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Intrinsic, a new Alphabet company

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Re: Intrinsic, a new Alphabet company

#91

Post by taldo »

neltnerb wrote: post #84
motohagiography wrote: post #60

Makes sense. The end state appears to be that humans should only be supervising ML that generates goal and outcome based behaviors for robots, and the machines will construct tools to solve problems themselves. The leap from an AI model learning how to replicate a behaviour (e.g. evolving walking to solve problems https://unitylist.com/p/2id/walking-ai ) to reasoning about it in terms of actuators and physical feedba…

https://www.mujin.co.jp/en/ This is not manual or bespoke and it has sensors. The videos are incredible and they work in real life already. This one is it moving petri dishes full of liquid without spilling! This is obviously not being pre-programmed to move along some kind of 1980s style fixed paths for welding parts as Alphabet apparently thinks everyone is still doing. The obliviousness of suggesting that using ML…

The few Mujin videos I watched look a lot like PCB assembly pick-n-place machines. A little bit of computer vision, a little sensing here and there, but overall fairly simple pre-programmed moves, on a pretty controlled environment.

Re: Intrinsic, a new Alphabet company

#92

Post by cbm-vic-20 »

Twirrim wrote: post #57
rexreed wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The list of Robot company failures and the robotic industry dead pool runs very deep. Just in the past few years: * Rethink Robotics https://www.zdnet.com/article/sudden-unexpected-demise-of-re... * Anki https://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/home-robots/con... * Jibo https://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/home-robots/jib... * Blue Workforce https://www.therobotreport.com/blue-workforce-robot-files-ba...…

Amazon bought Kiva a while back now to do robotics for them, and it's used heavily in their warehouses and facilities around retail side. Anything they can automate through robotics, they try to as robots can work 24x7 (other than maintenance requirements) and over their life span cost less than human workers. They also sponsor engineering competitions around trying to make generalised picking machines. It's good PR…

Tom Scott had a good video a couple of weeks ago about a grocery packing warehouse that has a sophisticated picking network:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ssZ_8cqfBlE

Re: Intrinsic, a new Alphabet company

#93

Post by ajsnigrutin »

falcor84 wrote: post #90
extropy wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The implication is that noone wants to work those jobs anymore and the options are to either import illegal workers being paid below minimal wage or replace by robots.

>noone wants to work those jobs anymore The implication of that in turn is that these US companies aren't willing to pay at a rate that would be competitive in the market

Yep, people will do all the jobs.... even hard, shitty jobs... just not for minimum wage.

Re: Intrinsic, a new Alphabet company

#94

Post by xor99 »

Robotics is not a software problem and SV companies bias is towards software development (a little different with X but still apparent). I think most companies that try to throw data at existing problems in robotics using existing machines will have a hard time matching human efficiency. For example, in something as straightforward as the usb insertion task.

Hardware and mechanical is like 95% of the problem so there's a need to take the approach of making the machines that make and then add the software on top and developing synthetic task orientated data from that. E.g. the dishwasher, which works because its physically designed for washing plates and then automation was added. The robot arm is a general purpose technology that has been around in the same form since the 60s/70s. There are many options as alternatives (e.g. magnetic assembly or even self-assembly in certain industries) but ofc these are incredibly risky commercially.

I'm aware that this is just the first post and the above is well known in robotics development so excited to see what gets built!

Re: Intrinsic, a new Alphabet company

#95

Post by downWidOutaFite »

falcor84 wrote: post #90
extropy wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The implication is that noone wants to work those jobs anymore and the options are to either import illegal workers being paid below minimal wage or replace by robots.

>noone wants to work those jobs anymore The implication of that in turn is that these US companies aren't willing to pay at a rate that would be competitive in the market

The other implication is that the US is unwilling to take advantage of the millions of people that want to immigrate here.

Re: Intrinsic, a new Alphabet company

#96

Post by neltnerb »

taldo wrote: post #91
neltnerb wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.mujin.co.jp/en/ This is not manual or bespoke and it has sensors. The videos are incredible and they work in real life already. This one is it moving petri dishes full of liquid without spilling! This is obviously not being pre-programmed to move along some kind of 1980s style fixed paths for welding parts as Alphabet apparently thinks everyone is still doing. The obliviousness of suggesting that using ML…

The few Mujin videos I watched look a lot like PCB assembly pick-n-place machines. A little bit of computer vision, a little sensing here and there, but overall fairly simple pre-programmed moves, on a pretty controlled environment.

If you check out the beginning of the video link (I had it fast forwarded towards the end) you can see that it is doing an awful lot more than that, and in 2013.

A pick and place is 2-axis movement with a suction cup. This is controlling a robot arm with a ton of degrees of freedom and developing paths for moving through all those degrees of freedom without hitting anything and using internal models to do so.

I suppose in some very broad sense it looks similar, but the difficulty of x-y + down is way, way lower than what you're seeing in that video.

Re: Intrinsic, a new Alphabet company

#97

Post by rexreed »

rexreed wrote: post #13
Vivtek wrote: post #3

Weird. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27861201

The list of Robot company failures and the robotic industry dead pool runs very deep. Just in the past few years: * Rethink Robotics https://www.zdnet.com/article/sudden-unexpected-demise-of-re... * Anki https://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/home-robots/con... * Jibo https://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/home-robots/jib... * Blue Workforce https://www.therobotreport.com/blue-workforce-robot-files-ba...…

And just today: https://www.aitrends.com/robotics/softbanks-humanoid-robot-p...

Re: Intrinsic, a new Alphabet company

#98

Post by ksec »

iamstupidsimple wrote: post #68
ethbr0 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Well, while cost are high in first world country, labours are mostly limited to services sector.

In manufacturing most of these labour are still in Asia. And the cost / productivity is still insanely cheap. It isn't just the cost of the Robot itself, but to program a new task which requires software testing and engineers. So the cost barrier is still so far apart. Foxconn make hundreds of millions of smartphone every year. You would have thought saving $10 per phone would have net them a few billions extra profits. And yet their employment rate has remained largely the same.

If and If, US and Tech managed to do this ( there is nothing even remotely close in the next 10 years, but let say somehow there is for the sake of argument ), this will be the largest reset of manufacturing and likely be Industrial Revolution 3.0.

Re: Intrinsic, a new Alphabet company

#100

Post by rexreed »

soheil wrote: post #23
rexreed wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The list of Robot company failures and the robotic industry dead pool runs very deep. Just in the past few years: * Rethink Robotics https://www.zdnet.com/article/sudden-unexpected-demise-of-re... * Anki https://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/home-robots/con... * Jibo https://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/home-robots/jib... * Blue Workforce https://www.therobotreport.com/blue-workforce-robot-files-ba...…

Market is not that big? What is the size of transportation industry alone? What about ride hailing? Investors are skittish? Cruise raised $10B most of it not that long ago, EmbarkTrucks is merging with a SPAC to go IPO soon, I could list others. Robotics is hard but that’s kind of the point.

Transportation might be the identifiable target market, but the actual market of buyers for robotics in transportation is very small, and the problem is that the chasm between the incumbent market and new entrant robotics space is far too large to surpass by the emerging startups.

This is truly a crossing the chasm problem.

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