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I’ve been thinking about AI robotics lately… if internally at labs they have a GPT-2, GPT-3 “equivalent” for robotics, you can’t really release that. If a robot unloading your dishwasher breaks one of your dishes once, this is a massive failure. So there might be awesome progress behind the scenes, just not ready for the general public.
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> If a robot unloading your dishwasher breaks one of your dishes once, this is a massive failure. Depending on what the rate of breaking dishes is, this would be a massive improvement on me, a human being, since I break a really important dish I needed to use like ~2x per month on average.
You really break a dish once every 2 weeks? That seems exceptionally clumsy. Not here to shame you for it, for the record.
That's me ;_;
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Really unfortunate that I forgot what YT video i saw about this just 2 weeks ago. It was about Googles PaLM-E evolution and progress. It basically has two models one which controls the robot, the other is a llm and they are combined together in some attention layer.
Must have been https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2mrGMMmrVNE from Welch Labs.
Maybe dumb question: One of the use cases is instrument reading of analog instruments. My brain immediately goes to "this should have some sensor sending data, and not be analog". Is having a robot dog read analog sensors really a better fit in some cases?
So we're going to have some engineers specify suitable digital replacements given the process/environment/safety requirements. We'll procure those (noting that an industrial digital pressure transducer can easily push up towards $10k), schedule a plant shutdown (how much does that cost?), then pay a pipefitter/boilermaker to replace the old gauges with new pressure transmitters (do you need a hot work permit for that? Did you get your engineer to sign that off?). Then, your controls sparky has to find a way to route a drop back to your marshalling cabinet for connection into your fieldbus/HART/modbus/whatever network (do you have one of those?) so that your SCADA system can talk to it (do you have one of those?).
Obviously it's not really an apples-to-apples comparison, but I think the costs involved with making "simple" changes in industrial settings are easy to wildly underestimate.
A parcel of land. A few robot legs and arms, big battery, off-the-shelf GPU. Solar panels. Prompt: "Take care of all this land within its limits and grow some veggies."
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Is emulating human behavior really a valuable end goal though? Humans exist as the evolutionary endpoint of exhaustion hunting large pray and organic tool-making. We've built loads of industrial and residential automation tools in the last 100 years and none of them are humanoid. I'd imagine a household robot butler would be more like R2D2 with lots and lots of arms.
It is when the world was made to interface with us. We can't use robots for everything if they aren't emulating us, because we would have to adapt everything for the non-humanlike robots.
Maybe dumb question: One of the use cases is instrument reading of analog instruments. My brain immediately goes to "this should have some sensor sending data, and not be analog". Is having a robot dog read analog sensors really a better fit in some cases?
If it ain't broke don't fix it — pointing a cheap camera at it with some cloud compute will suffice.
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It is when the world was made to interface with us. We can't use robots for everything if they aren't emulating us, because we would have to adapt everything for the non-humanlike robots.
We build our living spaces against the constraints of the human form, but that still doesn't imply the human form is optimal for anything. There's no reason a robot traveling over smooth surface should have legs instead of wheels or treads. There's no reason to have a head. Some kind of arm is a common design feature, but certainly no reason to have two. No reason to be symmetrical. A domestic robot may be constraine…