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RoboCat – A Self-Improving Robotic Agent

deepmind.com

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Re: RoboCat – A Self-Improving Robotic Agent

#61

Post by SongofEarth »

sashank_1509 wrote: post #52

I have a very opinionated opposing view of this research. A lot of research in this direction is working on raising the floor. Basically they just want the robot to handle a large variety of simple tasks and environments. Fair enough most industrial robots can't handle the smallest changes. But many times they implicitly make the assumption that raising the floor will also raise the ceiling. They assume, if it can ge…

Deepmind is google, and google suffers from chronical dabbling and never shipping products, I'd be surprised if they even care much about generalizing to useful tasks.

And about floor vs ceiling, what's really important is robustness, only robust robots can be deployed in the wild, at this time Dactyl with all its fingers is still too difficult to control, RoboCat got the grippers right, the problem really is they are again doing cute things with large models instead of raising robustness.

Re: RoboCat – A Self-Improving Robotic Agent

#62

Post by strogonoff »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #60
strogonoff wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hostility to automation is a consequence of the “free to use” double-sided market trap that have been flourishing since Web 2.0. If you are paying for a service, which adequately charges you at least how much it costs to run + margin, the service should not care whether you are giving them your eyeballs, and you are entitled to request features like automation friendliness and APIs and e2e encryption because you can…

Surprisingly, I don't believe it has anything to do with advertising. SaaS model is, by its very nature, hostile to its users - even the paying ones. > If you are paying for a service, which adequately charges you at least how much it costs to run + margin, the service should not care whether you are giving them your eyeballs, They may not care about your eyeballs, but their understanding of "adequate charge" is "wha…

I think streaming services is an invalid example, because their value is their catalog. Perhaps it was different at the dawn of Netflix but now they mostly sell series and movies, not a web service for accessing series and movies.

All actual services are interchangeable, or should be—and if not then there is network effect and/or user lock-in due to double-sided market malpractice. In all other cases there is a niche ripe for a competitor to come in and profit!

> increased utilization of the core service may be canceled out by reduction in the flood of requests their bloated GUI generates

I think in most cases a swarm of automated requests to core service would outweigh overhead from a front-end GUI, architecture must be really mismanaged otherwise.

> You ain't gonna "vote with your wallet". Hardly anyone does. And you're just one user of a hundred thousand, or a million - a rounding error.

Why not? This is a defeatist attitude that either ignores how markets work or assumes users are ignorant and never learn.

People do vote with their wallets. Once bitten, you choose services with full export functionality, start reading ToS and looking at who runs it. Word of mouth helps people make better decisions and pick better vendors, even if those vendors are more expensive. (The only problematic ones are “free” vendors, for a customer making a jump from 0 to N is much more difficult than from N to M. So we’re back to ad-supported double-sided markets ruining everything.)

And yes, there is information asymmetry, but there is also regulation that could compensate for it. For example, the government could require services larger than certain size to provide fully featured APIs.

Re: RoboCat – A Self-Improving Robotic Agent

#66

Post by numpad0 »

mlsu wrote: post #53
sashank_1509 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My exact thought as you. I actually have done robotics research in Academia and I find it ridiculous that an arm costs as much as a car when it's just servos in series. I guess economies of scale. Now that I'm leaving Academia I was trying to figure out how to get a robot arm so that I can continue doing stuff at home. I think an approach like the one here would be good: https://www.trossenrobotics.com/aloha.aspx . A…

I am eagerly awaiting a cheap clone of Dynamixel quality servos. Is it really just tuning? That seems like something that would pay off for an aliexpress copycat. A servo is pretty simple/cheap to build, right? I guess there are only a handful of us who really want high-accuracy, high-torque component servos...

Will MKS SERVO42 going to work? Installs onto back of NEMA17 stepping motors, works in closed loop using magnetic encoder, has to be stepped but infinite rotating and $20 apiece with a motor. Latest 42D variants seems to work with CAN or RS485 too.

Re: RoboCat – A Self-Improving Robotic Agent

#67

Post by FrustratedMonky »

Everyone seems to dismiss the 'Terminator' scenario in AI. Mainly because robots are lagging, or not having as remarkable break throughs as GPT, (even Boston Dynamics, is great, but watch their 'behind the scene' on all the trial and error). This seems like a step in direction. Hook up some of this, some self-driving car tech, some GPT-4, starting to look a lot more like 'Terminator' is doable, or at least not a complete fantasy.

Re: RoboCat – A Self-Improving Robotic Agent

#68

Post by _ea1k »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #56
rajansaini wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A successor to OpenLLaMA could make this possible. Imagine being able to deploy your own LLM.

It could , but I bet it won't. The UI is not the limiting factor - the SaaS providers are. Automation like this should be easy with regular APIs and code (or no-code tools). It isn't, because service providers don't want you to do it. A skilled dev can get their way with Selenium or some other way of browser automation - this is tolerated, because approximately no one actually does it. If anyone could easily get an L…

That second paragraph really nails it.

I had that exact conversation with Chamberlain about MyQ garage door openers. They make it difficult to integrate with and their stated reasons are all about security.

But they'll constantly try to get you to work with their (presumably paying) partners that have far more privileges than you as the lowly product owner.

There isn't a great business case for the latter, so it languishes.

Re: RoboCat – A Self-Improving Robotic Agent

#69

Post by socratic1 »

sashank_1509 wrote: post #49
aliljet wrote: post #7

I really really really want to play with robotics at home, but I've discovered it's super expensive to get things like robotic arms at home. Are there robotics platforms that are DIY ready? I really just want to teach a robotic arm to make my coffee in the morning. And I'll apply my life's effort to achieving this only if the cost of the robotics platform is stupid low. Yes. I know that's absurd. :)

My exact thought as you. I actually have done robotics research in Academia and I find it ridiculous that an arm costs as much as a car when it's just servos in series. I guess economies of scale. Now that I'm leaving Academia I was trying to figure out how to get a robot arm so that I can continue doing stuff at home. I think an approach like the one here would be good: https://www.trossenrobotics.com/aloha.aspx . A…

you should use Viam Robotics, they have a robot you can program and control remotely
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