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We accidentally solved robotics by watching 1M hours of YouTube

ksagar.bearblog.dev

71–80 of 183 posts

Re: We accidentally solved robotics by watching 1M hours of YouTube

#71

Solved??? Where?

Yeah, wake me up when they have a robot that can wash, peel, cut fruit and vegetables; unwrap, cut, cook meat; measure salt and spices; whip cream; knead and shape dough; and clean up the resulting mess from all of these. Then they will have "solved" part of robotics.

Re: We accidentally solved robotics by watching 1M hours of YouTube

#72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aaron Swartz died of suicide, not copyright. His death was a tragedy but it wasn't done to him.

There's an English phrase "hounded to death", meaning that someone was pursued and hassled until they died. It doesn't specify the cause of death, but I think the assumption would be suicide, since you can't actually die of fatigue. I think that's what was done to Aaron Swartz.

Many people have dealt with the law, with copyright infringement, even with gross amounts of it, and had the book thrown at them, and survived the experience.

Swartz was ill. It is a tragedy he did not survive the experience, and indeed, trial is very stressful. But he was no more hounded than any defendant who comes under federal scrutiny and has to defend themselves in a court of law via the trial system. Kevin Mitnick spent a year in prison (first incarceration) and survived it. Swartz was offered six months and committed suicide.

I don't know how much we should change of the system to protect the Aaron Swartzs of the world; that's the mother of all Chesterton's Fences.

Re: We accidentally solved robotics by watching 1M hours of YouTube

#74
"why didn't we think of this sooner?", asks the article. Not sure who the "we" is supposed to be, but the robotics community has definitely thought of this before. https://robo-affordances.github.io/ from 2023 is one pretty relevant example that comes to mind, but I have recollections of similar ideas going back to at least 2016 or so (many of which are cited in the V-JEPA2 paper). If you think data-driven approaches are a good idea for manipulation, then the idea of trying to use Youtube as a source of data (an extremely popular data source in computer vision for the past decade) isn't exactly a huge leap. Of course, the "how" is the hard part, for all sorts of reasons. And the "how" is what makes this paper (and prior research in the area) interesting.

Re: We accidentally solved robotics by watching 1M hours of YouTube

#75
I don't know. I'm not the expert, but if you've ever tried to a backflip or anything where your toes are above your head, then you'll know that spatial awareness goes well beyond vision. Or if you throw a frisbee for the dog to catch, they don't actually look at it while running; they look, predict position, then move in. Veni, vidi, vici. So any model that "learns physics" just through vision seems flawed from the start. What's your thought there?

Re: We accidentally solved robotics by watching 1M hours of YouTube

#76
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have never seen "ngmi" before, I wonder in which subculture it is common

It's the second most common four-letter acronym in crypto hype threads right after hfsp.

The Urban Dictionary definition is hilarious, opens with "HFSP is an acronym used typically in the crypto community against non-belivers".

Hasn't defined the term yet and I know I'm in for a hell of a ride.

Re: We accidentally solved robotics by watching 1M hours of YouTube

#78
Pure vision will never be enough because it does not contain information about the physical feedback like pressure and touch, or the strength required to perform a task.

For example, so that you don't crush a human when doing massage (but still need to press hard), or apply the right amount of force (and finesse?) to skin a fish fillet without cutting the skin itself.

Practically in the near term, it's hard to sample from failure examples with videos on Youtube, such as when food spills out of the pot accidentally. Studying simple tasks through the happy path makes it hard to get the robot to figure out how to do something until it succeeds, which can appear even in relatively simple jobs like shuffling garbage.

With that said, I suppose a robot can be made to practice in real life after learning something from vision.

Re: We accidentally solved robotics by watching 1M hours of YouTube

#80
post #2

Does YouTube allow massive scraping like this in their ToS?

Per HiQ vs. LinkedIn, it doesn't matter what their ToS says if the scraper didn't have to agree to the ToS to scrape the data. YouTube will serve videos to someone who isn't logged in. So if you've never agreed to YouTube's ToS, you can scrape the videos. If YT forced everyone to log in before they could watch a video, then anyone who wants to scrape videos would have had to agree to the ToS at some point.
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