then whatever they come up with, it's preferable to use it right now if you can: because it's available and delay may mean you no longer have it.

Cheap is that last step: if it works you production optimize it and try to get the cost down so it's sustainable. But while that's happening you're generally also back to innovating because the enemy is deploying counter measures.

And all of this is happening across multiple dimensions at once: if you can get a great bulk price from Alibaba for some part via an intermediary but it doesn't turn up on time, or an alternative is delivering faster or the warehouse for some part got hit last week then get, there's now a new drone design with that variant.

Hell a lot of the output is just because the small machine shop knows how to build some particular design and has the parts, but another does not.

Its war: the cash price of things is not the only price nor even necessarily the most important one.

Re: Hyundai buys Boston Dynamics

#415

Post by tkfoss »

r721 wrote: post #184
Animats wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh. It's Softbank exiting humanoid robotics at Softbank's discretion. That's a lot different than " Hyundai buys Boston Dynamics". Hyundai bought them years ago. This is just the last 8%.

Well, the original story title is "Hyundai takes full control of Boston Dynamics as SoftBank exits for $325 million".

dang, please fix :p

Re: Hyundai buys Boston Dynamics

#416

Post by devilbunny »

Forgeties79 wrote: post #403
devilbunny wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But presumably would not be for four hours a week, since they would do more maintenance-like cleaning. Once a month, yeah, it’s going to take that long.

Why wouldn’t it take that long? When you hire people to do housekeeping they don’t just come for the exact amount of time you need them on an infrequent, case by case basis. You generally have to agree to a standard number of hours and days or a flat rate per day. They’re trying to make a living. If you can’t give them consistency and a meaningful amount of hours, they won’t work for you (or only will temporarily). T…

If you clean a house once a month, it will take longer than doing the same thing once a week. You will end up spending more hours total, but it won't be four hours per visit, more like one or two. You spread the tasks out. Clean kitchen and den one visit. Clean bedrooms one visit. Clean bathrooms one visit. Or whatever.

The total cleaning time (and thus price) goes up, but it's not 4x what you're getting now, which a whole-house cleaning once a month would be.

Re: Hyundai buys Boston Dynamics

#417

Post by Forgeties79 »

devilbunny wrote: post #416
Forgeties79 wrote: post #403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why wouldn’t it take that long? When you hire people to do housekeeping they don’t just come for the exact amount of time you need them on an infrequent, case by case basis. You generally have to agree to a standard number of hours and days or a flat rate per day. They’re trying to make a living. If you can’t give them consistency and a meaningful amount of hours, they won’t work for you (or only will temporarily). T…

If you clean a house once a month, it will take longer than doing the same thing once a week. You will end up spending more hours total, but it won't be four hours per visit, more like one or two. You spread the tasks out. Clean kitchen and den one visit. Clean bedrooms one visit. Clean bathrooms one visit. Or whatever. The total cleaning time (and thus price) goes up, but it's not 4x what you're getting now, which a…

Once a month and it’s a different task each time for an hour or two? No one does that - a monthly or bi-monthly cleaning service is $200-$400 and they generally do the whole place in one fell swoop and they’re definitely not going to agree to cutting their pay since you don’t want your full house serviced after taking the time to prep, come out, and maybe say no to another job. I don’t know if you have freelanced before, but this is how you think when you engage in contract work. “Time is money” applies 10x compared to a salaried job. All of this is to say 3-4hrs is very typical. You seem to be coming up with the single thinnest definition of what constitutes hiring for housework and it just doesn’t reflect 99% of how these hires go.

Also, we are comparing to a robot that does all your chores any day. Once a month is not a fair comparison to begin with. This is carrots to oranges.

Let’s be super generous here. $100/day twice a week for a basic pass at your house. Dishes, laundry, some wipe downs, put things way, standard chores. $800/mo, $9600/yr. Plus payroll service/taxes/etc. Hell do $100 once a week, which you’d be lucky to get. This is a $5-6k a year investment for the bare minimum and you’re still doing 80% of the chores annually. If you’ve got kids this person is barely making a dent.

Hiring people is expensive. If it isn’t, you’re not treating them with basic dignity.

Re: Hyundai buys Boston Dynamics

#418

Post by fooker »

kijin wrote: post #394
fooker wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SoftBank’s investment plays have largely been comically wrong. This is a good hint that robots are really about to take off.

Humanoid (or dogoid) robot hardware on its own offers no benefits over non-humanoid factory machines. It just has fancy firmware controlling its motions. Humanoid robots loaded with an AI agent, on the other hand, could actually make you a sudo sandwich, do your laundry, or help you with that weekend project in the backyard. They're finally about to get useful. I'm not a fan of humanoid robots personally (they creep…

> offers no benefits over non-humanoid factory machines.

The value proposition is being able to fit in and navigate spaces built for humans without complete overhauls.

Stuff like small elevators, workbenches, server racks, etc.

> functional R2-D2

It would be pretty amazing to buy a kit with the hardware for this and be able to put your own software in it!!

Re: Hyundai buys Boston Dynamics

#419

Post by ajmurmann »

bruce511 wrote: post #361
ajmurmann wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Couldn't they just have sold their stock for dollars?

You can't sell 60b worth of stock without moving the price. It has to be dribbled out over time. Some buyees of course insist on cash. Which moves the effect of stock sales onto the buyer. Most buyers would prefer to pay in stock as it doesn't impact cash flow at all. So, a all-stock deal already has the future-price of the stock built in. Which probably (but not necessarily) inflates the headline number. In other wo…

Given the company is supposedly worse $2.5T, one would think the impact of selling 2.4% of that would have a fairly small impact on the price.

Re: Hyundai buys Boston Dynamics

#420

Post by addaon »

kelipso wrote: post #408
addaon wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But that's my point. If you're basing your society shape around adopting a technology based on it continually decreasing in price, but you only get a few decades of that behavior before saturation and then you're at the mercy of the consolidated winners... generally adoptions like this aren't reversible at the societal level. You're locking in a long-term structural change based on a short-term pricing trend.

Still doesn't make sense. You were criticizing: "But once a technology like general-purpose humanoid robotics exists, it’s costs are only likely to decrease over time." But the point was currently general-purpose humanoid robots is not affordable by the average person like say cars or washing machines currently are, but it will be because the costs will decrease. There was no argument that the price will forever keep…

> costs are only likely to decrease over time

>> There was no argument that the price will forever keep going down

It's very hard for me to read the first quote as anything other than a continuing decrease in expected value of cost as a function of time. This directly contradicts the second quote.

Post reply on HN