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Gemini Robotics

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561–570 of 588 posts

Re: Gemini Robotics

#561

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> show ambiguity of rules when interpreted by beings without empathy I don’t think that’s the main problem, there are a lot of moral dilemmas where even humans can’t agree what’s right.

Humans not agreeing has more to do with the fact that humans are called upon to take decisions with imperfect information under time constraints. If each human could pause the state of the world and gather all information and then decide, they would act humanely

The existence of trolley problems is a counterpoint to your comment.

Re: Gemini Robotics

#562
post #519

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not only wildly disconnected, but purposefully created to show ambiguity of rules when interpreted by beings without empathy. All of Asimov's books that include the laws also include them being unintentionally broken through some edge-case.

Well it's quite difficult to come up with much better rules than Asimov's. HPMOR offers a solution called 'coherent extrapolated volition' – ordering the super intelligent machine to not obey the stated rules to the letter, but to act in the spirit of the rules instead. Figure out what the authors of the rules would have wished for, even though they failed to put it in writing. We are debating scifi, of course.

> Figure out what the authors of the rules would have wished for

What if the original author was from long ago and doesn't share modern sensibilities? Of course you can compensate when formulating them to some extent, but I imagine there will always be potential issues.

Re: Gemini Robotics

#563

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Waymo took 15 years and $30B to develop and is still unprofitable. By the time they make their money back it'll probably be too late.

They’ll never make their money back. Autonomous driving is mostly software and will be commoditized very shortly after it works well. There’s not enough money paid to drivers in the world today to repay the investment in autonomous driving from direct revenues. It’ll be an expected feature of most cars, and priced at epsilon. Autonomous driving and the attendant safety improvements will turn out to be a gift to the w…

    > They’ll never make their money back.
I agree here, because the profit margin on taxi services is too low. Well, on an unrealistically long time horizon, like 50 years, they might make it back, but surely much worse returns that investing that same money into US Treasury bonds.

    > Autonomous driving is mostly software and will be commoditized very shortly after it works well.
I disagree here. To be clear, when we talk about AI/ML here, I separate it into a few parts: (1) the code that does training, (2) the training data, (3) the resulting model weights, (4) the code that does the inference. As I understand, self driving uses a lot of inference. (Not an expert, but please correct me if wrong.)

How can Waymo's software be "commoditized very shortly after it works well" if competitors don't have (2) and (3)? The training data that Waymo has incredibly valuable. (Tesla and some Chinese car companies also have mountains of it.)

Re: Gemini Robotics

#564

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google has been looking for post-ad post-search revenue for almost a decade now. They certainly won't dominate forever and have several signals flashing red for a few years now.

Google has been looking for post-ad post-search revenue for almost a decade now With a reasonable degree of success. In their last quarter (see https://abc.xyz/investor/earnings/ ) 25% of their revenue was non-ads, and that percentage has been consistently increasing.

That is much higher than I expected. Thank you to share the link. Can you imagine anyone saying "Media company XYZ has been looking for post-ad post-search revenue for almost a decade now"? It makes no sense. To me, Google is like a post-film/TV/newspaper media company that, unsurprisingly, makes most of its money from adverts.

Re: Gemini Robotics

#565
post #465

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why's everything gotta have arms and graspers it's so inefficient. We have designed a lot of processes and workplaces around the assumption that the 'machine' working there will be be around 160-190 cm tall, with two arms with graspers on the end and equipped with stereo colour vision cameras. The closer you make your new machine match that spec the less changes you have to make to your current setup. It also makes i…

I am having a hard time imagining a scenario where you have humans working where you can't replace them with a conveyor system. it doesn't need to be that long, you could have a 5 foot, linear, isolated section (about the sphere of a human range), and use compressed air and optical/laser sensing to pop stuff out of that section into a bin/trailer/whatever. do you have a picture of a facility where they would have to…

> compressed air

I believe a short drop and hydraulically actuated metal plates are the more typical solution. That offers a high level of precision.

Re: Gemini Robotics

#566

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They’ll never make their money back. Autonomous driving is mostly software and will be commoditized very shortly after it works well. There’s not enough money paid to drivers in the world today to repay the investment in autonomous driving from direct revenues. It’ll be an expected feature of most cars, and priced at epsilon. Autonomous driving and the attendant safety improvements will turn out to be a gift to the w…

> They’ll never make their money back. I agree here, because the profit margin on taxi services is too low. Well, on an unrealistically long time horizon, like 50 years, they might make it back, but surely much worse returns that investing that same money into US Treasury bonds. > Autonomous driving is mostly software and will be commoditized very shortly after it works well. I disagree here. To be clear, when we tal…

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Re: Gemini Robotics

#567

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They’ll never make their money back. Autonomous driving is mostly software and will be commoditized very shortly after it works well. There’s not enough money paid to drivers in the world today to repay the investment in autonomous driving from direct revenues. It’ll be an expected feature of most cars, and priced at epsilon. Autonomous driving and the attendant safety improvements will turn out to be a gift to the w…

> They’ll never make their money back. I agree here, because the profit margin on taxi services is too low. Well, on an unrealistically long time horizon, like 50 years, they might make it back, but surely much worse returns that investing that same money into US Treasury bonds. > Autonomous driving is mostly software and will be commoditized very shortly after it works well. I disagree here. To be clear, when we tal…

You point out yourself that Waymo doesn’t have a monopoly on training data. And the trained model is software, of which the price-to-use trends towards epsilon, even when it’s very expensive to make. For example Google search, maps, docs, YouTube. An exception is Netflix, but there the value provided by a subscription is access to novelty, which is not intrinsic to driving software.

Re: Gemini Robotics

#568

We're witnessing the robot apocalypse coming at us in slow motion. It's coming gradually, until one day it'll come suddenly.

It's slow motion because they only speed it up by 3-5x. If you play the videos at 30x then it will really look like it's coming at us at full speed.

Re: Gemini Robotics

#569

question for the robot experts: what is the limitation that makes the movements so slow? for example when it picks up the ball and puts it in the basket. why couldn't that movement be done much faster?

This is highly unlikely to be a mechanical limitation of the robotic arms. As others have said, it's likely an inference speed limitation - their model is understanding, reacting, and producing outputs as fast as its supporting hardware can. But that all just poofs away in a year or two as inferencing hardware gets better/faster. And for many use cases, the slowness/awkwardness doesn't really matter as long as the jo…

Robot demos have been stuck at that sort of speed for more than a decade and they didn't have to wait for a giant LLM to do inference. Why's that going to get any better now? And just in a year or two?

Re: Gemini Robotics

#570

Robotics has been trying the same ideas for the last who knows how many years. They still believe it will work now, somehow. Perhaps it goes beyond the brightest minds at Google that people can grasp things with their eyes closed. That we don't need to see to grasp. But designing good robots with tactile sensors is too much for our top researchers.

Everything is an abject failure... until it works. All the best ideas are tried repeatedly until the input technologies are ripe enough.

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