Funnily, their scroll capture is totally broken on their website [1] at least on my version of Firefox. Also, it's strange that they don't have their own website when they're a separate company. I guess it shows the ephemeral nature of these projects.
Intrinsic, a new Alphabet company
51–60 of 283 posts
Re: Intrinsic, a new Alphabet company
#52Re: Intrinsic, a new Alphabet company
#53Google owned Boston Dynamics at one point. I'm curious what made them flip flop back to robotics again.
These are complementary developments, Boston Dynamics is building robots that excel at navigating the world in the way its built. This seems to be intent on building robots that excel at interacting with the world in the way it wants.
The latter has a much broader customer base. From picking fruits to folding shirts to installing a headliner into a new vehicle, there are many applications.
Re: Intrinsic, a new Alphabet company
#54Funnily, their scroll capture is totally broken on their website [1] at least on my version of Firefox. Also, it's strange that they don't have their own website when they're a separate company. I guess it shows the ephemeral nature of these projects. [1] https://x.company/projects/intrinsic/
Because, uhm, it's one of multiple projects? See: https://x.company/projects/
Re: Intrinsic, a new Alphabet company
#55Google owned Boston Dynamics at one point. I'm curious what made them flip flop back to robotics again.
BD seems like it's mostly interesting in creating dogs. This new thing seems like it's a generic robot for making objects.
That was certainly the perception I used to have, but this demo video changed my mind. :)
Re: Intrinsic, a new Alphabet company
#56i might be willing to free up my garage for a laundry folding robot
Re: Intrinsic, a new Alphabet company
#57Weird. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27861201
The list of Robot company failures and the robotic industry dead pool runs very deep. Just in the past few years: * Rethink Robotics https://www.zdnet.com/article/sudden-unexpected-demise-of-re... * Anki https://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/home-robots/con... * Jibo https://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/home-robots/jib... * Blue Workforce https://www.therobotreport.com/blue-workforce-robot-files-ba...…
Amazon bought Kiva a while back now to do robotics for them, and it's used heavily in their warehouses and facilities around retail side. Anything they can automate through robotics, they try to as robots can work 24x7 (other than maintenance requirements) and over their life span cost less than human workers. They also sponsor engineering competitions around trying to make generalised picking machines. It's good PR for them, and although unlikely any time soon, someone _might_ have an inspired idea and solve something that has vexed experts for a long time.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TUx-ljgB-5Q shows some footage of the robotics they use.
Re: Intrinsic, a new Alphabet company
#58Funnily, their scroll capture is totally broken on their website [1] at least on my version of Firefox. Also, it's strange that they don't have their own website when they're a separate company. I guess it shows the ephemeral nature of these projects. [1] https://x.company/projects/intrinsic/
Wow, you're right. At least on Linux with Firefox 90.0.2 scrolling with the mouse wheel moves the page by such huge steps that it's basically unusable. Had to navigate with the arrow keys instead.
Re: Intrinsic, a new Alphabet company
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your conclusions are true, though I think it may be helpful to further subdivide into some categories as far as what the target market was and where they were at with technical readiness. Like, some of them (Anki, Jibo, Mayfield, Asimo, Reach) were 100% toys, and were always going to be at the extreme end price-wise trying to compete with increasingly "smart" toys being manufactured by regular toy companies with regu…
>They were never fast enough or reliable enough to be competitive with the minimum wage labour that they would have displaced This probably sums up well. Human are extremely adaptable. To point if we are measured as 100 then no Robot is even 1. There is a whole reason why even Foxconn gave up using Foxconn Robot, some task are just insanely easier and cheaper for a human to do it. They’re not easily automatable and e…
More specifically, humans have an incredible high adaptability:cost ratio.
There aren't many businesses where precision:cost or volume:time are more important than labor costs.
Re: Intrinsic, a new Alphabet company
#60Makes sense. The end state appears to be that humans should only be supervising ML that generates goal and outcome based behaviors for robots, and the machines will construct tools to solve problems themselves.
The leap from an AI model learning how to replicate a behaviour (e.g. evolving walking to solve problems https://unitylist.com/p/2id/walking-ai ) to reasoning about it in terms of actuators and physical feedback, to assembling a physical model out of a relatively small list of parts seems like a solvable engineering problem when it is broken out into a pipeline.
Those robot parts are basically a version of mechano with actuators that a model would map a behavior to, and the robots in the article would assemble them. When you look at something like Lego or Mechano as an intermediate representation to construct buildings out of, where all objects made from it are essentially a directed graph of those elements, robots designing and building robots seems like less than 20 years away.
e.g. we could functionally specify to an ML model, "produce a digraph of these element parts that has these degrees of freedom, and then load or derive a model that solves for this outcome within the domain of those degrees, where outcome is 'plug cables into a board' "