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Robotics needs HUGE advances in compute This is surprising to me. Robotics clearly needs huge advances in algorithms (RL or something better). Do you mean you

by p1esk 4y ago

Robotics needs HUGE advances in compute This is surprising to me. Robotics clearly needs huge advances in algorithms (RL or something better). Do you mean you need faster hardware to discover those algorithms?

TaylorAlexander 4y ago
Oh we definitely need better algorithms too! But I’ve imagined that we’d want something like GPT-3 but for sensor experiences. So the way GPT-3 can ingest lots of text and predict a reasonable paragraph as a continuation of a prompt, we could have a system ingest lots of simultaneous sensor data in the form of LiDAR, cameras, IMU data, and touch sensor/skin sensor data, and then given the current state of those sensors it could predict what in the world is going to occur next, and use this as input to an RL system to make a choice of action. This seems to me to be both a useful system and one that could require a lot of compute. And that’s still probably not a complete AI system so there’s probably many many pieces required. Looking at it another way, the human brain has wayyy more compute power than any of our current portable computers (robotics really needs to do most of its compute at the edge, on robot). Every robot I’ve ever worked with has been maxing out it’s CPU and GPU and still needed more compute. When you look at Tesla’s hydra network for their self driving system you get an idea for what is needed in robotics, but just as we saw GPT-3 improve with network size, I suspect a lot of the base systems involved in a hydra net could improve with network size. And I suspect that there’s still more advanced stuff required when you move beyond a simple task like driving a car to a more advanced general purpose AI system. For example the Tesla self driving system doesn’t need any language centers, and we know GPT-3 and similar networks are large.
- p1esk 4y ago
  robotics really needs to do most of its compute at the edge, on robot Why can't you hook your robot up to a GPU cluster? Tesla already has 7k+ A100 GPUs, the question is do they have algorithms which would clearly work better if only we could run them on 70k or 700k GPUs? I mean, what you say makes sense, but have people actually tried all that and realized they need bigger GPU clusters? Is there a GPT-3 equivalent model in robotics which would probably work better if we scaled it up? If not, perhaps they should start with a small proof of concept before asking for thousands of GPUs. Original Transformer --> GPT1 --> GPT2 --> GPT3.
  - TaylorAlexander 4y ago
    The problem with this is that autonomous robots need to function in the real world even without internet connectivity. For example I am designing a solar powered farming robot. We do have Wi-Fi and starlink here but Wi-Fi and internet go down. In general we think it makes most sense for it to be able to operate completely without a continuous internet connection. And take self driving cars where millisecond response times matter - those can’t rely on a continuous connection to function or someone will get killed. But as systems get more advanced it is my opinion that edge compute will be an important function. And edge compute can’t handle the state of the art networks that people are building for even text processing, let alone complete autonomous AGI. And no, the models I’m talking about don’t exist yet, I am speculating on what I think will be required based on how I see things. But I’m not asking for thousands of GPUs. I’m just speculating in internet comments about what robotics will need for a fully embodied AGI to function. I believe more edge compute power is needed. Perhaps 1000x more power than the Nvidia Orin edge compute for robotics today.
    - p1esk 4y ago
      Sure, I understand the need for the robot autonomy. The problem, as I see it, is that current robots (autonomous or not) suck. They suck primarily because we don't have good algorithms. Without such algorithms or models, it does not matter whether a robot is autonomous or not, or how much processing power it has. Only after we have the algorithms, the other issues you mentioned might become relevant. Finally, it's not clear yet if we need more compute than what's currently available (e.g. at Tesla) to develop the algorithms. p.s. I don't think AGI is needed for robotics. I suspect that even an ant's level of intelligence (together with existing ML algorithms) might be enough for robots to do almost all the tasks we might want them to do today. It's ironic that robots today can see, read, speak, understand spoken commands, drive a car (more or less), play simple video games, and do a lot of other cool stuff, but still can't walk around an apartment without falling or getting stuck, do laundry, wash dishes, or cook food.

by p1esk 4y ago

TaylorAlexander 4y ago

Oh we definitely need better algorithms too! But I’ve imagined that we’d want something like GPT-3 but for sensor experiences. So the way GPT-3 can ingest lots of text and predict a reasonable paragraph as a continuation of a prompt, we could have a system ingest lots of simultaneous sensor data in the form of LiDAR, cameras, IMU data, and touch sensor/skin sensor data, and then given the current state of those sensors it could predict what in the world is going to occur next, and use this as input to an RL system to make a choice of action. This seems to me to be both a useful system and one that could require a lot of compute. And that’s still probably not a complete AI system so there’s probably many many pieces required. Looking at it another way, the human brain has wayyy more compute power than any of our current portable computers (robotics really needs to do most of its compute at the edge, on robot). Every robot I’ve ever worked with has been maxing out it’s CPU and GPU and still needed more compute. When you look at Tesla’s hydra network for their self driving system you get an idea for what is needed in robotics, but just as we saw GPT-3 improve with network size, I suspect a lot of the base systems involved in a hydra net could improve with network size. And I suspect that there’s still more advanced stuff required when you move beyond a simple task like driving a car to a more advanced general purpose AI system. For example the Tesla self driving system doesn’t need any language centers, and we know GPT-3 and similar networks are large.

p1esk 4y ago
robotics really needs to do most of its compute at the edge, on robot Why can't you hook your robot up to a GPU cluster? Tesla already has 7k+ A100 GPUs, the question is do they have algorithms which would clearly work better if only we could run them on 70k or 700k GPUs? I mean, what you say makes sense, but have people actually tried all that and realized they need bigger GPU clusters? Is there a GPT-3 equivalent model in robotics which would probably work better if we scaled it up? If not, perhaps they should start with a small proof of concept before asking for thousands of GPUs. Original Transformer --> GPT1 --> GPT2 --> GPT3.
- TaylorAlexander 4y ago
  The problem with this is that autonomous robots need to function in the real world even without internet connectivity. For example I am designing a solar powered farming robot. We do have Wi-Fi and starlink here but Wi-Fi and internet go down. In general we think it makes most sense for it to be able to operate completely without a continuous internet connection. And take self driving cars where millisecond response times matter - those can’t rely on a continuous connection to function or someone will get killed. But as systems get more advanced it is my opinion that edge compute will be an important function. And edge compute can’t handle the state of the art networks that people are building for even text processing, let alone complete autonomous AGI. And no, the models I’m talking about don’t exist yet, I am speculating on what I think will be required based on how I see things. But I’m not asking for thousands of GPUs. I’m just speculating in internet comments about what robotics will need for a fully embodied AGI to function. I believe more edge compute power is needed. Perhaps 1000x more power than the Nvidia Orin edge compute for robotics today.
  - p1esk 4y ago
    Sure, I understand the need for the robot autonomy. The problem, as I see it, is that current robots (autonomous or not) suck. They suck primarily because we don't have good algorithms. Without such algorithms or models, it does not matter whether a robot is autonomous or not, or how much processing power it has. Only after we have the algorithms, the other issues you mentioned might become relevant. Finally, it's not clear yet if we need more compute than what's currently available (e.g. at Tesla) to develop the algorithms. p.s. I don't think AGI is needed for robotics. I suspect that even an ant's level of intelligence (together with existing ML algorithms) might be enough for robots to do almost all the tasks we might want them to do today. It's ironic that robots today can see, read, speak, understand spoken commands, drive a car (more or less), play simple video games, and do a lot of other cool stuff, but still can't walk around an apartment without falling or getting stuck, do laundry, wash dishes, or cook food.