The x.company website is unusable on Firefox. One scroll wheel movement and I am lost on a completely different part of the document. There is one way to ensure an immediate bounce.
Intrinsic, a new Alphabet company
61–70 of 283 posts
Re: Intrinsic, a new Alphabet company
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
I just don't think you can call that a real value prop if it's only for when the truck is stuck or a few minor edge cases. There are many scenarios where self-driving may not work or behave erratically so if their version of teleop doesn't solve those then not sure how Starsky argued they were ahead of competition. Additionally I think investors backed out primarily because of risks associated with operating an auton…
I feel that it covers an awful lot of them. If you cap teleop driving at 20km/h or something (or maybe a dynamic cap based on your rtt), that still covers all of the parking lot scenarios, as well many sensor-failure situations, like if you needed to crawl along in the right hand lane because it's a blizzard and the radar is blind. In any case, the Forbes article specifically addresses how they modeled these things:…
> We also saw that investors really didn’t like the business model of being the operator, and that our heavy investment into safety didn’t translate for investors.
This is what Stefan said here [0]. Honestly I hear contradicting reasons for the failure. It could be that their investors had a different risk tolerance than Waymo/Uber's.
I guess I'm confused, sure, teleop could cover a lot of the edge cases but if there is a fat long tail you still end up with a pretty unsafe technology. The deer example is kind of a distraction and goes to show that maybe Starsky had a problem imagining and classifying catastrophic failure events. For every deer jumping in front of the vehicle there is a 10x more serious scenario that could lead to human fatalities.
After reading his posts I'm still confused about the reasons they failed. Can you list the reasons from high priority to low as to why they failed?
[0] https://medium.com/starsky-robotics-blog/the-end-of-starsky-...
Re: Intrinsic, a new Alphabet company
#63Billion dollar question: do you get more bang for the buck (return on investment, ROI) out of improving robot control schemes, or out of designing the product with automated assembly in mind? Bonus: the ROI changes as you invest in either bucket.
Probably both, to the extent that it's practical.
Re: Intrinsic, a new Alphabet company
#64Google owned Boston Dynamics at one point. I'm curious what made them flip flop back to robotics again.
X has done a lot of robotics projects. Boston dynamics wasn't Alphabet's only attempt.
Re: Intrinsic, a new Alphabet company
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
Missile robots are the best: you don't really need to worry much about supporting legacy products years after selling them to customers, and they are not expected to be functioning after just one use.
Sadly, not that easy. > you don't really need to worry much about supporting legacy products years after selling them to customers You really, really do. Missiles are expensive, and stay in inventories for a very long time, and they need to be made compatible with every update to every platform that can make use of them. That wouldn't be so bad, but then you also need to prove that they work with all those platforms.…
You are running the joke by being that Obvious, Cap.
Re: Intrinsic, a new Alphabet company
#66The x.company website is unusable on Firefox. One scroll wheel movement and I am lost on a completely different part of the document. There is one way to ensure an immediate bounce.
Weird, its loading fine in firefox for desktop and mobile for me.
Re: Intrinsic, a new Alphabet company
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
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. :) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fn3KWM1kuAw
BD focus has been mainly on control and locomotion whereas what Goog wants is neural net-ification of perception and control altogether.
Re: Intrinsic, a new Alphabet company
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
>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.
That may be true today, but it might not last forever. Labor cost in 1st world nations is skyrocketing (due to cost of living mainly) compared to poorer nations, and there may come a time when robotics becomes relatively competitive. Especially when those cheap labor countries start having the same effect.
Re: Intrinsic, a new Alphabet company
#69The x.company website is unusable on Firefox. One scroll wheel movement and I am lost on a completely different part of the document. There is one way to ensure an immediate bounce.
Same here. One detent of the scroll wheel and it's 2/3 of the way down the page. I tried disabling smooth scrolling, but that didn't fix it.
Note that we're talking about the home page, x.company, not the page linked.
Re: Intrinsic, a new Alphabet company
#70Funnily, 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/
Right, they seem like a project not a company. I suppose they can put in a request to have Alphabet fix the website, they may not have the autonomy for that themselves.