[HN Gopher] Gemini Robotics 2 brings whole body intelligence to ...
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Gemini Robotics 2 brings whole body intelligence to robots
Author : ai2027
Score : 588 points
Date : 2026-07-30 15:15 UTC (22 hours ago)
HTML web link (deepmind.google)
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| kaeland wrote:
| Wow, what a time to be alive!
| I-M-S wrote:
| I would caution against enthusiasm. Anyone opposing those who
| end up controlling these robots won't be alive for long.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| These robots can't do combat, not effectively anyway, but
| that's already jumping three stages ahead, because first off,
| why would they?
| esafak wrote:
| Because every country wants cheap, expendable, tireless
| soldiers.
| SubiculumCode wrote:
| Now they are coming for the plumbers.
| lnsru wrote:
| Still waiting for self driving car to bring me one robotic
| plumber to my construction site.
| heaney-555 wrote:
| You won't be waiting more than 5-10 years.
| xgulfie wrote:
| Level 5 automomy has been "only five years away" for 15
| years
| heaney-555 wrote:
| You're probably thinking of Level 4. No one thought Level
| 5 was coming before 2050 until a few years ago.
|
| And Level 4 is already here, scaling up, while we're
| seeing the first real signs of Level 5 (Tesla FSD
| Supervised).
|
| The progress here is staggering - I'm not sure why you're
| so cynical!
| SubiculumCode wrote:
| For those who live in SF, for example, the progress is
| obvious. Not speaking for the other person in the thread,
| but most people have not seen an autonomous car working
| in real life. Also, many had assumed that freeway driving
| would happen first (as opposed to complicated city
| driving), but it turned out that the velocities involved
| carried too much risk during development. I agree with
| you, there has been much more progress than I had
| expected.
| aabhay wrote:
| Can anyone that works on this technology provide an honest
| assessment of where this technology actually stands? How much
| instrumentation is actually required, what the interaction
| quality is, how much trouble do humanoids have with in the wild
| daily tasks like turning doorknobs, recovering from falls,
| avoiding knocking into things, etc.
| utopiah wrote:
| IMHO the real test is if any robotic startup currently selling
| (or planning to sell) robots as a service for homes not just
| use it but gets returning users from it.
|
| I did professionally few prototypes with robots and progress is
| real yet very far from what the average customer would find
| reliably useful in menial tasks.
|
| FWIW I do think https://rodneybrooks.com/why-todays-humanoids-
| wont-learn-dex... remains relevant, namely dexterity is also a
| hardware problem, grippers aren't hands. They even clarify
| "multi-finger dexterous manipulation remains challenging." and
| those aren't even fingers with a lot of sensors.
| p1esk wrote:
| It's still at GPT-1 level, but GPT-2 moment feels imminent.
| tavavex wrote:
| What signs point to an inevitable GPT-2 moment in this field?
| p1esk wrote:
| This blog post
| adityashankar wrote:
| I work in this field, and I wrote my bachelor's thesis here,
| not with humanoids but with VLAs (think chatgpt connected to a
| robot arm)
|
| It's certainly not there yet for anything practical, there's
| also certain bits and structures that don't have accurate names
| during construction, and it is important to keep that in mind -
| so a robot is unlikely to understand what it means to say "put
| the left bit of this box onto this right bit" due to ambiguity,
| a human would understand that
|
| Plus we have no good reliable accuracy testing data in most
| cases (most tests occur on a few demos, but that isn't a good
| representation of how must things work), popular benchmarks,
| such as libero have been saturated, and nearly everything gets
| 95% there, most companies and researchers have their own
| benchmarks here.
|
| Plus companies lie alot, and do very dangerous things in thier
| videos, I.e. these robots should not be standing very close to
| humans, because of being dangerous.
|
| There are also legitimate concerns of misuse of these robots
| that need to be accounted for, misuse does not have to be
| warfare, but can be as simple as confusing it while it is
| cutting tomatoes with a knife.
|
| Turning doorknob is easy, and fail recovery is also being
| worked on, but we don't have reliable statistics anywhere on
| that. The hard part is on practical things, as in when placing
| bricks or attaching a part during manufacturing it needs to
| ensure that it is aligning everything correctly....and that's
| hard, while it is impressive, it is very irresponsible to keep
| humanoids at home (people are irresponsible when untrained),
| for example, lawnmowers injure about 6400 people a year...and
| that is not an everything machine.
|
| Humanoids in general are...not appealing in specific, due to
| maintainable of joints, complexity, but robot arms in
| particular, expecially on wheels (check mobile aloha), are
| likely to be able to do tasks such as clean up in hotels, after
| a guest had left, or replace some cooks in restaurants (if
| their work is consistent)
| dyauspitr wrote:
| This is absolutely not true check out Sunday robotics and
| their robot that folds clothes. Sunday robotics says it does
| holding of clothes correctly 99% of the time that is real
| world usage today. They even have three hour video of the
| robot folding the clothes.
| shawabawa3 wrote:
| They didn't mention anything about folding clothes so I
| suspect this comment is just an ad
| tamimio wrote:
| There is a LOT of monkey business when it comes to robotics
| industry, a lot of demos you see are well crafted for that
| specific demo, a lot of times there's even actual fraud "like
| claiming it's an autonomous but it was actually teleoperated
| during the demo", a lot robots that make most hypes are
| practically useless (dog robots or qugv for example) no matter
| how they try to create a usecase, when it comes to
| practicality, most fail. Robotics as an industry is niche (not
| to be confused with cobotics) the only exception is drones
| which is something I said in a workshop back in 2020 that
| drones are the only potential and will dominate if we solved
| the endurance issue, which is also why they immediately got
| weaponized because humans are usually evil and will utilize
| useful stuff in bad things.
|
| Humanoids are far from being remotely useful in real life
| scenarios, yet.
|
| Fun fact: most (if not all) qugv can't go reverse on a
| stairway.
| probablyabot wrote:
| Unfortunately I can't go into too much depth but I've seen many
| first hand evaluations of these robots- I'm a robot technician
| with first hand experience working on these robots. There is an
| incredible amount of effort and money going into training on
| many different tasks, including a few you mentioned and many
| more. They're getting pretty good, but don't expect to see this
| generation of bots doing their thing in public for a while, if
| ever. Generally they're pretty safe but they're a long way from
| safe enough to be sold to individuals in a household
| environment. I expect to see an incredible amount of progress
| in the next couple years.
| horacemorace wrote:
| Fingers crossed this inspires a Chinese lab to release some
| weights so people can benefit.
| martythemaniak wrote:
| They already do: https://qwen.ai/blog?id=qwen-robotsuite
|
| Nvidia also releases their Cosmos series models.
| samhclark wrote:
| Did qwen actually release those robotsuite weights? I can't
| seem to find them anywhere.
| RandomLensman wrote:
| > It can better detect when humans are nearby, trigger safety
| tool calls and bring the robot to a safe stop if someone
| approaches too closely.
|
| If the robots stop when humans are too close, wouldn't that mean
| that robots for close interaction or handling of humans need a
| whole other level of control?
| FartyMcFarter wrote:
| Yes. That's a whole other level of difficulty to accomplish
| safely.
| officialchicken wrote:
| Also, "better" is doing a lot of lifting here, meaning it still
| fails regularly.
| uejfiweun wrote:
| It's funny how Google is essentially trying to compete with the
| software side of Tesla only - Waymos (which AFAIK they plan to
| partner with major automakers), now this, etc.
| xnx wrote:
| Seems smart. There are dozens of companies that make low-margin
| cars. There's only one company that has managed to make a
| working autonomous software driver.
| heaney-555 wrote:
| Tesla is the only company to have high-margin mass-market
| EVs.
| xnx wrote:
| True, but their margins only exist because of protectionist
| US laws (i.e. 100% tariff on Chinese competitors).
| heaney-555 wrote:
| What does that have to do with margins?
| xnx wrote:
| Not many people would pay $62K for a Tesla Model Y if
| they could get a BYD Sealion for $37K.
| heaney-555 wrote:
| Do you know what 'margins' means?
|
| And even in markets where BYD Sealion is sold - including
| China - Tesla Model Y outsells it!
| nl wrote:
| Margins means exactly what the poster you are replying to
| implies: that in the US Tesla has high margins (the
| difference between cost of good sold and what you get for
| them) because tarrifs make Chinese brands uncompetitive.
|
| And as Tesla's latest financials showed they are under
| margin pressure too, even with that:
| https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/stocks/articles/tesla-
| tsla...
|
| > in markets where BYD Sealion is sold - including China
| - Tesla Model Y outsells it!
|
| Sure, but that's because BYD (for example) has both the
| Atto 3 and the Sealion which overlap in market segment.
| FartyMcFarter wrote:
| Another way to look at it is that they're avoiding some of the
| expensive parts of making products that use AI, while leaning
| into their strengths. No Tesla required within the explanation.
| dawnerd wrote:
| That makes it sound like Waymo is copying Tesla when in fact
| Waymo has been in the works before Tesla even considered self
| driving.
| Rebuff5007 wrote:
| Bizarre oversimplification.
|
| For both manipulation and autonomous driving, google has
| invested in approaches with custom hardware, and off-the-shelf
| hardware, and a blend (which is what waymo is).
| _davide_ wrote:
| What's the point of "releasing it"? It only makes sense in the
| labs, and what would calling your APIs give "me" as a researcher,
| other than a baseline to beat? mah the model is real, but it
| feels 100% internal
| jjice wrote:
| What's the point of not releasing it? Let people play with it
| and get some experience with it for a price.
| LarsDu88 wrote:
| All VLM, VLA models. I wonder if these architectures will reach
| prod before Yann LeCunn's world model JEPA startup even gets off
| the ground in Europe.
| cowboy_henk wrote:
| A 36% success rate on screwing in a light bulb means there's
| probably something to LeCunn's take that VLM/VLA models aren't
| going to be the thing powering tomorrow's robots, but only time
| will tell.
| LarsDu88 wrote:
| Where did you get this perf metric? I couldn't find it in the
| release
| striking wrote:
| Second chart (it's to the right of the first chart and
| clicking it to scroll is easier than otherwise)
| LarsDu88 wrote:
| Wow screw lightbulb is lower than tie bag or close
| ziploc. Pretty surprising.
| heaney-555 wrote:
| It's still very early days. There are many benchmarks that
| LLMs scored 36% on just 18 months ago that they're now at
| 100% on.
| swframe2 wrote:
| Welsh Labs has a great video on JEPA and robotics.
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kYkIdXwW2AE
| FartyMcFarter wrote:
| These robots look slow and not very fluid in their motions, but
| LLMs like ChatGPT also looked very dumb initially. If progress is
| as fast as LLMs , this could have massive applications in a few
| years.
| pwython wrote:
| For house keeping tasks the robotics companies love showing
| off... it honestly doesn't matter if it takes a robot longer
| than a human to clean your house. As long as it gets done
| before you get home from work, no big deal.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| Yeah, the dishwasher takes much longer to do the dishes than
| I do by hand, but that's cool. That said, the dishwasher is
| out of the way.
|
| I don't think we'll get household robots anytime soon. Hell,
| the only ones that can afford them will be the same that
| would hire human household help.
| FartyMcFarter wrote:
| > Hell, the only ones that can afford them will be the same
| that would hire human household help.
|
| But maybe they'd rather deal with a robot than a human?
| RandomLensman wrote:
| Honestly: why?
| terio wrote:
| Less liability?
| tartoran wrote:
| You think robots can't malfunction or be hacked to do
| some nefarious things in the household?
| seasox wrote:
| Robots don't steal and don't want a raise.
| RandomLensman wrote:
| If there is a subscription in there somewhere, prices
| could change.
| pertymcpert wrote:
| It's ok, we get it you don't want one. I would happily
| pay $20k-$30k for one if it worked well. I know a lot of
| people who would.
| RandomLensman wrote:
| I might even get one as I like trying new tech if and
| when, but I have no issue with hiring humans either and
| humans so far "fail" very differently from machines (as
| in a lot of software). I find the latter far less
| predictable and controllable.
| lukan wrote:
| Also if the robot is ultimately controlled by Musk or
| Altman?
|
| I do want a robot serviant. But running AI that I
| control. Here it google says it can "And this profound
| intelligence can also run locally on-device", that makes
| it interesting for me.
| goatlover wrote:
| They'll just spy on you along with the smart tv, phone
| and flock camera at the street corner.
| iinnPP wrote:
| The list of plausible answers is long enough as to
| question why you felt the need to include the word
| honestly, irony? One example: social anxiety.
| RandomLensman wrote:
| Not irony: why manage machines with all the issues that
| go with that instead of people?
| Marha01 wrote:
| Tell me you are not an introvert without telling me...
|
| I don't want a person I barely know regularly going all
| over my apartment. What if they discover... nevermind.
|
| A robot, on the other hand? Hell yeah!
| luckydata wrote:
| you don't need to be an introvert to find that line of
| reasoning short sighted. I'm plenty extroverted and I
| still don't want to deal with people coming to my house
| to clean it. It's very invasive and they rarely do a good
| job. A robot that I can "train" to do exactly what I need
| and constantly works in the background would be a HUGE
| value add to my lifestyle.
| RandomLensman wrote:
| The difference might be that I don't believe in these
| "machine gods of cleaning" being the thing to arrive
| (looking at current consumer goods) and then the boundary
| for what to choose shifts a lot if one is willing to deal
| with humans. The latter also doesn't need to be so
| foreign, e.g., could be someone already working for a
| friend.
| bananaflag wrote:
| A robot will send whatever they discover to the FBI.
|
| My issue is different: I feel bad with someone working
| around me while I am lazy. A robot would not pose that
| problem.
| FartyMcFarter wrote:
| I don't want a person I don't know very well in my space.
|
| That aside: if I'm lucky enough to find a person who's
| good and reliable, they might move away, switch jobs etc.
|
| It has all the headaches that come with hiring and
| managing someone, because, well, it is exactly that... If
| I don't want to be a manager at work (been there done
| that, happy to let others do it and get the raise that
| comes along with it), I sure as heck don't want to do it
| at home.
| nozzlegear wrote:
| Usually you hire a cleaning company who sends a person
| they've hired and vetted to clean, you don't have to deal
| with all of that stuff.
| FartyMcFarter wrote:
| Then I have to deal with whichever random person they
| decide to send. I can't be the only one who finds this
| annoying (even if I'm not in the majority).
| RandomLensman wrote:
| You'd need to manage the robot, too, I would think. In my
| experience, I rather manage people than machines.
| margalabargala wrote:
| Sure, but others have the opposite preference. Machines
| tend to be more predictable.
| RandomLensman wrote:
| I think machines are just unpredictable in different ways
| (for example, changes from software updates).
| lukan wrote:
| "Machines tend to be more predictable."
|
| Those controlled by LLM's maybe ain't.
|
| Here with google the LLM is even local, but will be fun
| with the cloud controlled robots, where the company got
| overwhelmed and silently uses a weaker model at certain
| times. With fun results.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| I prefer machines
| kibwen wrote:
| _> I don 't want a person I don't know very well in my
| space._
|
| In the humanoid robot scenario, you'll get a surveillance
| device with a built-in microphone and camera beaming
| every intimate detail of your space to the highest
| bidder. Instead of getting one person you don't know very
| well in your space, you'll get thousands.
| fidotron wrote:
| Humans have emotions. Best avoided.
| RajT88 wrote:
| It's been said that people who do not have a high EQ
| gravitate towards tech, because machines are easier to
| understand than people.
| gretch wrote:
| I feel like people who have high EQ should actually grasp
| the infinite depth and complexity of even the median
| human.
|
| Just imagine, there's a woman Alice who cleans your home
| once a month. On this particular day, she had a fight
| with her husband this morning on (something completely
| unrelated to you).
|
| Do you expect her to check her emotions at the door when
| she enters your space? Or is she going to give really bad
| vibes while she is moving around your house?
| fidotron wrote:
| It's been said that people that say this are
| transparently trying to manipulate other people, which is
| why the others prefer to cut off all potential for
| tedious negotiations.
|
| This is the same reason people prefer buying Tesla cars
| direct instead of having to make a deal at a dealership.
| If they all had high EQ maybe they'd prefer the
| dealership model after all.
| RajT88 wrote:
| > It's been said that people that say this are
| transparently trying to manipulate other people
|
| Tech does also attract grumpy people.
|
| The reason this idea stuck in my memory when I read it -
| is that it resonated with me. To some extent I feel this
| way.
| fidotron wrote:
| > Tech does also attract grumpy people.
|
| You have cause and effect wrong; it just makes people
| that have to deal with the people in and around the tech
| industry grumpy.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| With a robot housemaid, I wouldn't have to get dressed.
| :-P
|
| More seriously:
|
| - I wouldn't feel obligated to 'pre-clean' anything. Who
| wants to come across as a thoughtless/careless slob whose
| personal habits amount to borderline-abusive demands on
| the cleaning staff? Not me... and where does that line
| get drawn, anyway?
|
| - I wouldn't worry about stuff being picked up and
| misplaced
|
| - I have never had problems with maids stealing stuff,
| but I know others have
|
| - Cleaning can be initiated or postponed as needed, with
| no dependencies on someone else's schedule
| kibwen wrote:
| _> With a robot housemaid, I wouldn 't have to get
| dressed. :-P_
|
| Well, as long as you don't mind the workers in the robot
| company's telemetrics department whacking it to your
| robot's video feed.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| They can jerk themselves silly, IDGAF. When the 'Black
| Mirror' screenwriters get involved, though, I'll require
| some back-end participation of the financial kind.
|
| (I'm being facetious here: nothing that transmits data
| out of the house is going to be deployed to run household
| robots, at least not in my house. Even if I didn't care,
| I can't make that call on behalf of family members or
| guests. Then there's the obvious concern that the
| robotics company would sell the data to my homeowners'
| insurance company, health insurance company, and who
| knows who else.)
| icepush wrote:
| For the robot to function without teleoperation, sota is
| for it to be using a model that runs on chips about 5-10x
| the cost of what is being discussed here. How do you
| propose for that without transmission of data out of your
| house ?
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| I've pretty much made my peace with the idea of spending
| on GPUs what I used to spend on sports cars.
|
| That being said, by the time the kinematic hardware
| needed to build a robotic housekeeper is available for
| home use, I don't think the brainpower is going to be a
| problem. There's nothing in _Ex Machina_ that couldn 't
| run on a couple of RTX 6000s.
| RandomLensman wrote:
| The last point I can get behind as it is a clear
| advantage, the other ones might need some more superhuman
| abilities that I'd not accept as given until demonstrated
| in extenso.
| verdverm wrote:
| "hey Rosie, the cat yakked on the rug again"
|
| (real-time mess handling)
| sagarm wrote:
| The dishwasher is out of the way because you made space for
| it out of the way. We'll probably adapt our spaces for
| robots too eventually.
|
| For example, you could store far more things out of easy
| human reach.
| qurren wrote:
| I'm bearish that they'll be economically viable in the house
| for a very long time.
|
| For businesses the bar for adoption is very low: If the thing
| can work repetitive jobs for 24 hours a day and replace 3
| shifts, the purchase bar is nominally anything less than 3 x
| human salary if your budgeting horizon is 1 year. That's a
| high number, and probably fairly easy to achieve.
|
| For homes, it's a very different bar. You'd have a hard time
| convincing most American families to purchase anything with a
| >$1000 price tag. Currently that's pretty much impossible for
| a humanoid.
| heaney-555 wrote:
| >You'd have a hard time convincing most American families
| to purchase anything with a >$1000 price tag.
|
| Like cars, they'll likely purchase them through finance
| deals, with a monthly payment. Or perhaps even rent/lease
| them.
| meowkit wrote:
| Much easier to remotely brick a robot too I imagine
| mbil wrote:
| Leasing seems like it could make sense given rapid
| upgrades in the technology. Why spend $15k on a home
| robot that will be obsoleted in the next few years?
| garbageman wrote:
| Leasing is out, but locked-in subscriptions are in!
| qurren wrote:
| Cars are an absolute necessity in the US unless you live
| in one of the small handful of cities that have viable
| public transit. Different thing altogether.
|
| Robots aren't a necessity, and for a price tag in the
| tens of thousands, most people will just mop their own
| floors and do their own laundry.
| georgemcbay wrote:
| > Robots aren't a necessity, and for a price tag in the
| tens of thousands, most people will just mop their own
| floors and do their own laundry.
|
| And (regardless of the costs involved) if I were going to
| pay money to not do this stuff myself, I'd rather pay a
| human to do it because I know there are humans out there
| that could use the work and I value them much more than I
| value Google and other corporations making even more
| obscene amounts of money selling future e-waste.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| $45k cars are not neccessary though, and that's the
| average american car loan today
| bigfishrunning wrote:
| That's really more of a financial literacy problem
| though. People don't see $45k car, they see $600/mo
| payment. And car dealers very much sell on the payment
| and not on the actual price.
| pessimizer wrote:
| Why would it be different for a robot?
| bigfishrunning wrote:
| People *need* a car, and a salesman manipulates them into
| buying more car then they need. People aren't convinced
| they *need* a robot.
|
| increasing your spend by 25% is a smaller change then
| increasing your spend by infinity%
| drusepth wrote:
| nit: 45k is the average car loan for a _new_ car, but
| average for a used car is $25k. Purchasing a car is a
| necessity but purchasing a new car is a luxury.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| Average monthly payment for both new and used cars is
| $500-$700
| michaelmrose wrote:
| People are financing small consumer goods with 3 digit
| price tags because they can't afford their mediocre
| already leveraged life. They borrow high 4 to low 5
| figures for a car because they can't get to work to earn
| money so they don't have to join the bums sleeping on the
| cardboard. They will not be borrowing high 5 figures to
| low 6 figures for Rosie the Robot.
|
| If Rosie was the only output she would never happen.
| Rosie might happen as a side benefit of replacing
| American workers but only for the rich people.
|
| The vast majority which may be replaced would probably be
| better off burning down the factory rather than celebrate
| their upcoming domestic helper.
| randomNumber7 wrote:
| If you have a robot doing household work you can spend
| more time at work /S
| kelvinjps10 wrote:
| At that point why not have a human cleaning service it
| will probably be cheaper
| luckydata wrote:
| it's not cheap at all and the privacy and logistical
| implications of letting a stranger inside your house is
| something not everyone wants to deal with. I would rather
| have a robot.
| stirfish wrote:
| I don't trust a robot with my privacy, but I know Linette
| isn't building a profile of my shopping habits and Wi-Fi
| traffic. She is also careful to not let my cats out.
| blacksmith_tb wrote:
| Not to pull on the tinfoil hat, but I would assume most
| commercially available home cleaning robots will be
| covered with cameras, mics, and other sensors, and
| connected to their manufacturer's cloud... I don't pay
| for housecleaning, but I would vet humans quite
| differently.
| infinitezest wrote:
| Suggesting that a robot is the more privacy friendly
| option is an interesting take.
| Marha01 wrote:
| Why not? A recording from a robot can be _potentially_
| viewed by a real human, if the company is not reputable
| (happened with robotic vacuums). But by default, no
| humans will view it.
|
| A human house cleaner by definition is a real human
| looking at your home every time.
| defrost wrote:
| One human, with a single set of human eyes and a limited
| network of associates with few immediate criminals
| looking to take advantage (although, yes, that does
| happen).
|
| Versus a small army of roomba's and equivalents mapping
| out floor plans and tangentially exposing human
| occupation times with that large data set almost
| certainly exposed to criminal and surveillance networks
| that will almost certainly use some of that choicer data
| to their advantage.
|
| It's literally trade offs in both cases.
| lovasoa wrote:
| Of course we'll rent them! I don't even want to keep a
| robot in my flat all the time.
|
| But that means speed does matter after all. The renting
| company will need to clean as many flats as possible with
| a single robot in a single day.
| neutronicus wrote:
| I mean, a twice-monthly house-cleaning service is running
| you ballpark 5k/year and people treat that shit as non-
| negotiable. I tried to claw back that line item after our
| second baby was born (wife didn't want them in the house
| anyway when we had a newborn), and it was completely
| unsuccessful. She claimed misery and all our friends were
| on her side.
|
| So the lifestyle stayed inflated.
| qurren wrote:
| Yes, but:
|
| 1. 80%+ of Americans can't afford house cleaning
| services. I'm a software engineer in silicon valley and
| even I clean my own house because I don't think I can
| afford it. My rents have gone up by more than 5K in the
| last year, my salary hasn't, so that's coming out of my
| house cleaning budget.
|
| 2. Even if you can afford 5K/year on it, the cleaning
| service is not an upfront commitment. You can bail
| anytime when you get laid off and clean your own house.
|
| 3. Consumers don't budget rationally. Businesses do.
| soperj wrote:
| > ballpark 5k/year
|
| How big is your house? When we had a cleaning lady it was
| $70 a go. Under $2000 for every second week.
| pertymcpert wrote:
| I have a 1300 sqft house, 3b2b. Costs me around $200 for
| a cleaning.
| neutronicus wrote:
| Similar here for 2500 finished sq ft.
| drusepth wrote:
| Same, it was $150 for 1400 sq ft house last I did it, so
| roughly same ballpark. I do remember it being closer to
| $80 10ish years ago though.
| soperj wrote:
| Ours was a 1300 3b1b. It was $35 an hour, they finished
| everything in under 2 hours. I'm guessing(hoping!) they
| have to be there for more than 2 hours for $200?
| neutronicus wrote:
| 2500 finished square feet in a MCOL east coast metro
| (Baltimore).
|
| Wondering if you're closer to the southern border or
| something.
| soperj wrote:
| Southern border of Canada yeah.
| infecto wrote:
| $70 a go? That's got to be the cash only person to person
| handshake agreement. That would never buy you laundry
| too.
|
| I think I remember maybe around $100 including laundry
| almost 20 years ago and that was a cash type arrangement,
| weekly including laundry (multi hour visit).
| rfrey wrote:
| There is a lot of variance in the price of cleaning tied
| to location. Cost of living in the area for sure, but
| also presence or absence of economic migrants and new
| immigrants.
| tootie wrote:
| I think domestic robots will make a lot of incremental
| progress and that few, if any, will be humanoid. We'll see
| a laundry folder and sock picker-upper and they'll be more
| like roombas or just big cubes. And tethered.
| kibwen wrote:
| The more likely scenario is that the hucksters currently
| hyping the idea of humanoid robots will gradually move
| the goalposts so that, when we eventually get a big,
| soft, stationary cube with six inflatable robot arms
| they'll point to it and say "behold, a humanoid robot!"
| and declare their predictions vindicated.
| jameshart wrote:
| Robot lawnmowers are mostly over $1000 already and they
| only do one thing. Heck, a lot of _lawnmowers_ are over
| $1000.
|
| You can pay over $500 for an automatic cat litter box.
| Robot vacuums can be cheap but run to $600 or so. Household
| appliances is a robust sector where people have a proven
| track record of spending a lot of money.
| memonkey wrote:
| For all of these things, then what's the point of having
| a humanoid robot then? The last thing is a folding
| laundry bot that I would happily also pay $1000 for.
| lowbloodsugar wrote:
| My wife hates having other people in our house and we
| both hate cleaning. If it worked, we'd drop $5k no
| problem. It'll be $5k and a $50/mo sub? Sold!
| mrexroad wrote:
| > folding laundry robot
|
| This is my dream for a house chore robot. If I could dump
| hampers of clothes into a receptacle and get stacks of
| folded clothes out, I'd happily pay $1k. Household of 5;
| my kids each produce 3-4 sets of clothes a day (sleep,
| school, sports, after school). I run wash in AM so dryer
| finishes before 3pm (pg&e ToU) and then I'm focused on
| other things for rest of day. More often than not, I get
| to bed to find a near full hamper of clothes dumped where
| I sleep and then have to sort/fold/deliver. Bonus points
| if robot can sort different items to different
| stacks/bundles.
|
| I don't need AI/robotics to save me time from having to
| think, research, or code... I need AI/robotics to save me
| time so _I can_ think, research, or code.
| imtringued wrote:
| A foldimate costs a fraction of your $1k.
| 76SlashDolphin wrote:
| And is vapourware. They went bankrupt in 2021 after
| failing to make it work and the domain is run by
| scammers.
| garbageman wrote:
| Automatic litter box is a great example. We've had one
| for ~7 years and it's still going strong. High initial
| cost that pays back every day over the course of what
| will likely be a decade+ of usage. Absolutely worth every
| penny if you look to the horizon. I imagine the robot
| mowers and robot house maids will fall under the same
| type of payback but with even higher upfront costs -
| perhaps this will turn into yet another subscription
| scheme.
| xnx wrote:
| > We've had one for ~7 years and it's still going strong
|
| Interested. Which one?
| jvidalv wrote:
| Also interested.
| f6v wrote:
| Yeah, I heard all it does is smear shit all over itself.
| Any good brands?
| entropic wrote:
| Not OP, but I have a litter robot 3 that is still going
| strong after 10 years, and a litter robot 4 that is
| around four years old. The only problem I've run into is
| occasionally the pinch sensor will get bits of litter
| stuck in it and I have to take the globe off and tap/push
| on the sensor housing, then it will allow cycling again.
|
| Great machines!
|
| https://www.litter-robot.com/
| lp0_on_fire wrote:
| Do you use it with multiple cats? I know they advertise
| it that way but I'm curious where the rubber meets the
| pavement.
| entropic wrote:
| Yeah, I've always had two or three cats using them, they
| like to use them as an opportunity to hide and pounce on
| one another as one exits the litter robot globe, inside
| the globe they have a pretty limited field of view.
| codegeek wrote:
| It is all about the ROI. A lawn cut from a professional
| can cost anywhere from $25-$100 on an average (per cut).
| So with a $1000 lawn mower, you will get the return back
| in 10-40 cuts at most. That is less than 1-2 seasons.
| Sure, there will be some maintenance cost over the years
| but if you look at a 5-10 year period, it is totally
| worth doing your own. Even with the $1000 price tag. Of
| course, you cannot count the labor time.
| vladgur wrote:
| There is more to yard work than mowing the lawn
| unfortunately. Trimming. Fertilizing Etc etc
|
| If I can get a robot replace a gardener who I pay $170/mo
| for 2 visits per month, i probably would. But I suspect
| that would kill lawn
| codegeek wrote:
| Agreed. That's one thing I realized I cannot do myself. I
| bought an expensive Mower Rider and tried it myself only
| realizing how much work it is for do trimming, blow,
| cleanup, weeding etc other than just mowing. Granted, I
| have a large property. I hired back a landscaper and
| focus my time on other things :)
| traes wrote:
| I have personally never met someone with a personal
| robotic lawnmower, and I suspect that if you have you
| live in a bubble that is severely biasing your view of
| the average American.
| alnwlsn wrote:
| My cousin has one. But he also lives on 5 acres, which is
| also not average either.
|
| Apparently prices on them have gone way up. The one he
| has now would cost something like $6K today.
| jameshart wrote:
| A product doesn't need to appeal to or reach the average
| American to be a viable product.
| traes wrote:
| Perhaps not, but I interpreted it as an intended
| counterexample to the GP's claim
|
| > You'd have a hard time convincing most American
| families to purchase anything with a >$1000 price tag...
|
| Which I am skeptical of.
| si1entstill wrote:
| I'm not sure.
|
| I think house cleaning/chores require at least a "part-
| time" job's work of work for the average household
| (especially with children). We may be atypical, but my
| partner and I don't want to hire out a cleaning service and
| deal with the whole human component. But, I think we'd
| gladly pay 15k+ if it allowed us to take on the additional
| gainful workload. Even at a 20k price tag, I suspect we
| would likely have made up the difference in under a year.
| qurren wrote:
| If you can even _afford_ 20K you 're in the top 10% of
| the US population. It's not a very big market, and even
| selling to that market is hard. Probably only 10% of that
| 10% will actually buy, and all of a sudden you're selling
| to 1%.
|
| Selling to businesses is much easier, 99% of businesses
| can afford 200K if it replaces 3 x 70K humans.
| nsvd2 wrote:
| Actually the high income households are becoming a
| greater and greater share of spending, referred to as the
| "K shaped" economy. For example, the top quintile of
| households accounts for about 40% of all consumer
| spending.
| jfaat wrote:
| Your napkin math only shows that the market is identical.
| There's about 35m businesses operating in the US. So by
| selling to 10% of those you sell the exact same number of
| robots...
| yorwba wrote:
| The difference is that some of those businesses might buy
| a lot more than just one robot. As many as they currently
| have employees doing robot work for a human salary.
| aantix wrote:
| Most people finance vehicles that cost much more than
| 20K.
|
| I'd gladly pay or finance a robot that could have dishes
| clean, laundry folded, and carpets vacuumed by the time
| our family got home.
| drusepth wrote:
| I don't think a cleaning robot and a vehicle are in the
| same category, as vehicles are more a necessity (at the
| very least to get to and from your jobs, to buy
| groceries, etc) and a cleaning robot is squarely a
| luxury.
| rendang wrote:
| A car saves you time walking/biking, a robot saves chore
| time. Depending on depreciation, it's feasible that you
| could go do minimum-wage level work on Doordash using the
| chore time you save from the robot and still come out
| ahead. E.g. 5 hours/week at $20/hour = $5200/yr
| brailsafe wrote:
| > A car saves you time walking/biking, a robot saves
| chore time
|
| Mileage varies. My impression is that on net, many people
| borrow money for the vehicle and end up adjusting their
| lives to depend on it, so much so that in their head they
| think they're saving time, but if they'd put that money
| into their home budget and moved closer to where things
| are, they'd get more exercise, be more socially healthy,
| and also waste less time and money driving. In aggregate,
| this makes everything worse and perpetuates the cycle. I
| sure as hell wouldn't move somewhere I had to drive to
| and from if I didn't already have the car, and I sure as
| hell wouldn't buy a car to get to a job unless the nature
| of my work required it. Not again.
| jader201 wrote:
| Vehicles, when first invented, were 100% a luxury, not a
| necessity.
|
| They only became a "necessity" once they went mainstream
| and the world started evolving with vehicles becoming a
| part of everyday life.
|
| I can certainly see the same thing happening with
| residential robotics.
| nancyminusone wrote:
| Only way I can see that happening is if you somehow get
| fired for not folding your laundry, in the same way
| people are fired when their car breaks and they can't
| make it to work.
| jader201 wrote:
| At some point, household robots -- once they become
| mainstream -- can do things around the home that you
| depend on, and if/when they break down, prevent you from
| being able to work/get to work.
|
| Or, if the stress of doing everything they do is too
| much, and interferes with your ability to work and do
| other things you once had the time to do.
| stef25 wrote:
| So many people talking like cleaning services don't exist
| ACCount37 wrote:
| People in the US buy cars.
|
| Can a household robot provide as much utility as a car?
| If "yes", the market gets pretty big.
| qurren wrote:
| Not really. The car is a non-negotiable, like food,
| unless you live in Boston/NYC/SF or something. The robot
| is not.
| scotty79 wrote:
| People in Europe also buy cars, even though most of them
| doesn't really need to.
| jryle70 wrote:
| The economy would be very dead if people only spend money
| on non-negotiable items. Why would one fly to Colorado if
| they could just go to the park near by?
|
| Robots may not be very useful for now, but they will be
| at some point, and people will buy them, financing if
| they have to. Even if what the robots can do are not non-
| negotiable.
| cj wrote:
| How does it compare to hiring a human?
|
| I pay $200 every 2 weeks to have a 3000 sq ft house
| cleaned.
|
| That's about $5200 a year to fully clean a house. And
| it's a human, so they can also tidy up, clean out the
| refrigerator, do my laundry, water my plants, etc.
| scotty79 wrote:
| You'd have to pay me this much to let a human inside my
| house to do that.
| cj wrote:
| Where I live, you typically share house cleaners with
| your neighbors or family members.
|
| My parents, aunt/uncle, grandparents, and one of my
| neighbors uses the same house cleaner.
|
| If she stole from me, I'd immediately tell my family and
| she would lose basically all of her clients.
|
| That makes it easier for me to trust her.
|
| (It works similarly in NYC apartment buildings - a single
| cleaner often services many people in the same building,
| so they have a reputation to uphold)
|
| I would never use random online cleaning services.
| MostlyStable wrote:
| My understanding from parents and friends who have a
| cleaning service...it pretty much depends on a certain
| baseline level of cleanliness. Most cleaning services
| don't (and likely wouldn't be able to provide) basic
| "pick up around the house". They will come into a house
| that is mostly picked up and sweep, dust, mop, vacuum,
| etc. but they won't come into a toddler house and put
| everything away.
|
| I'm sure that there are services that do this, but I very
| much doubt they are the $400 per month services you are
| talking about. Robots may not be able to do that level of
| task at all right now, but they will get there.
|
| And of course, that's not even thinking about all the
| cleaning tasks that would be avoided in between the
| every-other-week visits.
|
| Having my surfaces be somewhat cleaner every two weeks is
| worth ~nothing to me. It's by far the easiest and least
| unpleasant part of cleaning a house. Having a robot that
| will pick up the detritus of everyday life and put it
| away, pick up and clean dishes, etc. and do so _every
| single day_ would be worth an enormous amount of money.
|
| I have no idea how long it will take for robots to get to
| that point, but whichever company cracks that level first
| is going to make a lot of money.
| stevep98 wrote:
| Totally agree with you on 'putting stuff away'. Much of
| the mental effort is trying to organize stuff so it takes
| space efficiently, and be easy to find it when I need it.
| If a robot put it away, I don't really care where. I can
| just ask it where it is.
| sciencejerk wrote:
| Toddlers should learn to pick up their own toys...?
| Unless we're grooming them for a life of pampered self-
| absorbed entitlement?
| MostlyStable wrote:
| This is one of those "tell me you don't have kids without
| telling me" situations. The process of teaching a kid to
| be a responsible human is long and arduous. If you expect
| a 2 and a half year old to successfully be picking up
| their toys, well, I don't know what to tell you. Go spend
| some time in a daycare, I guess.
|
| And of course, that's completely ignoring the fact that I
| also would like to not have to pick up my shit if I could
| buy a robot that would do it. Yes, I can. And in fact I
| currently do...mostly. But I'm not happy about it and if
| there was an even quasi reasonable amount of money I
| could pay that would mean I would never have to do it
| again, I 100% would do so.
|
| And if you can honestly say that you wouldn't...well I
| hope you are enjoying your life in the monastery.
| sethammons wrote:
| Teaching kids responsibility and autonomy cones in right
| after keeping them healthy.
|
| 2 year olds do a bad job. They are 2. Yet it is valuable
| for them to learn to manage themselves. They love helping
| put silverware away from the washing machine. Kids _need_
| to help as part of their development.
| qsera wrote:
| >but they will get there.
|
| May be they will. But do you think this because of the
| LLMs? I don't think LLMs will help. Because it can only
| generate text.
| stef25 wrote:
| > I'm sure that there are services that do this, but I
| very much doubt they are the $400 per month services you
| are talking about
|
| Costs me 160 / month for 4hrs / week.
| slfnflctd wrote:
| This is the part of the thread I was looking for.
|
| Obviously the whole question is how a robot cleaner
| compares to a human.
|
| As you point out, the potential for robots far
| outperforms humans in multiple categories (although
| clearly not all by any stretch).
|
| I'd say pricing around that of a lower end new car - or
| nice used one - seems about right to me. In terms of
| justifying the price, another thing I haven't seen
| discussed much is the competitive advantage this can
| provide. If you're spending less time cleaning, that's
| more time for other things.
| nancyminusone wrote:
| You don't even "need" to clean your house (yes, yes, I
| know). You do need to drive to work.
| DrScientist wrote:
| To your point - in terms of domestic services - ownership
| isn't the only model. After all human cleaning services
| don't work like that either these days ( even in the
| American south.... ).
|
| Some people might feel that a robot cleaner is less
| intrusive that a person.
| didibus wrote:
| > We may be atypical, but my partner and I don't want to
| hire out a cleaning service and deal with the whole human
| component
|
| I kind of understand where the feeling comes from, but
| this also saddens me. What happened to our generation?
| We're scared of people.
| idiotsecant wrote:
| Sometimes I forget what a bubble HN really is.
| nearbuy wrote:
| Unitree's R1 humanoid robot is only about $6000, and it's
| still a nascent, smallish scale technology. They will come
| down.
|
| If the future home robots are any good, it saves you from
| buying a dishwasher and robot vacuum. It can replace a
| maid/cleaning service and gardener/lawn-mowing service. For
| anyone paying for those services, it pays for itself.
|
| $1000 isn't that high. Probably about a third of American
| households have an appliance over $2000, which is still a
| massive market.
| monknomo wrote:
| I doubt it'd save you from purchasing a dishwasher -
| those things are very efficient and not very expensive.
| Perhaps it'd save you from loading and unloading a
| dishwasher
| xnx wrote:
| Have 2 dishwashers, and you never need to load or unload
| (as an extra step).
| nearbuy wrote:
| I have a dishwasher and I still usually just hand wash.
| It takes about 10 seconds to wash a dish.
|
| The side benefit is all your dishes are always available.
| With the dishwasher, up to one full dishwasher load are
| dirty at any time, which means you need more dishes and
| more cupboard space than someone without a dishwasher.
|
| If the robot is going to clear your dishes and wash them
| for you right away, what's the dishwasher for? To save
| the robot 10 minutes?
| imp0cat wrote:
| Mostly to save water and energy. I have a hard time
| believing the robot would be more efficient washing
| dishes by hand.
| imtringued wrote:
| Just use the shortest two cycle program while following
| the two stage powder suggestion by Technology
| Connections. Obviously, if you are American you have to
| make sure the water going into the dishwasher is hot.
|
| Honestly I don't even bother with two cycles and just use
| a 45 minute program in a 45cm wide dishwasher while
| throwing the extra powder in there anyway because it is
| too cheap to care about the waste vs tabs.
| jaccola wrote:
| Another huge blocker (that is essentially just cost too) is
| maintenance. These things are like 1000x more complex than
| a car, need to work in a diverse range of environments,
| handle water, household chemicals, different humidities,
| kids, etc... maybe eventually robots will service robots
| but that seems very hard!
|
| And talking of kids, these will have to be exceedingly
| safe, a 6ft machine falling on a child is probably a worry
| most households could do without.
| tartoran wrote:
| We'll probably get there in some shape or from but I
| agree, we're absolutely not there yet. I don't see
| humanoid robots normalized in households anytime soon but
| at the same time they'll probably be a thing outside the
| home.
| luckydata wrote:
| if you give me a robot that cleans the house and can do
| dishes and laundry I'll easily pay the cost of a compact
| car for that. I know a LOT of working families that would
| feel similarly.
| jonplackett wrote:
| Yeah if you can afford the probably 10x it will actually
| cost, you can also just afford a cleaner to come twice a
| week and be able to do a wider variety of tasks (anyone
| going to trust this with ironing?)
| f6v wrote:
| Self-driving car brings a robot cleaner to your door step
| once a week.
| codegeek wrote:
| You never know the future but imagine the people who were
| bearish on personal computers when it wasn't a thing yet
| but was being discussed. Imagine Email, Internet etc etc.
| Now they are commodities. I am sure one day AI Robots will
| be a commodity that we could buy for $1000. May be 10 years
| from now. But it is coming.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > You'd have a hard time convincing most American families
| to purchase anything with a >$1000 price tag.
|
| They all have cars. Turns out you can finance things, and
| turn them into forever debts. Paying $30K to never have to
| do chores again, or maybe even cook again, and live in a
| clean neat environment is not only an amazing proposition
| that opens up a lot of _free time_ for people, but will
| also have a lot of social pressure behind it. We have
| social pressure that causes people to buy >$1000 _phones_
| to virtually no marginal benefit over $20 phones.
|
| They will be paid off at $500/mo over 10 years, and most
| renters might just use the one that came with their
| apartment. If they're more like $80K or $100K I could see
| having a problem selling them. But if they basically turned
| apartment buildings into hotels, they would be a bargain
| for landlords; just give them the keys.
|
| edit: of course, sci-fi has already rehearsed this. You can
| watch any number of movies and tv shows with families
| walking through a robot showroom guided by a guy in a cheap
| suit offering to give them the best deal. I'm sure you
| could find written examples from the 40s.
| supern0va wrote:
| > For homes, it's a very different bar. You'd have a hard
| time convincing most American families to purchase anything
| with a >$1000 price tag.
|
| There are plenty of white collar employees in cities paying
| $500+/month for someone to come clean their home. As one of
| those people, I could easily see paying low five figures
| for something like this if it actually worked well and
| could replace most household labor.
| qurren wrote:
| Most consumers don't think like that. Businesses do.
|
| Part of the reason is upfront commitment is scary and
| risky for personal money, but not scary for a business.
| supern0va wrote:
| Most consumers? Sure. Upper middle class consumers?
| They're the sort more likely to buy cars with cash if
| they're dissatisfied with the value of the financing
| offered.
|
| As with most things, it'll cater to that demographic and
| then filter down.
| lanthissa wrote:
| if all it could do was operate a lawn mower and a shovel,
| the annual value to a homeowner in the north east is ~1-2k
| depending on lawn size assuming they value their free time
| at the same amount as their hourly wage.
|
| what you have to keep in mind is homeowners salary is way
| above avg salary so anything you can do to effect them has
| a much larger impact than it would seem at first.
| verdverm wrote:
| I think ~car is a more likely range, there's a lot of value
| in cooking / cleaning, Americans buy cars pretty frequently
| qsera wrote:
| If someone can make a robot that can keep a house and
| surroundings clean and pretty, it is going to sell like hot
| cakes..
| badpun wrote:
| They could be shared, and work practically non-stop (minus
| nights, as that would wake people up). That'd bring the
| per-consumer cost down by a large fraction. The sharing
| would likely be organized by a commercial third-party, but
| still, it could be much cheaper than human cleaners.
|
| Having said that, it could still be decades till the robot
| is ready to be released into human homes unsupervised. The
| variation in human homes, what people store in them etc. is
| not easy. However, it could be ready for hotels much
| sooner.
| Dumblydorr wrote:
| Price point: they'll be very low volume and very high
| price. There's enough inequality and plenty of cash at the
| top to support such luxury robots. Everyone else will be
| doing their chores the old fashioned way, with their own
| hands.
| doctorpangloss wrote:
| > it honestly doesn't matter if it takes a robot longer than
| a human to clean your house
|
| it depends. in order for my slow ass Roomba to clean my
| floors, I have to move a bunch of things out of the way and
| not use the room.
|
| on the flip side, i think this "the robot cannot automate the
| whole task" thing is reductive too. suffice it to say,
| EVERYTHING matters, there honestly nothing that "honestly
| doesn't matter."
| millerm wrote:
| Exactly. People buy those automated circular floor vacuums.
| Anyone can get it done with a regular broom/vacuum in a small
| fraction of the time it takes for those things. Just like I
| drive an electric car. It charges while I sleep. It doesn't
| matter if an ICE can fuel in a few minutes.
| moffkalast wrote:
| "That's fair, you are absolutely right I should not have
| unscrewed the water hose and put it away before turning on
| the valve to water the plants, even though you specified that
| order, I should've used some common sense."
|
| There is going to be so much pain from VLA malicious
| compliance. If the current gen of LLMs are anything to go by
| I can already see it being an hilariously massive problem.
| People are careless.
| claaams wrote:
| This was my thought too. An unsupervised robot can cause
| 10s of thousands in damage by accidentally ripping a water
| line and flooding your house or just breaking all of your
| dishes. There's no level to how dumb and awful LLMs can
| hallucinate
| Razengan wrote:
| We all know sexbots will be the real killer app
| trkaky wrote:
| which work?
| cute_boi wrote:
| yes at 1k tok/sec i think these robots will be fast and very
| fluid.
| GaggiX wrote:
| I believe that it's also for safety, these robots would easily
| destroy themselves if not restrained (and cause damage).
| drbioart wrote:
| Better to go slow and controlled. Giving physical action to a
| model is dangerous and must be carefully monitored. Slow is
| good. Oversight is important.
| gretch wrote:
| I agree
|
| I only wish I could convince some humans in my life to slow
| down and do things with care.
| amelius wrote:
| But why use that slow speed in a press release?
| ChaitanyaSai wrote:
| We don't get virtuous feedback loops in hardware though.
| Muscles are incredible engineering that took half a billion
| years. Token generation (speech) is low hundred thousands
| maybe. Unless of course improved AI navigates the space of
| ideas so well that it can give us alloys or synthetic flesh
| that does twitch as fast...
| hwillis wrote:
| The time between gpt 2 and 3 was 15 months. The time between
| gemini robotics 1 and 2 was also 15 months:
| https://blog.google/products-and-platforms/products/gemini/h...
|
| The difference between gpt 2 and 3 was insane. 2 could generate
| limericks when it wasn't repeating a word 300x. 3 could
| actually do some things. By comparison gemini robotics has
| hardly changed at all.
|
| I will also point out that slow, non-fluid robotics is on a
| _totally_ different level of difficulty from fast fluid motion.
| Asimov could walk pretty smoothly, but it didn 't fall over
| because it used a very careful sequence that was never
| unbalanced; you could pause at any point without falling over.
| Move faster, like boston dynamics, and you need to account for
| the change in balance from your arms swinging... or rather, you
| need to be able to account for the rotational inertia etc from
| moving multiple masses along complex paths with multiple points
| of articulation at hundreds or thousands of times per second.
|
| An algorithm to fold tshirts 90% of the time is easy. The cloth
| hangs down by gravity and you can just look for right angles
| (corners), find their coordinates with binocular matching, and
| move them to meet each other. Getting 99%, or folding them
| quickly, so that the fabric is actually moving instead of just
| hanging still- incredibly, incredibly more complex.
| fc417fc802 wrote:
| > folding them quickly, so that the fabric is actually moving
| instead of just hanging still- incredibly, incredibly more
| complex.
|
| TBF fabric is much more difficult to simulate than a bipedal
| body is.
|
| As I recall openai had mujoco playing soccer nearly 10 years
| ago. Obviously real world bodies are much more difficult but
| I'd be curious to learn why that is.
| kibwen wrote:
| Even being able to simply do the task isn't enough here. It
| also has to do the task while also never, ever, ever
| accidentally folding your toddler as though it were a towel.
| Having industrial-strength robots around inherently
| unpredictable humans in a fail-safe way is an extremely
| difficult problem that will not be addressed any time soon.
| gretch wrote:
| This is not the bar for societal adoption, and we can
| already see a demonstration that it is false.
|
| A waymo is basically an industrial strength robot. It
| operates among inherently unpredictable humans already.
| There is no guarantee that it will never, ever hurt a
| human.
|
| And yet in many cities around the world, you can call a
| waymo and ride it and society accepts it.
| boelboel wrote:
| Waymo will have existed for ~25 years by the time it'll
| be available in most US cities, that's a long while.
| mwt wrote:
| > If progress is as fast as LLMs
|
| Is this the new "x technology is a year away" ?
| ashleyn wrote:
| Gotta admit google is pretty ballsy for directly attacking
| Moravec's Paradox:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec%27s_paradox
| fidotron wrote:
| They're fluid, but they are slow, which is highly likely to be
| a safety thing, which will have the side effect of making many
| motions more difficult, not less.
|
| LLMs aren't themselves hurting anyone, no matter how much
| certain people like to pretend otherwise, whereas an AI in a
| robot with significant motors in absolutely can and will. There
| are reasons industrial ones live in safety cages after all.
|
| Expecting them to be like inverse kinematic driven digital
| dolls is wrong because the optimization won't be for matching
| that but something like "net reduce energy consumption" which
| for electric motors in multi joint arms will look a bit odd.
| bastardoperator wrote:
| These robots are unusable in their current form. Slow and
| expensive, humans perform this work better and cheaper. Looks
| like every other robot before it, a bunch of servos and no
| brain.
| ghostly_s wrote:
| This is the first press videos I've seen of 1x speed that seems
| reasonable, imho. Though I see elsewhere they report only
| 50-75% success rate- not clear if that's first attempt, or
| total?
| mrinterweb wrote:
| Look at robotics demonstrations on YouTube from one or two
| years ago, and compare that to where we are today. It seems
| reasonable to me that general purpose robotics may be able to
| outmaneuver your average human in a few years. At least one
| robot has surpassed what I could do
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xha2TJ_1C6Q
| CapyToolkit wrote:
| If it has intelligence of Gemini... well, good luck...
| dev0p wrote:
| Gemini is the only LLM I've ever experienced that decided on
| its own to tell me that something was a bad idea. Which, ok, in
| itself it's not a bad thing, we actually need more of that
| instead of the pathological sycophancy that all current models
| suffer from.
|
| But in a physical robot? Yeah, that thing is going to punch me
| in the face, eventually. Or worse.
| CapyToolkit wrote:
| I use Sonnet and Opus everyday. Believe me, it's very common
| they tell me that something is bad idea, write a rationale
| and suggest better solutions.
|
| Gemini doesn't remember almost anything after 2-3 follow ups.
| I have to paste the same "system prompt" at the top of each
| message and it still doesn't understand it.
| dev0p wrote:
| > Believe me, it's very common they tell me that something
| is bad idea
|
| In my experience, the most they dare is to suggest better
| alternatives, which is the polite and useful version of
| telling me something is a bad idea.
|
| But in general, they do not tell you "this whole idea is
| complete bogus". So far, only Gemini did. Don't even
| remember what about.
| defrim wrote:
| We're getting closer
| logankeenan wrote:
| Robotics with AI is the real revolution.
|
| Today, humans convert their labor to capital. Capital holders
| need labor (humans) to acquire more capital. When the price of
| inference for these robots becomes less than the price of labor
| then capital holders don't need labor.
|
| Obviously, AI impacts non-manual labor too, but a significant
| portion of the world population does manual labor.
| ausbah wrote:
| and this is good?
| wffurr wrote:
| It's good for capital holders. It does imply a further shift
| in the distribution of wealth though with all the attendant
| implications thereof.
|
| I question the premise that humanoid robots are "around the
| corner". I suspect this will turn out more like self-driving
| cars which are still a very slow burn.
| andsoitis wrote:
| If all goes well, imagine a world in which you work because
| you want to not because you have to.
| georgemcbay wrote:
| > If all goes well, imagine a world in which you work
| because you want to not because you have to.
|
| And if all goes bad, imagine a world in which you and your
| family are homeless and starve to death.
|
| Luckily the politicians and business leaders in place today
| who are going to be responsible for navigating us to one of
| these outcomes are the adults in the room, very ethical,
| even keeled and not the least bit corrupt. So... we should
| be fine! /s
| mmh0000 wrote:
| I think this is way too optimistic. I suspect these things
| will be only available to the already-quite-wealthy. While
| the poor (i.e., not billionaires) are left to rot and
| starve without jobs, property, or livelihoods. Then, when
| the poors (i.e. us) become too much of a headache, these
| things will be deployed to murder the poors (i.e. me).
|
| I am imagining a world somewhere between the movie Elysium
| and Oblivion.
| Marha01 wrote:
| > I suspect these things will be only available to the
| already-quite-wealthy.
|
| Initially, sure. But the price will come down in time,
| just like with any other technology in history.
| IAmGraydon wrote:
| I'm really curious - are the people who keep saying this in
| denial or lacking in a basic education in economics? You
| can imagine all you want, but this is absolutely not a
| possible outcome.
| wartywhoa23 wrote:
| They are not in denial, they're spreading PR narratives
| of AI corporations / VC hedge funds, no matter if
| willingly or out of naivety.
| alexashka wrote:
| You are using 'basic' economics to predict the future
| with 'absolute' certainty?
|
| Rhetorical.
| mitthrowaway2 wrote:
| As someone who lacks a basic education in economics, what
| part of basic economics prohibits this nice-sounding
| outcome? It seems like what I'd expect from a combination
| of UBI and widespread automation.
| ToValueFunfetti wrote:
| It's good that we'd be able to increase the amount of goods
| and services produced and reduce prices. For example, a lot
| of people would benefit from access to cheap, reliable heart
| surgery within a few days of learning they needed it. It
| would be good if the exponential growth that has elevated our
| wellbeing for the last millenia wasn't tethered to
| exponential population growth that would be disastrous if we
| even expected it to continue.
|
| It would be bad to remove demand for humans from the economy,
| of course. Humans have inherent moral value, and so it's good
| that our current system gives them economic value as well.
| But there's more than one way to achieve that end, and the
| massive quantity on the good side of the scale suggests it
| may be worth investigating the others instead of opposing the
| advancement outright.
| RandomLensman wrote:
| Not sure it is just about inference costs, errors in handling
| things and beings in the real world have a very different
| "surface" from immaterial applications - robots might need to
| have failsafes, independent limiters, etc. there.
| logankeenan wrote:
| Great point, inference is just one variable. It'd be really
| great to know how much those tasks costs in inference. I'm
| assuming they cost significantly higher than human labor.
| Therefore, the inference cost is so high that it makes the
| other variables seem irrelevant for the time being.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Today, humans convert their labor to capital. Capital holders
| need labor (humans) to acquire more capital. When the price of
| inference for these robots becomes less than the price of labor
| then capital holders don't need labor.
|
| Ignoring quibbling about inference not being the only cost and
| other issues and just accepting the proposed end state: this is
| very good if capital is effectively democratized, and
| apocalyptically bad if it remains highly concentrated in a
| narrow class.
| wartywhoa23 wrote:
| > this is very good if capital is effectively democratized
|
| Are there any indications to think it's possible in our
| world?
| aavci wrote:
| Can someone that uses these models provide some tips or docs on
| how best to get to use these at home to test around? Is the best
| thing a virtual environment?
| prima-facie wrote:
| A lot of these household tasks could be automated without the
| need for humanoid robots. Roombas can clean your floor, automated
| rubbish disposal can be integrated into houses and flats, grocery
| delivery and storage could be done via an automated intake,
| cataloguing, and storage system. Humanoids are just creepy and
| you can't really trust them.
|
| Could you sleep easily knowing that you have one in your house?
| What if you oppose the political views of its creators?
| heaney-555 wrote:
| >automated rubbish disposal can be integrated into houses and
| flats, grocery delivery and storage could be done via an
| automated intake, cataloguing, and storage system
|
| This is a complete non-starter for already-built apartment
| blocks, terraced homes, and even most semi-detached. It's an
| interesting but costly solution for new detached homes.
|
| Humanoids are a useful form factor because the already-built
| human world is, definitionally, built for humanoids.
| prima-facie wrote:
| Doing what's ethically right rarely means taking the most
| convenient path. Fridges and pantries take a considerable
| amount of space in our homes. These could become part of an
| automated storage system.
| jonas21 wrote:
| Why is a Roomba or automated rubbish disposal system more
| "ethically right" than a humanoid robot?
| prima-facie wrote:
| My point is that a generalist-humanoid robot can be used
| for nefarious purposes more easily than a specialised
| robot like a Roomba. A humanoid robot could, in an
| extreme case, perform a civil arrest or prevent you from
| leaving your house until the police arrives. Ultimately
| it's our decision to make.
|
| 1. Do we want to be governed by machines?
|
| 2. Do we want to relinquish our freedoms to the whims of
| corporations?
| seydor wrote:
| we ve stopped building infrastructure but we have to do it.
| Rail, car , electricity, fiber infrastructure developed
| quickly, yet we refuse to even plan for robotic
| infrastructure. We can't be stuck forever in the 19th century
| xgulfie wrote:
| > Humanoids are just creepy and you can't really trust them.
|
| Ultimately I shouldn't have to trust my robots. If my roomba or
| my dishwasher go haywire they won't pinch my finger off. They
| physically can't listen to me or spy on me. These are good
| robots.
| esafak wrote:
| https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/12/19/1065306/roomba-i.
| ..
| jaccola wrote:
| Except Roombas can only clean 80-90% of my floor, and not as
| well as a real vacuum. And we have a dog that leaves toys
| everywhere so probably it does more like 60% of the job when
| accounting for clearing its path, emptying it, etc... To get to
| 100% you basically need the whole human(oid).
| rstuart4133 wrote:
| You are being far too kind. A primate's body shape may be
| optimal for life in the trees, but it sure isn't optimal for
| any of the industrial or household tasks we want a robot to do.
| There are millions of robots around the world doing useful
| things, from vacuuming houses to assembling iPhones and playing
| table tennis. None of them look remotely like a human.
|
| If an article features a humanoid robot it's sure sign its a PR
| fluff piece. This one looks to be a recruitment ad. Tesla's
| Optimus is being used to pump some sort of investment scam. God
| knows China's humanoid marathon is about. Whatever it is, it
| isn't getting from A to B quickly and efficiently.
| prima-facie wrote:
| This is exactly my point, thank you.
| andsoitis wrote:
| Deepbody
| fernly wrote:
| Relevant: A San Francisco company is advertising humanoid robot
| housecleaning services[1]. However those 'bots require local
| supervision and a human controller watching through its video
| feed.
|
| Presumably that company could use the Gemini Robotics product to
| eliminate the remote controller.
|
| [1] https://www.tau-robotics.com/
| modeless wrote:
| I actually like Tau's videos a lot better than Google's. An
| agile robot getting out of a car carrying a tote is actually
| novel and difficult and useful. In contrast, what Google is
| showing here is mostly glorified pick and place with low
| success rates on a needlessly complex robot and a voice LLM
| slapped on top to pre-announce its moves like an anime
| character, with fancy video editing and bubbly music to
| distract you from how slow it is.
|
| Sure Tau is teleoperated, but teleoperating an agile movement
| like that is actually really hard to get right and still
| involves AI to keep the robot balanced. Tau is a lot closer to
| real deployment than Google, and when it performs useful tasks
| it is simultaneously collecting the data to eventually automate
| those tasks.
| gradus_ad wrote:
| Is the fundamental challenge for AI directed movement in 3D space
| the continuity of the environment? Vs LLM's which train on
| discrete and limited token sets.
| baron816 wrote:
| I don't think this is where the robotics revolution is going to
| happen. The big one will be using AI to design and build highly
| specialized robots to automate mining and manufacturing.
| heaney-555 wrote:
| Why not both?
| mlyle wrote:
| Big humanoid robots are expensive, the actuators still suck,
| and the control problems are hard. Their big advantage is
| that they can occupy human-shaped spaces, but struggle to do
| anything useful.
|
| Not to say we won't get humanoid robots eventually, but I
| think there's probably some low hanging fruit for people to
| make some other kinds of solutions. Specialized robots for
| industrial environment, well-thought out appliances for the
| home.
|
| It would be a bit surprising if the progression was Roomba ->
| humanoid robot.
| s08148692 wrote:
| We have Google, Figure, Tesla, Boston Dynamics, and
| literally dozens of Chinese companies building humanoid
| robots and making huge improvements in the tech. Not there
| yet by any means as a general-purpose home assistant, but I
| don't think it will be too surprising if at least one of
| them succeeds
| chrsw wrote:
| It will take a while before humanoids become useful. You
| can speed it up with extreme amounts of investment but it
| still wouldn't be soon.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| I'd say 10 years before they're a luxury item, if you
| look at what has progressed in the past 10 years it's
| been massive
| baron816 wrote:
| I hope humanoids will be ever present, it's just that the
| scale of impact from specialized robots will be far greater.
| Humanoids will be our butlers, but the other robots will be
| creating a world of unimaginable abundance.
| jameshart wrote:
| The AI will need generalized robots to build the highly
| specialized ones.
| margalabargala wrote:
| Why would building specialized robots require generalized
| robots?
|
| Seems to me you'd do better if you built the robots with
| robots that were specialized in building robots.
| jameshart wrote:
| If it can make any robot then it's not very specialized.
| margalabargala wrote:
| Making robots is a very narrow, highly specialized subset
| of things that robots can do.
|
| Also, no one said it could male _any_ robot until you
| tried to broaden the scope just now because you didn 't
| want to admit you're wrong. This is an example of "bad
| faith" in a discussion.
| olmo23 wrote:
| A robot can be made by an automated assembly line
| (similar to how cars are built today).
| seydor wrote:
| agriculture first (mining and manufacturing are already
| robotizing).
| brendong wrote:
| Is anyone building non-humanoid robots? Feels like humanoid is
| limiting the creativity of building a truly useful robot in
| today's age
| Chabsff wrote:
| Humanoid robots can be dropped in wherever human labor is
| currently used.
|
| That makes them _extremely_ easy to sell to industry. This
| unlocks, in principle, a large chunk of the potential untapped
| industrial automation market that still relies on human labor
| because the ROI of redesigning production lines didn 't make
| sense.
| gowld wrote:
| That's the dream.
|
| It's easier to redesign the work to be robot-friendly than to
| deploy a humanoid robot and have it actually work.
| Chabsff wrote:
| I don't think it's the dream, I think it's the cynical
| market-driven logic.
|
| Automation has been rolling out for a long while now, and
| most of the low-hanging fruit of things that can easily be
| redesigned in a cost-effective way has been dealt with
| already. The role of these robots is to address all of the
| stuff that would have been automated by now if they could
| have.
| poilcn wrote:
| These humanoid robots would cost $10-100k to make and would
| require costly maintenance for them to do the job people in
| poor countries do for a dollar. I don't say we won't come to
| it eventually, but not in near future
|
| More realistically it seems that llms in several years could
| help dramatically decrease costs of automation and make it
| available for more industries
| nope1000 wrote:
| In the Xiaomi Model Demo, they have non-humanoid robots
|
| https://robotics.xiaomi.com/xiaomi-robotics-1.html
| numpad0 wrote:
| ABB, EPSON, FANUC, Kawasaki... Virtually every cars in past
| 50-60 years have had robots and some form of AI involved in
| assembly. Some of them already support standard humanoid/dogbot
| tools in their products.
|
| Humanoid startup execs just don't talk about that.
| henpa wrote:
| As a 47-year-old man with no kids, I have to admit I'm looking
| forward to the possibility of having a robot help take care of me
| in my old age.
| Petersipoi wrote:
| The fact that Star Wars like droids seem to be likely within
| our lifetime is WILD. It's crazy how normal everyone is acting
| about this.
| sib wrote:
| As a person in my 50's with a parent in her 80's, this would be
| incredibly useful right now. And I've got many, many friends in
| similar situations.
| wartywhoa23 wrote:
| Fucking hell, hiring a robot to care after an elderly parent.
| Now that's some disturbing shit.
| overlords wrote:
| have you ever bathed or changed diaper on old people?
| wartywhoa23 wrote:
| Yes, I helped my friend deal with her bedridden granny
| who was very painful at a slightest movement, we did it
| together as gentle as we could.
|
| Now I imagine a robot doing that with all its compassion
| and empathy (which, however close to zero, still seem to
| be greater than in many people at this point).
|
| Your parents bathed you and changed your diapers, why
| can't you? Or did they hire a robot for that?
|
| Getting shit done, details of implementation, elegance,
| humanity be damned - is all I see in AI crowd's attitude
| to life.
| philipkglass wrote:
| I have an uncle with Parkinson's disease. He has a
| daughter who's looking after him. But he is a tall man
| who weighs about 200 pounds and she is a petite woman.
| She literally doesn't have the strength to help him up
| again if he falls. She has to call emergency services.
| Gareth321 wrote:
| I think this idealism needs to be tempered with a big
| dose of reality. Old people who need care aren't always
| able to book in time to be bathed. They soil themselves,
| trip and fall, get hungry and thirsty, need to get their
| book/glasses, need to check the mail, clean, get lost and
| confused, etc. This can be a full time job. How do you
| expect someone with a full time job to do this?
|
| Dumping granny in a home and never visiting is bad. Being
| a full time carer and abandoning one's family and job is
| also bad.
| fipar wrote:
| I did that with my grandmother after she had a stroke,
| and I would not have offload that to a robot, had one
| been available. It wasn't nice, but not everything in
| life has to be nice. What was important to me is that she
| felt loved and dignified. That's also why I combed her
| hair while waiting for the ambulance on the night of her
| stroke, even though she had peed herself on the floor.
| She always mentioned taking care of her hair should she
| ever have an emergency, so it was important for me to do
| this. Given how lousy having a stroke is, at least she
| got some comfort knowing I had been paying attention all
| the times she said that :)
|
| I certainly don't judge you, but I wanted to offer my
| perspective.
| sib wrote:
| "Disturbing" to be able to economically provide cooking,
| cleaning, laundry, yard maintenance, snow shoveling, etc.,
| for an elderly parent who lives alone (by her choice)? Why
| is that disturbing?
| wartywhoa23 wrote:
| Because the last thing a lonely elderly person needs at
| the life's sunset is a soulless clanker around.
| Marha01 wrote:
| Just because a robot is taking care of the chores does
| not mean that they have no relatives that visit them.
|
| And if they truly have no relatives that visit, then a
| clanker is better than some low-paid disgruntled employee
| in an assisted living facility.
| ck2 wrote:
| have you seen that NEO robot's hands, wild
|
| * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QRyXV3csReA
| wiredbox wrote:
| Didn't we see Chinese robots doing kung fu??
| henry2023 wrote:
| Yeah, but that doesn't mean the west won't try to catch up
| criddell wrote:
| Do these learn?
|
| It would be cool to have a robot that can be taught to drive the
| same way we might teach a teenager to drive.
| gowld wrote:
| No one has any idea how to achieve something like this.
| criddell wrote:
| Are there any AI models that can be taught?
| krishna180 wrote:
| Given the rapid advancements in AI. It is not what we thought it
| will, what it is, what we didn't wanted it to be, but it is great
| for being what it is.
| xnx wrote:
| While Anthropic and Open AI get 80% of the attention here, it's
| impressive to see how much Google is doing: near frontier model,
| fast models, open weight models, image generation, video
| generation, music generation, robotics, etc.
| hexeater wrote:
| And protein folding + Nobel Prize
| AFF87 wrote:
| Baffles me how this is not that well known
| freakynit wrote:
| And AlphaGo Zero .. probably the first real-world deployment
| of a self-improving system that beat humans.
| smokel wrote:
| I think that credit might go to IBM:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TD-Gammon
| jeremyjh wrote:
| It was a huge advancement but it did not beat the world
| champion. AlphaGo is noted for being a self-learning
| system that became better than _all_ humans. Chess
| engines had long been there but were not self-learning
| before AlphaZero.
| BeetleB wrote:
| > probably the first real-world deployment of a self-
| improving system that beat humans.
|
| Isn't that Checkers right from the dawn of reinforcement
| learning?
| tantalor wrote:
| _Google DeepMind disbands its Nobel-prize winning AlphaFold
| team_
|
| https://www.engadget.com/2225849/google-shuts-down-
| alphafold...
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49098375
| joaogui1 wrote:
| I won't comment much on this, but I'd say these articles
| are 2-3 years late and reduces the agency of the people,
| who in many cases moved to Gemini because they wanted to
| work on LLMs
| egorthinks wrote:
| Google DeepMind was at the forefront of AI, and they are
| currently developing new concepts while others chase benchmark
| percentages.
| JeremyNT wrote:
| It's certainly an odd situation where Google is on the
| forefront of _all_ these emerging technologies while the latest
| chatbots from OpenAI and Anthropic are getting breathless press
| releases and wildly hyperbolic coverage ( "rogue AIs" "too
| dangerous, must be banned" etc...)
|
| Google acting like a normal but competent company that's just
| chugging away, meanwhile the hype cycle is propping up its
| upstart competitors to truly ludicrous valuations.
| IanCal wrote:
| > Google acting like a normal but competent company that's
| just chugging away,
|
| Chugging away not releasing products or releasing ones worse
| than their competition typically. Not sure that's what a
| normal competent company should be doing.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Google acting like a normal but competent company that 's
| just chugging away_
|
| Competent is a stretch. Google's AI offering seems to be,
| once again, PM led-lots of constantly-changing brands being
| merged and deprecated with zero customer support or service.
|
| They'll almost certainly be one of the survivors. Their
| technical competece is unmatched. But that doesn't mean they
| have a great product in the way both OpenAI and Anthropic do.
| (Outside their datacentres, which are a legitimate feat.)
| pants2 wrote:
| After all this time it's still a pain point just to pay
| them for a Gemini API key.
| mountainriver wrote:
| So crazy, at one point they had 3 different systems for
| interacting with Gemini, all with different auth.
|
| For a company that prides themselves on the smartest
| engineers, they really struggle with the basics
| ben_w wrote:
| Mm, however the more I experience of the world, the more
| I find this matches the description up-thread:
|
| > Google acting like a normal but competent company
|
| Is it messed up and weird? Yup. Still normal though.
| Worse, this is matching the baseline of competence I find
| in so many other places.
| titzer wrote:
| Google has never been good at supporting developers, and it
| absolutely loathes end users. Support for everything that
| is not their ad ecosystem is miserable. There's never any
| long term plan, everything gets deprecated and bitrots.
| slashdave wrote:
| Don't forget: resources
| soulofmischief wrote:
| Google wins on infrastructure and creativity (NotebookLM,
| etc) but entirely lacks product coherence. The ecosystem is a
| mess, just like Microsoft's offering, and I don't think this
| is a coincidence but rather a symptom of the type of company
| in which these two companies have evolved.
|
| Furthermore, Gemini is just all around a less trustworthy and
| mature model, for many reasons. Very smart but lacking the
| precision and holistically exhibited in the more recent
| models from OpenAI and Anthropic. On the flip side, Google's
| work on Gemma is unmatched.
| BodyCulture wrote:
| Everything would be perfect if only you were CEO of both
| companies!
| soulofmischief wrote:
| What is the purpose of this comment?
| IanCal wrote:
| I can say a portrait doesn't look like a person even if I
| can't do better, googles product range is an absolute
| mess and using it is a nightmare - I don't know how to
| fix the company but I know the outcome is bad.
| annzabelle wrote:
| I thought Google was a mess until I started working at a
| Microsoft shop for the first time. Boy it's astonishing.
| I've got two versions of Outlook on my computer, neither
| of which is as quick to load as Thunderbird was 20 years
| ago. My team uses Azure DevOps for our git forge, which
| is somehow a completely different product than GitHub.
| There are multiple versions of Planner in Teams, where
| the free version's features are not a strict subset of
| the premium - there are features that are blocked if you
| pay.
|
| The thing that gets me with Google is that they've killed
| too many products I used daily (RIP Inbox and Google
| Podcasts) for me to be able to trust that any new
| offering will exist in 5 years.
| areoform wrote:
| "I also see that I have two Microsoft Outlooks, and
| neither one of those are working if you want to remote in
| and check"
|
| Cdr. Reid Wiseman to Mission Control, Artemis II, Earth-
| Moon Coast.
| ChadNauseam wrote:
| Yeah, something surprising to me was that I can't even add
| a custom MCP to gemini. It has tons of missing features.
| lII1lIlI11ll wrote:
| > Google acting like a normal but competent company that's
| just chugging away
|
| People are too quick to forget racially-diverse Nazi soldiers
| and other hilariously incompetent stuff that has been going
| around their generative AI efforts just a couple of years
| ago. Google look like they finally getting their shit
| together under immense competitive pressure but I would keep
| my eye on them for a few more years before starting calling
| them "competent".
| Melatonic wrote:
| I mean they did practically invent LLMs and a lot of modern
| machine learning stuff. Or I should say researchers at
| Google. Makes sense they would keep at it
| sumedh wrote:
| > I mean they did practically invent LLMs
|
| Didn't all those authors leave Google?
| azan_ wrote:
| It's because their products are really bad. Last time I tried
| Gemini it repeatedly lied about running internet search when
| explicitly asked to do it. I know their models benchmark
| really well, but in real world the performance is abysmal.
| broeng wrote:
| Maybe it was just using Google Search, and not finding
| anything ...
| sumedh wrote:
| > Google acting like a normal but competent company
|
| I am just waiting for the 10 AI models or Chatbot Apps
| competing with one another like the 10 messenger Apps.
| spwa4 wrote:
| Wait? What are you talking about? We're already drowning in
| them. There's literally more than Google messenger apps. An
| incomplete list of Google AI chatbots currently online:
| Gemini Gemini Live Gemini Code Assist
| Gemini for Google Cloud NotebookLM Gmail
| Google Docs Google Sheets Google Slides
| Google Drive Google Chat Google Meet
| Google Calendar Google Forms Google Vids
| AppSheet Workspace Studio Google Search
| Google app Google Chrome Google Lens
| Google Maps Google Flights Google Hotels
| Google Shopping Google Photos YouTube
| Google Messages Google Translate Android
| Circle to Search Google Home Google Play
| Pixel apps and features Google Flow Google
| AI Studio
| ddfarmr wrote:
| I recommend reading ,,The Infinity Machine: Demis Hassabis,
| DeepMind, and the Quest for Superintelligence" from Sebastian
| Mallaby. It offers a detailed glimpse into the reasons behind
| your observation regarding Google/DeepMind and the other
| frontier labs. best book I read so far on my current vacation.
| jimbob45 wrote:
| While I agree, it's hard to trust Google not to kill this off
| in the future. They're not winning and the prospect of dumping
| their own for a partnership with another AI company isn't out
| of the picture.
| krisgenre wrote:
| Yes, I am surprised that no one talks about the 'live' feature
| in Gemini app. With camera turned on, it has helped me fix
| things which I have no clue about.
| sakree wrote:
| thing is, google have a track record of dropping support or
| just killing of projects. Personally, I view most of google's
| products and services as a business risk, because you never
| know when they will kill it.
| jeffybefffy519 wrote:
| and building inference hardware
| mountainriver wrote:
| It's basically because LLMs supersede all of these. The ability
| to reason, research, and write code applies to everything else
| and will speed up the innovation cycles there significantly.
|
| Google is losing in the race that really matters
| dsign wrote:
| I loved the video. Also, I had a lot of fun watching it while
| imagining I was living in 2051 and this whole progression had ran
| its course. It's impossible to predict the future, but certain
| events can negate whole branches of possibility. This one video
| in particular prunes the "we never figured out robotic motion and
| thus all the science fiction scenarios built on that premise
| never came to happen" subtree.
| zuzululu wrote:
| we'll be having sex with robots in the near future
| weatherlite wrote:
| Sounds like a lot of work I'd probably want my robot to have
| set with the other robot for me
| lowbloodsugar wrote:
| What does this mean for intrinsic, the moonshot they brought back
| into the fold in feb?
| johnnyApplePRNG wrote:
| If they can't even get LLM/agentic coding right, I have little
| hope for a literal intelligent robot coming out of Gemini... but
| I wish them luck.
| avdlinde wrote:
| I always wonder why these robot forms don't have cameras and
| distance sensors on every single joint, processing costs I guess?
| modeless wrote:
| Cost, weight, durability. For cameras, bandwidth.
| YuechenLi wrote:
| Running a full LLM to actuate a robot is way too heavy, the
| minimum latency they can get down to is probably 1-2 seconds even
| with powerful GPUs, which is not very useful for practical
| robotics applications.
|
| Machine vision should definitely be handled by ML, but motion
| actuation should be relegated in the realm of traditional PID
| style linear/nonlinear control. Again, the tech is cool, but the
| practical usefulness of using a full LLM as a controller will
| probably run into hardware limitations.
| CardenB wrote:
| AFAIK NVidia has a VLA running on their chips with 2B params at
| 10Hz. They've openly published a .5B model running at 10Hz
| YuechenLi wrote:
| 10Hz is still a 0.1s of latency, which doesn't seem like a
| lot until you realize that an Arduino typically runs at 16
| Mhz, which is literally a million times faster than running a
| full LLM.
|
| So, yeah, for complex reasoning and sensory processing, LLMs
| are the correct choice, and Gemini is especially strong at
| spatial reasoning over ChatGPT/Claude. But for actual
| motion/actuation? LLMs are the wrong tool for the job,
| probably easier to have LLMs program a reusable workflow in a
| script for repeated tasks instead of invoking LLMs after the
| first time.
| CardenB wrote:
| For this operating domain the latency comparison is human
| reaction time and not arduino reaction time.
|
| Also the process that's running at 16MHz is not the same as
| a full VLA. VLA is much more expressive. You think the
| processor that is running the VLA system is running at 10Hz
| or some GHz?
| SparkyMcUnicorn wrote:
| 16 MHz is the chip's clock speed. Arduino PID is more like
| 100 Hz to 1 kHz.
|
| Human deliberate movement runs around 2-10 Hz I think.
| yhjc2692 wrote:
| On latency: that is true now but likely false in the near
| future. There is so much potential left over for optimizing
| inference further.
|
| On PID: the field has been stuck trying to do
| analytical/optimization-based control for decades, and end-to-
| end control has shown incredible performance (e.g., SoTA cost
| of transport in legged locomotion) and robustness (e.g., not
| falling over when stepping on a pile of leaves) - while being
| far scalable (in terms of how fast it is to get a new robot up
| and running). Which is not to say it's perfect but it seems
| like it's a step in the right direction.
|
| Better yet, companies like Physical Intelligence are doing good
| with hierarchical ("fast-slow") architecture to address both
| the intelligence and latency fronts.
| causal wrote:
| Well they certainly don't intend to rent you one that works
| offline.
| nphardon wrote:
| > we are teaching robots intelligent whole-body control, fine
| dexterity, *and teamwork*...
|
| That's the most Skynet thing ever.
| egorthinks wrote:
| I believe that LLMs represent the future of robotics in this
| field. Of course, I don't want a robot uprising, but if our goal
| is simply to increase the utility of robots in manufacturing
| (within the necessary constraints), then LLMs are the only
| powerful path forward.
| WarmWash wrote:
| I think the biggest snag with home robots will be that if it is
| strong enough to install your air conditioners, it's strong
| enough to break your ribs.
|
| So the robots will need to be weak, so even weak people can
| overpower it. But then it loses a ton of it's most promising
| abilities.
|
| I don't mean this like a "rogue robot" situation. I mean it like
| the robot gets confused, or someone sees a walking $10M lawsuit
| in their home.
| snek_case wrote:
| I think that people will argue around that. Self-driving cars
| are already strong enough to kill people and even if you only
| made the robot strong enough to lift 15 pounds of weight,
| that's probably strong enough to slit someone's throat with a
| kitchen knife while they sleep... There probably isn't a level
| of strength that's weak enough to be completely safe but strong
| enough to be useful.
|
| So at some point you have to trust that the tech is safe. Both
| in terms of "robot won't go off the rails", but also in terms
| of hostile actors can't remotely take over your robot while you
| sleep.
|
| In terms of sleeping, personally, I would like for the law to
| mandate that robots must have a physical off switch, in a very
| visible location, that physically disconnects power. The switch
| should be illuminated while in the ON position. What makes me a
| bit pessimistic there is that we don't even have laws to
| mandate webcam indicator lights (e.g. a very tiny red LED) must
| be ON in hardware.
| freakynit wrote:
| What would be the hallucination equivalent of such robots?
| yhjc2692 wrote:
| falling down and breaking things?
|
| I do think robotics would come up with more safety mechanisms
| (provably safe motion planning etc) just because the risk is a
| lot more serious than LLMs spitting half-truths
| wartywhoa23 wrote:
| I know what the post-hallucination reasoning of such robots
| will be:
|
| "Dave, would you like to get the instructions on how to stitch
| that head back to the neck?"
| summarybot wrote:
| And absolutely nothing in your company charter says the military
| won't be allowed to buy it. Y'all think we've never seen a
| Terminator movie before, huh.
| walr000s wrote:
| Robots that look humanoid are a marketing gimmick.
| brap wrote:
| I said the same thing about chat bots trying to act human, but
| evidently that's what people want. I still cringe whenever an
| LLM uses "I"
| canyon289 wrote:
| I'm a researcher at Deepmind that contributed to these models.
| (And the opinions here are my own)
|
| Just want to say, Deepmind is a great place to work and the only
| (Edit: one the few unique labs!) lab where you can move from
| large frontier models (Gemini), frontier open models (Gemma),
| robotics (what you see here), science (weather, biology, more)
| and basically any other topic related to intelligence. It's
| really an incredible place to be, with incredible people.
| Consider joining! And thank you for the enthusiasm here.
| jauntywundrkind wrote:
| Good stuff, yay, good.
|
| I do want to pick a nit in this one,
|
| > _and the only lab where_
|
| I do think Allen Institution for AI (AI2) is has coverage
| across most of these domains ( albeit their frontier isn't
| nearly so far out, hopefully the $152m NSF awarded them +
| Nvidia is a fruitful partnership there).
|
| For example, robotics: MolmoBot, MolmoSpaces, MolmoAct,
| https://allenai.org/embodied-ai
| canyon289 wrote:
| Totally fair and thank you for nit picking! I edited my
| comment. AI2 is doing amazing stuff, I read their papers and
| code all the time and appreciate how open they are.
| lewismenelaws wrote:
| Congrats! Awesome release! (can i have access)
| canyon289 wrote:
| Join the waitlist! It's in the blogpost
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| Hey Ravin, I'm executive director for AGI Society which has run
| the AGI conference (https://agi-conference.org/) since 2007
|
| We'd love to invite you to speak about your work next year at
| the AGI Conference if you're open to it.
|
| Alexander Lerchner spoke this year and was great.
|
| I'll reach out on email if you have a preferred one, it was
| unclear on your site which email you prefer.
| staplor wrote:
| Would you mind expanding on the difference between frontier
| model development and open model development? I was under the
| impression that they were nearly the same thing and would thus
| be handled by the same team. My impression is that open models
| tend to go through more safety testing and are generally
| smaller, but are otherwise the same thing. Shouldn't most of
| what is commonly referred to as 'AI research' be applicable to
| both?
| Razengan wrote:
| What are you doing to prevent abuses by governments,
| corporations and militaries? (non snarky question)
|
| How much of this technology is going to benefit and uplift the
| Common Peasant and how is going to be used for increasing
| surveillance and control?
| CaptWorld wrote:
| Lol.. why do people ask employees this stuff as though
| they're the ones controlling big decisions?
| Razengan wrote:
| "Just following orders"
|
| is how some of the worst shit in human history went down.
|
| They're literally CREATING the tech and tools and you're
| saying don't even question them about potential and proven
| misuse?? lol
|
| They're the first people that should be asked this
| question.
| drusepth wrote:
| I don't think OP's "Why do people ask employees this
| stuff" question implies you _shouldn't_ ask, but rather
| wonders why people even ask when you're obviously not
| going to get an answer (and if you do, it'll be a non-
| answer filtered through PR/HR/MR/etc).
| CaptWorld wrote:
| Thank you.. this was what I meant.
| Razengan wrote:
| Well they posted on a public forum and it wasn't a rude
| question or anything, in fact it's one of the hottest
| topics in the zeitgeist and here we have one of the
| people near the center of it.
|
| Right on the HN frontpage near this post: "Google will
| expand age checks on Android worldwide till the end of
| the year"
|
| NOT asking them the "taboo" questions is the dumb thing
| to do
| david-gpu wrote:
| Cogs in the machine do not have the decision power nor
| even the visibility over how those decisions are made.
|
| What are you going to do? Only work for tiny little
| companies with very limited local reach? What if you have
| the ability and the desire to work on global projects,
| even if you don't get to make the big decisions?
| sciencejerk wrote:
| Because we're nearing the endgame...perfect total
| surveillance and control will be possible soon
| ceroxylon wrote:
| So glad to see that you are still involved and have your
| inspiring enthusiasm! Meeting you was a huge inflection point
| in my journey with ML/AI.
| anonymid wrote:
| How are you engaging with the fundamental problems explained in
| this blog post https://rodneybrooks.com/why-todays-humanoids-
| wont-learn-dex...
|
| - the relatively crude tactile and proprioceptive sensing
| apparatuses of robots when compared to humans
|
| - the limited availability of multisensory, perception-action
| coupled training data
|
| Genuinely curious!
| nl wrote:
| This seems like a post by someone who hasn't really ingested
| the bitter lesson.
|
| Eg, even LeRobot (without proper fingers) can fold clothes
| now: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dPe9v4gqbdg
|
| The labs are spending huge money collecting "multisensory,
| perception-action coupled training data" (eg, there is the
| one in NY that gives you free cleaning in return for video
| data from the cleaner).
|
| Edit: The Gemini Robotics blog post has a video of it tying
| knots too. That's pretty good.
| jhanschoo wrote:
| You can point to the bitter lesson to support your claim,
| but on the other hand I can point to the massive investment
| in capital and time to get self-driving cars viable to
| support my more bearish view.
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| Yesterday evening I rode 12 miles in a Waymo actively
| dodging pedestrians and obstacles dynamically in an open
| ended environment. Multiples better experience than the
| two Ubers I had later that evening.
|
| What are you bearish about precisely?
| qsera wrote:
| It is amusing to observe that the tech marketing of today
| are milking the shit out of this trick.
|
| The trick being to tread continuously through some non-
| obvious happy path. And average people will be convinced
| that you really have some breakthrough tech.
|
| But hey, this is not something new. Magicians were taking
| advantage of such things for centuries ..
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| Please describe the trick you're suggesting
| qsera wrote:
| 1. Make some thing that work in very limited of amount of
| real world cases 2. Deploy it somewhere where it won't
| encounter things it won't handle. 3. Market the shit out
| of the above fact and how well it work there. 4. Let the
| naive population who have a tendency to take one look,
| and imagine how it will automatically progress to some
| arbitrary influx point. 5. Get a lot of funding from
| people in point 4 and feed it to point 3, and keep going.
| jryle70 wrote:
| > 1. Make some thing that work in very limited of amount
| of real world cases
|
| > 2. Deploy it somewhere where it won't encounter things
| it won't handle
|
| Who are doing these? Waymo? how? You're talking BS if you
| can't elaborate.
| jhanschoo wrote:
| I'm not talking about the state of today's self-driving
| cars, I'm talking about how we got to here. Also don't
| forget the overarching claim regarding lack of sensor and
| actuator fidelity in the parent comment; self-driving
| cars in contrast have expensive LIDAR in them and we
| still don't think camera-based self-driving cars are safe
| enough.
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| Yea we got here through recognizing the bitter lesson is
| a description of reality and adopting techniques that
| exploit it
|
| The entire history of this field is precisely that
| problem and repeatedly demonstrated
| jhanschoo wrote:
| I don't know how you can read my comment, not respond to
| my comment saying that today's self-driving cars use
| LIDAR, and continue to reiterate your point.
|
| I don't think I was clear and explicit, it being tedious
| to write, and I apologize for that. I also apologize for
| shifting the goalposts as I had not written out my own
| position, which is not exactly in the "grandparent
| commenter"'s position (that I had not previously given
| enough attention understanding), but it is also not in
| agreement with yours. I don't mean to say that we are not
| presently in the "bitter lesson" (your idea of what the
| bitter lesson says) regime. I definitely think that a lot
| of progress can be done right now by emphasizing the
| humanoid robotics platform as a foundation. What I mean
| to say is that I don't know if that platform with the
| hardware we have today is sufficient for parity with
| human housekeeping tasks in the domains that we wish it
| to have parity. The bitter lesson itself (not your
| understanding of it) is in fact silent on this as it is
| in relation to feature engineering, where it is a clear
| point, but you seem to be adapting it uncritically
| wholesale to mean something more than what it is written
| about. My position is that, it is unclear whether today's
| sensor platform is sufficient for parity. It is less
| strong than the blog post author's "Why Today's Humanoids
| Won't Learn", it is a "We can't say whether or not
| today's humanoids will learn", but it is something that
| also contradicts a "the bitter lesson means today's
| humanoids will learn" thesis.
|
| The self-driving car supports my claim, because after so
| much investment in capital and time, we ended up with a
| car with comparatively expensive LIDAR sensors as our
| preferred platform.
| ACCount37 wrote:
| Tesla's entire fleet runs on raw cameras. Including the
| driverless Robotaxi vehicles - which are basically a 1:1
| match to how Waymo operates.
|
| Plenty of hecklers were saying "you can't self-drive on
| cameras", and some still try. But Tesla's self-driving on
| cameras, and it seems to work fine. While Waymo's self-
| driving on fat sensor stacks, and it also seems to work
| fine. Sensors don't seem to be a differentiator of self-
| driving performance.
|
| I don't think anything about self-driving tech supports
| your claim. Tesla was bullish on AI all the way, and
| Waymo has also shifted towards highly integrated end to
| end AI. It's the AI advances that make self-driving
| tractable - not anything else.
| nl wrote:
| Using LIDAR is of course the perfect example of the
| bitter lesson. More data makes for better outcomes.
| qsera wrote:
| But how does LLMs help in making chat bots better, help
| with this "multi-sensory" data. Has this anything to do
| with the current AI surge with LLMs?
|
| Has it been demonstrated? Or is it just that such things
| now get a _lot_ of funding now, for no good reason?
| nl wrote:
| >But how does LLMs help in making chat bots better, help
| with this "multi-sensory" data.
|
| All three offerings from the linked blog post are either
| Vision LLMs or Vision/Action LLMs.
| ACCount37 wrote:
| It's a load of bollocks, and always was.
|
| Modern robotics is, at its core, not a hardware problem. It's
| an AI problem. We have plenty of headroom in the hardware -
| what we don't have is an AI good enough to utilize it. We
| don't know the practical limits of current hardware because
| we can't make a robot AI that would make the hardware a
| meaningful bottleneck.
|
| Today's robots don't fail at tasks because they have poor
| fingers. They fail because they don't know how to perform
| those tasks. If you put an effort into solving that? You get
| demos like: Gemini Robotics 2 tying a garbage bag. Take one
| long look at that and think of manual dexterity.
|
| Human body is crude and suboptimal in a thousands different
| ways, and all of it is salvaged by advanced intelligence.
| syntaxing wrote:
| I'm a mechanical design engineer (10 years) turned software
| engineer (7 years in autonomous vehicles). Is there a
| particular role you would recommend for someone with my
| experience?
| tonyhart7 wrote:
| Is DeepMind basically Google innovation hub ???
|
| What happens when those ideas need to be scaled into real
| products, though? For instance, I can't really imagine Google
| being fully committed to manufacturing and selling robotic arms
| at scale.
| icepush wrote:
| Don't worry, after ten years of research a few employees will
| quit and form their own company, and release a robot arm,
| which will spur Google to release their own version 3 months
| later. (As is tradition)
| Centigonal wrote:
| Important question: how many engineers does it take to teach a
| robot how to screw in a light bulb?
| nevir wrote:
| ...and how many people to label all of the examples?
| KellyCriterion wrote:
| ...and do not forget Support, Maintenance and that you will
| need an forever Cloud-connection...
| slashdave wrote:
| ... we don't know, because this one can't?
| Frannky wrote:
| Working there feels like a trap.
|
| Why work there when you can start a company? You get to choose
| the problem you care about most, the people you work with, and
| your own pace--and if it works, you own the success.
|
| Why accept all the rules Google will force on you, are those
| rules optimized for you or for them?
| drivebyhooting wrote:
| How do I reliably apply? And is there a remote role?
| dwohnitmok wrote:
| [flagged]
| WarmWash wrote:
| What you are actually asking for is political commentary from
| someone just going about their job. They absolute best thing
| they could do is ignore the bait.
| dwohnitmok wrote:
| > political commentary from someone
|
| No it depends on what they choose to answer. canyon289's
| account self-describes as Bayesian, a hallmark of
| rationalists, one of whose taglines is "politics is the
| mind-killer". Nonetheless
| https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/iKm2FhpWkuuBojm82/why-i-
| left... is one of the most upvoted posts on LessWrong (the
| big rationalist site) of all time. Most of the comments
| don't touch on the politics of the situation at all.
|
| > someone just going about their job
|
| They're doing a little bit more than that by actively
| recruiting (even more so than the usual "if this interests
| you we're hiring" bit at the end of a post). So I'm doing a
| little bit more by asking them about a recent high profile
| departure. It's a little bit different from the usual way
| employees chime in on threads.
| ed_mercer wrote:
| if DeepMind is such a great place to work, why have several
| leading researchers recently left for Anthropic and OpenAI? Are
| the problems limited to certain teams, or are the reports
| misleading?
| kyrra wrote:
| Have those leads that left said why they left? Could it just
| be money?
| theptip wrote:
| Is there a broad benchmark like SWEBench or METR that's
| credible for overall progress on dexterity tasks? I'm curious
| on the trendline for human parity.
| blubber wrote:
| How do you explain applicants that the real goal of your work
| is folding underwear while the internet is flooded with
| announcements like this https://www.unitree.com/mobile/As2-W
| and people explaining how weapons could be mounted on such a
| thing?
| Geee wrote:
| I've kind of given up on humanoid robotics, because of how bad
| the actuators are. There has been no innovation in robotic
| actuators since Honda's Asimo. There's just no way that someone
| wants a 80kg wobbling tin can in their home or workplace.
|
| My bet is that the final robotic revolution will use genetically
| modified human/animal bodies with replaced brains. You'll have to
| stretch your ethics a bit, but if you grow a bear genetically
| modified in a way that it has no consciousness or thought, it'll
| make a much better construction worker than any humanoid robot.
| You'll just need to wire it up with neuralink and then control it
| via LLM. Fast animals can be used to deliver packages, and
| giraffes for warehouses.
| AnodicElegy wrote:
| That seems like a problem orders of magnitude harder than
| making a humanoid robot. We haven't even figured out how to
| make hamburgers without cows at a marketable price yet.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _We haven 't even figured out how to make hamburgers
| without cows_
|
| Isn't that OP's point? Engineering muscle and sinew is harder
| than coming up with the control software. The cheapest way to
| a robot thus emerges as just taking the natural stuff and
| adding an artificial brain to it versus trying to re-engineer
| the bones and muscles with metal and plastic.
| random3 wrote:
| Cortical Labs has been doing work in this area. They had a Doom
| demo a while ago. I think it's a matter of tradeoffs. Perhaps
| you'd have biological version as a versatile all-around thing,
| but many tasks don't require that so likely the tin variants
| are more durable for many tasks. Also, in terms of reasoning,
| the brain bandwidth is very low and high latency so there are
| advantages to silicon chips there.
|
| It's interesting to learn actuators are "behind". I kept seeing
| cool stuff in the 3D printing space and thought there's a lot
| of progress. I'd love to learn more.
| Geee wrote:
| I think they're doing it the other way around, i.e. growing a
| biological brain for the AI, which would then be used in a
| robot.
| hermitShell wrote:
| That is a truly terrifying future to imagine. Fortunately I
| would hazard to guess the medical technology to accomplish
| something like this is very, very far away. Not only because of
| the raw technological challenge, but also the barriers to
| development that scientists, doctors, and engineers would face
| before even being allowed to conduct experiments.
|
| I do agree though the humanoid form is a dead end for robots.
| Just build giant cubes that process inputs and give outputs,
| like a dishwasher. Why wash dishes with meat wand tentacles or
| try to recreate meat wand tentacles when you can accomplish the
| job in a wholly different way with far greater efficiency...?
|
| Where's the clothes foldeing cube? Analogous to the clothes
| washer and clothes dryer.... the clothes folder...
|
| Why stop at dishwashing...? Sell an entire integrated robotic
| kitchen.
| Geee wrote:
| I think the only real barriers are ethical. I'm pretty sure
| we'll figure out to do a completely synthetic biological
| robots without any kind of biological brain in the next 10-20
| years, and they don't even have to resemble animals or
| humans. This should alleviate some of the ethical issues.
| novafunc wrote:
| Dedicated machines can obviously solve an issue more
| efficiently, but it's still good to have a machine that can
| do most things adequately.
|
| As an example, you can have an automated washer, dryer, and
| folder, sure. But what if you wanted to automate the
| retrieval of dirty laundry and the delivery of clean laundry
| ? That would need to be some sort of robot to travel
| throughout an environment (fit through human sized areas,
| open doors, walk steps) to collect and deliver things. And if
| I have a robot roaming around the house, I would prefer to
| just buy one robot that could do many things rather than have
| to buy it to just collect things and more expensive machines
| as well.
| krisoft wrote:
| > giraffes for warehouses.
|
| I'm not even sure if you are joking there or haven't thought
| your proposal through. Sure giraffes are tall, but they can
| barelly lift any weight. What use would a robotically
| controlled giraffe be in a warehouse?
|
| > There has been no innovation in robotic actuators since
| Honda's Asimo.
|
| I very much doubt this. If nothing else the MIT Cheetah's
| actuators are a whole different ballgame compared to asimo's
| actuators. (Backdriveability, variable stiffness) And then
| there is a lot of interesting work being done with combining
| elastic elements with the actuators.
| Geee wrote:
| Well, a giraffe could do jobs where you need to reach high,
| such as replacing a lightbulb. Sure, I'm half-joking.
|
| Asimo used BLDC motors with strain-wave gearing, which is
| pretty much standard today on high-end humanoid robots. The
| only thing that has happened is that these are much cheaper
| today, and might be slightly more optimized.
| siekmanj wrote:
| Actuators on modern humanoids use cycloids or planetary
| reducers, not strain waves. They are much more compliant
| and backdrivable because of the huge reduction in reflected
| inertia.
| devindotcom wrote:
| this is a tangent but you should revisit your assumptions
| about giraffe anatomy. their necks actually weigh a
| tremendous amount and are kept upright by an interesting
| system whereby they actually stretch this giant tendon to
| bend down and the tendon's tension lifts it back up. super
| cool to learn about - they dissect one in a documentary
| series I can't think of just now.
| kridsdale1 wrote:
| It was Richard Dawkins dissecting it IIRC in front of a
| lecture hall where he makes a point that if there were a
| God designing animals, he wouldn't have made this insane
| thing.
| Ciantic wrote:
| Did you look at 1X's artificial tendon driven hands?
| siekmanj wrote:
| I could not disagree more with the claim about no improvement
| in robotic actuators.
|
| The torque density and price of actuators has fallen
| dramatically since Ben Katz's MIT work on mini cheetah. The
| actuators on the Unitree G1 based on that work are powerful for
| their size and near quasi-direct-drive. The motors on the BD
| E-Atlas are completely passively cooled and appear to have
| really good torque density. Actuators have never been improving
| faster than they are now.
| Geee wrote:
| G1 is a small robot designed for agility, and can't do much
| real work. That's why it uses lower reduction actuators with
| low sustained torques, and it'll overheat easily in
| continuous work. Many of the larger robots (Optimus, Figure,
| BD Atlas) use higher reduction actuators with strain waves or
| planetary roller screws. They're designed for higher
| sustained torques, but are also less agile and less safe for
| humans to be around. They're also quite heavy (BD Atlas is
| 90kg), and still can't match human performance.
| siekmanj wrote:
| yes, for heavy lift and bulk manipulation high gear ratios
| are still necessary. Maybe someday cable drives will be
| feasible. No question that we are not at human performance
| yet or that there isn't a ways to go. This is the specific
| claim I was arguing against:
|
| > There has been no innovation in robotic actuators since
| Honda's Asimo.
|
| I believe we are 100% making tangible progress and the
| technology is improving faster than it ever has.
| Geee wrote:
| I don't think electric motors + reduction gears can be
| improved much, unless I'm missing something. I hope
| someone invents something completely new.
| hypendev wrote:
| Exactly, the last year or two has been insanely innovative
| for actuators, with some new material combinations,
| approaches and multiple startups that are starting to scale
| up their innovations in this space. Give them a few years to
| sort out the vaporwares and the robotics revolution will
| begin.
| creaturemachine wrote:
| The world can't support the number of bodies on it already, and
| you're proposing adding mindless meatbags that still need
| feeding and their waste managed? Are you going to accept an
| amazon package that's had giraffe poop sprayed on it while
| picking, or change your meat-robot's diaper? I didn't think so.
| qnleigh wrote:
| Wow, I know what my next nightmare will be about.
| igleria wrote:
| > if you grow a bear genetically modified in a way that it has
| no consciousness or thought, it'll make a much better
| construction worker than any humanoid robot
|
| I was lacking material for my nightmares, thanks.
| Gud wrote:
| Have you worked construction?
|
| I'd rather have a guy with a crane than a grizzly.
| xchip wrote:
| Video has too many cuts, similar to kungfu movies where the actor
| doesn't know how to fight.
| fnoef wrote:
| This is incredible. Seems like a big achievement.
|
| The only thing that bothers me is what happens when robots
| finally automated "all the mundane day-to-day tasks" including
| our jobs, what is there left to do for common folks who are not
| geniuses working at Google/Anthropic/ChatGPT or occupy the
| C-Suite of these companies?
| IanCal wrote:
| The question of agency and the question of income are
| different. The former - we do things manually that can be
| automated for fun all the time and make entirely arbitrary
| weird things to do for no value. However some find it hard to
| move from work to leisure.
|
| For income - who knows?
| tireonfire wrote:
| I'm asked to prove I'm not a bot if I want to watch the top video
| with sound.
| seydor wrote:
| it s a trick question, they are actually looking for robots
| Flere-Imsaho wrote:
| No mention of whether the robot's models run locally or in the
| cloud. Ie. Does it require an internet connection?
|
| For a robot to be in my house it would have to run locally,
| there's no way I'm allowing one that runs in the cloud to operate
| my washing machine for example.
| neuronexmachina wrote:
| It does mention it though?
|
| > Many robotic applications need to operate without network
| latency or internet connectivity. Gemini Robotics On-Device 2
| is built specifically to handle these constraints -- it is our
| most-efficient vision-language-action model (VLA) optimized to
| run locally on robotic devices.
| Flere-Imsaho wrote:
| Ah thankyou I missed that, good to hear.
| butlike wrote:
| Why do we want to add more bodies on a finite plane of existence
| with an infinitely-expanding base (humans)?
|
| We have a finite plane of existence (Earth), with an infinitely-
| expanding consumer base (humans), and we want to add robotic
| competition to that finite plane of existence? The data center AI
| is more appealing (I guess) since it doesn't compete literally
| shoulder-to-shoulder with me. Why do we want dexterous robots
| when we have humans?
| antonyt wrote:
| We show many signs of stopping our infinite expansion.
|
| As for why we want dexterous robots, the obvious answer is to
| do things that we don't want to do. Things that are back-
| breaking, disgusting, dangerous, or just plain boring.
| ge96 wrote:
| Paint it yellow and ask why it is hiding a nuclear battery
| DonnyV wrote:
| Its almost like Google selling Boston Dynamics was a bad idea.
| purplecats wrote:
| anyone notice the jokes they put in?
|
| * bot: "im nervous. is that a microphone?"
|
| * bot: "great job, you're a machine!" (said to another bot, a
| machine)
|
| * bot: clicks "i am [not] a robot" button on a computer
| maelito wrote:
| Still can't make a page scroll smoothly though.
| secretsatan wrote:
| Is this why chinese robots got banned?
| caycep wrote:
| There's one of this that is a language model; are the rest
| reinforcement learning models?
| dr_blueberry wrote:
| Doing some initial testing of Gemini ER 2 within the Orion 2
| visual agent harness. I'll share a few initial results and chat
| threads here. I'm impressed with how fast Gemini ER2 is.
|
| 1. Crop the segment when adding rice to the rice cooker + analyze
| a frame:
| https://chat.vlm.run/c/40b5edfb-6d15-47e8-bedd-c77b1ed92496
|
| 2. Extract 16 keyframes in a 4x4 grid + detect the water bottle:
| https://chat.vlm.run/c/a8542517-0021-4013-9663-a9f41f286e4c
|
| 3. Extract the frame at 0:03 + segment the lettuce + generate a
| 3D reconstruction:
| https://chat.vlm.run/c/494c7c65-4aa1-442f-a78a-bfd1409c784d
|
| (I work at VLM Run).
| zuluonezero wrote:
| That's the most expensive piece of toast ever made! I want one.
| Can in open the jar of jam yet?
| jwpapi wrote:
| I don't want to be a hater, but somehow i still keep throwing
| vacuum roboters away and prefer the manual machine. It somehow
| always ends up worrying me more than helping. Crashing, charging
| putting away, putting things away for it to work (peeping). There
| are a lot of small things that come to these things that have
| evolved over the last 100 of years.
|
| When i think about humanoids and household. I have so much
| particular ways of how I want my household to be done. I find it
| really hard to believe you can make it act that way. I struggled
| to teach humans how I want it. So I ended up doing everything
| myself again.
| PostOnce wrote:
| Once upon a time, optimism was plausible.
|
| But now it seems the only likely outcomes of such technology are:
| > rich people hoarding wealth > high (and unpleasant)
| unemployment > ICE agents being remotely operated
| unaccountable robots whose operators are made anonymous by law.
|
| Where the future goes I don't know, but I'm no longer optimistic
| about it for the average person.
| greatony wrote:
| nothing new, at least 12~18mo behind tesla, shame on Google
| aucisson_masque wrote:
| How close are they to Chinese ?
| frays wrote:
| When will robotics' GPT-3.5 moment arrive?
| rldjbpin wrote:
| interesting time to try the different physical ai stuff! the
| apollo 2 [1] featured in the videos is quite cute and seeing it
| for the first time.
|
| the benchmarks right below the list of models is weirdly set.
| very unlike the standards of the usual alphabet websites.
|
| [1] https://apptronik.com/apollo/apollo-2
| bluber84 wrote:
| This page is just marketing...more interesting is that:
| https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/models-and-research/go...
|
| Success-rate of ~60% Accuracy: ~80% That's pretty low and
| definitely not production ready
| lez wrote:
| At the point it gets solid and useful, the powers that be will
| immediately use them as weapon.
| Gud wrote:
| They already use robots as a weapon, they're just not bipedal.
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