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Man, another (potential) foundational AI/ML/Robotics library from Facebook. At some point every major open source library in this field is going to be run out

Man, another (potential) foundational AI/ML/Robotics library from Facebook. At some point every major open source library in this field is going to be run out of a FAANG company. I wonder what the impact of this will be in the long run.

SCUSKU 7y ago
One impact is that a $5,000 robot is labeled as a "a low cost" robot.
- detaro 7y ago
  Not really. That's just sadly the state of whats "low cost" in that market, regardless if you work in FAANG, traditional industries or academia.
- criddell 7y ago
  It's relatively low cost.
- accurrent 7y ago
  Robots are expensive unfortunately. In particular good actuators seem to cost a bomb.
agentx3r 7y ago
Foundational seems like a strong word here - this is a thin wrapper on top of two popular components from ROS (Navigation and MoveIt), and bringup for a specific robot (LoCoBot). I appreciate the effort here though - ROS feels like it's become harder to use due to stale documentation, and there's value in providing a simple python API that abstracts the underlying bringup. However looking through the wrapper and its documentation, it doesn't feel like it's making it much simpler by hiding away standard ROS tools.
- andreyk 7y ago
  Yeah, as a robotics + ML researcher at Stanford I can confirm I've looked over this and was not that impressed; our own lab already has a version of this, as do most robotics lab. It's nice that it's open source but it's not that feature-rich.
DrNuke 7y ago
A barebone, swiss-knife solution for a DIY lab at $1.5k might help here? I had to get it up and working last year for a local meetup at high-school and lateral professional level. The article is not in English language but the four referred links are, so here it goes: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/azzerare-con-poco-il-debito-tecnico-dellingegnere-giuseppe-cornacchia/ https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/azzerare-con-poco-il-debito-t...
slimsag 7y ago
I've thought about this a LOT, more specifically about the implications of the fact that open source projects are treated as _both_ communities AND code as a single entity at the same time instead of independently so. This gives the owner of the project a large amount of weight not only in the direction of the project's code, but also in the community as a whole, which can have some substantial negative impacts I believe. With many open source projects started by non-companies, you end up with community leaders who are a few people in the scene who started the project or contributed to it heavily and care about the space a lot. Most importantly, their views are affected largely by the community -- they're "one with the community" so-to-speak. With the introduction of large companies managing OSS projects, there is a new aspect in which sub-communities grow. This allows for one side of the community (almost never the company's side) to become "a group of people to communicate our changes to" rather than a group of people to actually collaborate with. I could list several examples of this happening, but I don't want to anger anyone from these companies against me personally and don't feel like creating a throwaway account. Treating OSS projects as communities and code has some nice qualities, and certainly having paid engineers from companies working on these projects has nice properties, too, but we're not honest with ourselves about the downsides and risks and people regularly give _more_ weight to projects created by companies without warrant (I've seen 20% projects by Google on the front page of /r/programming without even so much as a README -- something that would never happen if it wasn't "created by a FAANG")
dwrodri 7y ago
I think a big reason that AI/ML/Robotics is closely associated with FAANG companies is that these are very expensive fields to get into compared to web development or CLI utilities. FAANG companies can also move much faster than FOSS efforts when it comes to putting together great teams. There was a REALLY good comment on FOSS vs. closed source commercial software that was brought up a couple weeks ago, which I wish I could quote verbatim but unfortunately you'll have to deal with my paraphrased version: > "In early UNIX days, we got things done on computers using lots of small tools that did one thing well because compute resources and developer talent were both in scarce supply. Nowadays, software companies can put together teams that can manage huge monoliths of software. In order for FOSS to thrive, we need to put less time into trying to beat these companies at their own game (e.g. code behemoths like the ones you see on Linux desktop projects) and focus more on making great tools that do one thing really well (e.g. cURL, GNU Readline)" ML/AI is also really hard because it requires people to establish much stronger interfacing standards between the important steps of the data analysis process AND the substeps within those steps. Keras[2] was an enormous step forward in this regard, but the creator now works at Google and I assume he isn't very interested in continuing to make Keras the standard frontend for Deep learning model specification. HuggingFace[1] Is an awesome counterexample to this trend of AI/ML being lead by FAANG. I'm fiending for an opportunity to check out Thinc, but I'm quite occupied with security coursework these days. 1: https://angel.co/company/hugging-face https://angel.co/company/hugging-face 2: https://keras.io/ https://keras.io/

SCUSKU 7y ago

One impact is that a $5,000 robot is labeled as a "a low cost" robot.

detaro 7y ago
Not really. That's just sadly the state of whats "low cost" in that market, regardless if you work in FAANG, traditional industries or academia.
criddell 7y ago
It's relatively low cost.
accurrent 7y ago
Robots are expensive unfortunately. In particular good actuators seem to cost a bomb.

agentx3r 7y ago

Foundational seems like a strong word here - this is a thin wrapper on top of two popular components from ROS (Navigation and MoveIt), and bringup for a specific robot (LoCoBot). I appreciate the effort here though - ROS feels like it's become harder to use due to stale documentation, and there's value in providing a simple python API that abstracts the underlying bringup. However looking through the wrapper and its documentation, it doesn't feel like it's making it much simpler by hiding away standard ROS tools.

andreyk 7y ago
Yeah, as a robotics + ML researcher at Stanford I can confirm I've looked over this and was not that impressed; our own lab already has a version of this, as do most robotics lab. It's nice that it's open source but it's not that feature-rich.

DrNuke 7y ago

A barebone, swiss-knife solution for a DIY lab at $1.5k might help here? I had to get it up and working last year for a local meetup at high-school and lateral professional level. The article is not in English language but the four referred links are, so here it goes: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/azzerare-con-poco-il-debito-tecnico-dellingegnere-giuseppe-cornacchia/ https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/azzerare-con-poco-il-debito-t...

slimsag 7y ago

I've thought about this a LOT, more specifically about the implications of the fact that open source projects are treated as _both_ communities AND code as a single entity at the same time instead of independently so. This gives the owner of the project a large amount of weight not only in the direction of the project's code, but also in the community as a whole, which can have some substantial negative impacts I believe. With many open source projects started by non-companies, you end up with community leaders who are a few people in the scene who started the project or contributed to it heavily and care about the space a lot. Most importantly, their views are affected largely by the community -- they're "one with the community" so-to-speak. With the introduction of large companies managing OSS projects, there is a new aspect in which sub-communities grow. This allows for one side of the community (almost never the company's side) to become "a group of people to communicate our changes to" rather than a group of people to actually collaborate with. I could list several examples of this happening, but I don't want to anger anyone from these companies against me personally and don't feel like creating a throwaway account. Treating OSS projects as communities and code has some nice qualities, and certainly having paid engineers from companies working on these projects has nice properties, too, but we're not honest with ourselves about the downsides and risks and people regularly give _more_ weight to projects created by companies without warrant (I've seen 20% projects by Google on the front page of /r/programming without even so much as a README -- something that would never happen if it wasn't "created by a FAANG")

dwrodri 7y ago

I think a big reason that AI/ML/Robotics is closely associated with FAANG companies is that these are very expensive fields to get into compared to web development or CLI utilities. FAANG companies can also move much faster than FOSS efforts when it comes to putting together great teams. There was a REALLY good comment on FOSS vs. closed source commercial software that was brought up a couple weeks ago, which I wish I could quote verbatim but unfortunately you'll have to deal with my paraphrased version: > "In early UNIX days, we got things done on computers using lots of small tools that did one thing well because compute resources and developer talent were both in scarce supply. Nowadays, software companies can put together teams that can manage huge monoliths of software. In order for FOSS to thrive, we need to put less time into trying to beat these companies at their own game (e.g. code behemoths like the ones you see on Linux desktop projects) and focus more on making great tools that do one thing really well (e.g. cURL, GNU Readline)" ML/AI is also really hard because it requires people to establish much stronger interfacing standards between the important steps of the data analysis process AND the substeps within those steps. Keras[2] was an enormous step forward in this regard, but the creator now works at Google and I assume he isn't very interested in continuing to make Keras the standard frontend for Deep learning model specification. HuggingFace[1] Is an awesome counterexample to this trend of AI/ML being lead by FAANG. I'm fiending for an opportunity to check out Thinc, but I'm quite occupied with security coursework these days. 1: https://angel.co/company/hugging-face https://angel.co/company/hugging-face 2: https://keras.io/ https://keras.io/