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Physical Intelligence's first generalist policy AI can finally do your laundry
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- Terretta 2y agoAt Physical Intelligence (π) our mission is to bring general-purpose AI into the physical world. We're excited to show the first step towards this mission - our first generalist model π₀ Paper, blog, uncut videos: http://physicalintelligence.company/blog/pi0 http://physicalintelligence.company/blog/pi0 via: https://x.com/physical_int/status/1852041726279794788 https://x.com/physical_int/status/1852041726279794788
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- gigel82 2y agoNice, finally some AI functionality I could actually use.
- tomohelix 2y agoGet it a bit better in term of precision and we have a killer lab automation tool. Labs around the world would be willing to pay 1M for a robot that can handle manual lab works and it is not like they are very difficult. Lots of labwork is based on established protocols with well defined steps. A robot that can grab things and go to town on those tubes without any programming needed is a blockbuster product to me.
- NoLinkToMe 2y agoAgreed, my girlfriend has a biochemistry degree and works in such a lab. It involves some physical work like collecting, preparing and inputting samples, doing basic maintenance of the machines, some analysis and then some administrative/secretarial work in feeding the results into a system or by phonecall to the doctor. All of which can indeed be automated in my view. I would say it really depends on where you are though. In the US it probably makes sense quite quickly. But she lives in a small EU country where salaries aren't high, and this is very much a junior position with a lot of students looking for such a job. Her position costs about 25k a year. The NPV of a $1m investment with a 25k cashflow is negative at normal discount rates. Once you get to replace a $120k salary with a $1m robot, it does make sense. Further I do still expect there to be some jobs in overseeing the robot (e.g. your average factory manager). That makes sense for large centralised production locations, because you can have 1 human job overseeing many robots. It doesn't necessarily make sense with many small decentralised production locations. And that's the nature of most labs, I believe due to the time sensitivity of a lot of lab work they need to be everywhere and close to customers. But maybe that will change.
- bagels 2y agoProduction version of these robot arms would not be anywhere near $1m
- Falimonda 2y agoThat seems to only account for the hardware. How much do you reckon a software license will cost for your fleet of cheap arms?
- thanksgiving 2y agoI got really excited for a second for people who need to work on a lab thinking they will be able to work from home now...
- csomar 2y ago> That seems to only account for the hardware. How much do you reckon a software license will cost for your fleet of cheap arms? Just a bit lower than what a human would cost.
- amelius 2y agoRemember though that AI is a winner takes all space. It will probably be won by a company with lots of cash behind it (like this one which has support from many companies, including OpenAI).
- notatoad 2y agosignificantly lower than what a human already doing the job would cost, until the VC money runs out. And then a whole bunch more than what a human would cost, after they've got you locked in and you've let your staff go.
- llm_trw 2y agoKeep in mind that workers in the EU work for around 6 hours a day, a robot works for 24, so it's replacing 4 of them, not 1.
- M4v3R 2y agoAlso worth mentioning that a lot of stuff in chemistry labs is toxic and even potentially deadly to humans, it would be a big win if these could be handled by robots instead.
- bottom999mottob 2y agoThat reminds me of Dr. Greenamyre in Pittsburgh who thinks he accidentally gave himself Parkinsons researching rotenone in pesticides [0] [0] https://youtu.be/7mYEqUrx6dQ?si=x4P6pkUCd7EvCe1N&t=152 https://youtu.be/7mYEqUrx6dQ?si=x4P6pkUCd7EvCe1N&t=152
- amelius 2y agoCertainly. I have a friend working in this space (AI lab automation). In a few years he expects competition to be fierce, though.
- doctorpangloss 2y agoThis lab automation product already exists and the couple of startups in this space face the same headwinds as everyone else trying to sell hardware when the stuff people are essentially really paying for is software. Also nobody’s academic lab is buying $1m startup lab equipment. A whole core for 30 research groups is buying something, but it will be a piece of equipment that directly leads to publishing, ie, something with history. That is why you don’t have the exact thing you are talking about, which exists, in labs.
- bubaumba 2y agoDon't expect much. Even screwing a nut on a bolt is a huge problem for generic robot. Which means you will need a 'robot friendly' lab. Were all things can be done by a primitive robotic hand. Other options are making more capable hands, and completely robotic specialized labs. The first is most interesting and the way to go. When it happens it will open a lot of possibilities. Like "self-repairing" vehicles and planet stations. Just with 'technician' robot onboard.
- Animats 2y agoOn HN 9 days ago. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42011770 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42011770
- qnleigh 2y agoIs my knowledge out of date, or is this a step change in robotics capabilities? Boston Dynamics robots are impressive, but this seems way beyond what their robots have been able to do.
- authorfly 2y agoIt's not really a step change. Saycan demonstrated similar functionality with PaLM 2 years ago (2.5 years first demo of cleaning up coke cans, etc): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ru23eWAQ6_E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ru23eWAQ6_E Caveat - I am way out of my depth here as I focus on Software AI, but: I can't see any major breaks from SayCan looking at this information. When studying robotics, Degrees of Freedom/basic Arms and mechanisms (tension, grip, extension, types of joint etc) are a typical case study. However, I do not think there has been any practical progress (with the lack of data) in about 20 years now, besides increased refinement from materials science (e.g. detection of soft materials) allowing some better grip but not particularly better dynamic movement(e.g. walking remains badly solved compared to the efficiency/mechanism of humans).
- Falimonda 2y agoIt's certainly an expansion of software capabilities with respect to what Boston Dynamics typically highlights in their videos. With that said, Boston Dynamics is likely to have their own version of this in the works if not already live. They're videos just tend to highlight advancements in both hardware and software that are likely to go viral and connect with non-technical viewers. You can already see it in some of BD's latest videos.
- fragmede 2y agoThe trouble Atlas had taking the car parts off the slotted shelf makes it seem like they're quite a bit further away, given the hand dexterity it takes to fold clothes.
- ValentinA23 2y agoFolding clothes is a special task. Other prototypical tasks that are used in robot benchmark: - changing a bike chain - closing a jacket's zipper
- llm_trw 2y agoFascinating work. I never thought about what we could do if instead of trying to do work in real time we slowed robots down for non time critical tasks to latencies which current transformers can deal with on real hardware.
- 082349872349872 2y agovon Neumann, Theory of self-reproducing automata (1966) p.72 "Role of High Complication": > An automaton can not be separated from the milieu to which it responds. > The characteristics of a human for survival are well defined on the surface of the earth in its present state, though for most types of humans you must actually specialize the situation a little further than this. But it is meaningless to argue how the human would survive on the bottom of the ocean or in a temperature of 1000 degrees centigrade. Similarly, in discussing a computing machine it is meaningless to ask how fast or how slow it is, unless you specify what type of problems will be given to it.
- wiz21c 2y agoYeah, one thing is for sure: the robot has actually understood that it is very boring to do the laundry. Proof ? Just look at how it botches the d*n task :-) I mean, I would never ever pince a t-shirt so bad :-)
- JumpCrisscross 2y agoI hate doing laundry. Everyone gets one task they get to abhor. Mine is laundry. If I could buy this in a few generations for less than $20k, I would, pinches and all. Perfect is perfect. Good enough is good enough.
- anonzzzies 2y ago$20k... Doesn't that buy a lot of serviced laundry? I am unaware about prices in the rest of the world, but 20k is more than a lifetime of having my laundry picked up and ironed every week (which I do as I too hate laundry).
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago> $20k... Doesn't that buy a lot of serviced laundry? In my neck of the woods it costs a couple years of the cleaner dropping in every week or two. In New York, maybe a couple more years, albeit with the added burden of having to pick it up and drop it off myself.
- pzo 2y agoI like that their robot is pretty simple comparing to humanoid robots so cost should be much lower. I don't get it why focusing on clothes folding though, does anyone do laundry more often than once a week? Much more useful if it can do cooking since that's something you do at least once every day. Instead I would like to see some new innovation in laundry machines. Current technology is very basic, you heat water and keep spinning. Why not some something more similar to bigger paper printer that at the end of the day you feed your 1 shirt, roll it into a roller, sprinkle with some high pressure minimal amount of water, heating and return 30min later already perfectly ironed.
- M4v3R 2y ago> I don't get it why focusing on clothes folding though, does anyone do laundry more often than once a week? Folding laundry is not the end goal here. They chose it because it’s a very challenging thing for a robot to do, requiring great manual dexterity, planning, reacting to sensory inputs etc. In other words: if your robot can do your laundry it can probably be taught to do pretty much anything else around the house.
- bitwize 2y ago> I don't get it why focusing on clothes folding though, does anyone do laundry more often than once a week? Much more useful if it can do cooking since that's something you do at least once every day. Because the people on the Axiom are going to need clean jumpsuits? Seriously, laundry folding is an example of a complex task that requires considerable dexterity and sophisticated object manipulation on the robot's part, but unlike cooking it's relatively low stakes: little harm is likely to be caused to the robot, the environment, or bystanding humans if the robot screws it up. So it makes a pretty good research task that, when solved for, will make impressive demos at trade events.
- lotsofpulp 2y ago> does anyone do laundry more often than once a week? Yes, at least 3x per week. Young kids, toddlers, babies, workout clothes, sports clothes, work clothes, etc.
- averageRoyalty 2y ago
- Falimonda 2y agoHow long before we see this running on a fleet of excavators?
- seydor 2y agoThese things can be huge for agriculture
- sawmurai 2y agoMaybe someone in the HN crowd knows that: Why are these robots moving so slowly? Is it for safety or does speed increase the difficulty significantly?
- imtringued 2y agoThey are using a vision language model to generate the robot motions token by token. They are being bottlenecked by the inference of the VLM.
- amelius 2y agoMy guess is that speed is not their first concern.
- PostOnce 2y agoFor factories and closed environments, stuff is getting good fast, but for the rest of the "real world", no robot or AI is practical without human supervision. I automate physical things for a living and have thus become convinced. The first thing that robot will do is start a dryer that a toddler climbed into because it isn't that aware of the world around it. And that will be the end of general purpose domestic robots. That or knocking over candles or fucking up something else simultaneously trivial and terribly dangerous in context. I dream the same dream of a general purpose machine, but I think it may never be possible, and if it is we're a long way out.
- user90131313 2y agoHow about at first if we put camera on it and then someone from overseas checks around before performoning the task? for cheap but it can make it secure.
- unsupp0rted 2y agoI’d rather not have someone from overseas walking around my home via remote cameras
- user90131313 2y agoMany chooses Amazon and Google to listen their home + record their home every day. Most customers just buy things.
- TeMPOraL 2y agoSci-fi authors were worried about rebellions of enslaved robots, while the industry figures, why risk jumping into the unknown, when we can fake a smart computer with overseas labor and an Internet connection, and wage slavery we know how to handle... Anyway, if we're going to fake smart robots this way, why not just honestly call it what it is? Remote household staff. Might as well give them better sensors and actuators, but I guess this is giving humans too much agency and risk; what if the operator decides to hurt the "robot" owners or something? The vendor would not have that. Cannot have that. Humans are too messy to deal with. Or is this the short-term future of all automation? I look at my robotic vacuum cleaner now, occasionally pausing for a second or two while it figures out where to go, and I wonder - maybe in those moments, it's using some Protein Intelligence Chip to query a bunch of random humans somewhere?
- ribcage 2y agoLet's automate everything, so we don't need to do anything just lay in our bed.
- tacocataco 2y agoPeople should be free to enjoy life their way. Including if they want to be grandpa Joe from willy wonka.
- consteval 2y agoYes because clearly this is how automation works. Never mind that we've improved efficiencies many orders of magnitude over the last century and people still work the exact same amount of hours. We could automate the world and then we'd all be stuck rolling a cube up and hill and back down. We will work, no matter what, even in the face of post-scarcity utopia.
- light_hue_1 2y agoThis robot cannot "do your laundry". It is the same toy as always in robotics. It works in very specific environments, with very specific laundry, as long as no one gets in the way and nothing bad ever happens, you've trained it to do your laundry, you never buy anything unusual, nothing gets tangled too much, etc. They have an extremely specific definition of the word "laundry". Three specific shirts of size M, L, and XL, and two pairs of shorts of size 28 and 36. Then they do a mobile task on three specific shirts of size M, M, and XL, and two shorts of size 32 and 31W. That's not "laundry" the way any lay person would understand. It's sad to see yet another group hype their work for money. What they did do, is invest a tremendous amount of engineering effort to scale things up, to collect data, and to see what changes models need to scale well in this space. That's nice and useful. It's something that as academics we generally cannot afford to do. And won't be able to afford any time soon because they don't share their data and none of their results are reproducible. PS: Where is this title from? "Physical Intelligence's first generalist policy AI can finally do your laundry " It's not in the article. It's very misleading.
- imtringued 2y agoSure, what you said is somewhat true, but you have seemingly misunderstood one key aspect here. They simply do not have enough training data to fold all possible laundry. If there was a way to fine-tune the robot on your own clothes, then it would be able to do your laundry just fine. You're under the mistaken impression that this is just a scripted demo built around learning directly from teleoperation as was the case with mobile aloha. The VLA model here is capable of more generalization than you are willing to admit.
- Terretta 2y agoNo intention to mislead, but to fit their gist into an informing title. I was originally linking to X, describing their tweet with laundry vid, then changed to point to their source blog post, where their title doesn't fully convey the content. So this title is firm name and blog post title, adding the "laundry" from their hero video under the title and featured video on their x.com post that links to this blog post, as well as the first featured/labeled "Laundry" task discussed in body (not to mention, answering HN commenters such as this, since "doing the laundry" is by now a meme): > I’m still waiting for a neural net that can do my laundry. -- sheeshkebab 11 hours ago - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42098153 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42098153 The response to this, portrayed in both blog post and x.com feature videos, is in the third sentence of the blog post: To paraphrase Moravec’s paradox, winning a game of chess or discovering a new drug represent “easy” problems for AI to solve, but folding a shirt or cleaning up a table requires solving some of the most difficult engineering problems ever conceived. To build AI systems that have the kind of physically situated versatility that people possess, we need a new approach — we need to make AI systems embodied so that they can acquire physical intelligence. The synthesis is, this is about “doing your laundry”. Finally, to take it out of air quotes, the article's first explicit and bold labeled text task description is: LAUNDRY. We fine-tuned π0 to fold laundry, using either a mobile robot or a fixed pair of arms. The goal is to get the clothing into a neat stack. This task is exceptionally difficult for robots (...and some humans): while a single t-shirt laid flat on the table can sometimes be folded just by repeating a pre-scripted set of motions, a pile of tangled laundry can be crumpled in many different ways, so it is not enough to simply move the arms through the same motion. To our knowledge, no prior robot system has been demonstrated to perform this task at this level of complexity. They hold they have demonstrated this robot doing the laundry.
- jonplackett 2y agoFinally someone teaching AI to do all the stuff I _dont’t_ want to do.
- lifeisstillgood 2y agoThe (unspoken?) goal is to do my laundry - and all the other domestic tasks, because that’s where human satisfaction can be unleashed Give me a moment 1. All economics / markers of value are about human happiness / satisfaction - we claim it’s money but it’s only given a value by humans who want it. 2. As soon as people get rich enough they outsource their domestic tasks - hire a maid or a cook, or buy ready meals. 3. In the western world companies over past fifty years got a free boost as women joined the labour force, and essentially companies were paying one guy the cost of a household now they pay two people the cost of household getting twice the workers for same price. 4. So most households have lost 35 hours a week, and also still have same amount of domestic duties to do 5. As we can’t give everyone a maid we might be able to give everyone a robot maid. 6. Most innovations / technologies find their way into homes - from bricks to heating to electricity we invent it and eventually find a way to make our lives more comfortable - see the point about economics is just humans liking stuff 7. I assumed that real robo maids would be a social shift - ie a different design of washing machine, people eating at other peoples houses every day, anti-dust surfaces. But this one looks … interesting 8. I know this is incredibly western middle class centric - but exactly what else are 6 billon people aiming for?
- ktjag 2y agoWhere did the economies get a boost when women joined the labor force? In Germany the post-war economic miracle happened mostly without them. In the beginning of the 1970s, when women did join the labor force in greater numbers, admittedly the macroeconomic conditions were bad (oil crisis), so it is hard to filter that out. But still, mostly we have more workers, which lowers wages and leads to the creation of more bullshit jobs. To be clear, also men create and perform bullshit jobs! Now it takes two salaries to finance a house and a family. Great progress. At the supermarket, I boycott automated self-checkouts even if the lines are long so the nice cashiers keep their jobs.
- simgt 2y agoThat's clearly the "why" no one pushing for innovative products is answering. A couple decades ago one salary could sustain a family in most developed countries, now it seems to be a struggle with two for many, we have mass unemployment, productivity soared but somehow society also can't afford enough cleaners to keep places decent. Is the solution really to replace even more workers by capital, or do we have an issue with how we measure value that we should fix first?
- macrolime 2y agoPretty sure that once the pre-trained models used for this are pre-trained on lots of video and get larger (2-3 orders of magnitude larger than this), things will quickly improve. This may already exist in prototype form behind closed doors. Think how LLMs have improved since gpt-2 and gpt-3. Though I imagike it in real-time and cost efficiently may be a challenge.
- joduplessis 2y agoMan, watching that robot struggle with that green shirt made my eye twitch.
- GistNoesis 2y agoThe hard problem for a laundry robot is not folding the clothes, it's getting into the laundry room. Living in European city, space is a hard constraint. The cost of rent is 30€ per square meter per month in Paris. Laundry rooms are small. This robot is too wide and won't be able to go through the door of my laundry room. Ironing boards are foldable for a reason : they need to be setup every time. This robot can't do it, and also can't handle the softener bottle for the washing machine. Having 1 square meter empty table (0.5 for the table and 0.5 accessible space for the robot doing the folding) dedicated to folding is a pipe dream for most. Laundromats are there because some don't have enough space to even have a washing machine. Laundry room are a dedicated space for humidity and ventilation reason, so they have been designed on specific location on house plans probably more than 30 years ago on average, not having in mind robot accessibility, but rather be as small as functionally possible. Quite often for people not living in flats, but in houses, the laundry room is located in the basement with only stair or single step access. I don't think architect and construction accessibility norm will change fast enough, specially with bipedal robots right around the corner. The slack necessary for home robotics emergence has already been eaten multiple time due to the high cost of space.
- blagie 2y agoIf you scroll down, this is a general-purpose robot. It can drive around and bus the table or fold a cardboard box. I'm not sure it can't handle the softener, and V2 will likely be able to set up the ironing board. In terms of size, even now, it's smaller than a fridge, washing machine, dishwasher, or many other household time-saving appliances common in most houses (although not necessarily historic cities with multi-century homes not designed for them). No effort has gone into shrinking it either; perhaps with clever engineering, it can be made much smaller if it moves out of the research prototype phase. Another question, to me, is cost. Many robots like this run around $100k, and with good reason. Can this be brought down? I hope so.
- GistNoesis 2y agoThe water bottle is usually a common hard test for robots. The softener bottle raise the stakes even more. Because every time I handle it, I need to wash my hands afterwards. Ironing board is bigger than the robot, and quite heavy, the torque in setting it up is a lot and probably greater than the torque necessary to break the expensive actuator when things go wrong. Keeping a shared table clean so you can fold clothes on it is a not trivial but more manageable problem. The home market is highly predatory. If people have enough to invest in a home robot, it means that they have some available money that other actors didn't grab. In France last time they remove 5€ per month of renting help, it was a struggle for lot of people. You have lots of actors that call dibs on your home improvement money before you can improve your home. There is usually the landlord, then the building manager (or Home Owner Association) (which is usually already working in the kleptocracy domain), then there are local tax, and mandatory ecological improvements (thermal isolation, and windows), home improvement market (paints and kitchen), and of course everything is indexed on the current cost of energy, and uncontrolled inflation. It's not a question of costs, otherwise all smart investment improvements that bring more than they cost on the relevant time-scales like thermal isolation and solar power infrastructure, collective infrastructure, not having to do the laundry every week..., would have been done already. It's more about determining who deserve the money.
- psychoslave 2y agoSo we will have robots building and making corve there, while humanity focus on making smart policies through continuoys education for all and involvment in direct democracy. Or maybe we will have private army robots under the order of some random dictator disconnected from the reality of people. Or some mix of these. Or finally no longer any war, in a world without any human though. What a time to be alive.
- sebastiennight 2y agoI know very few people under 40 who fold and iron clothes, and I'm not sure I know people under 30 who own an ironing table and iron (or if they own one, it's busted, and if it's not busted, it's lost). I think "doing the laundry" is getting obsolete faster than doing it yourself is. Kind of like people didn't give up on sewing their damages clothes by hiring a robot to do it... they gave up by throwing old clothes away and switching to fast fashion. If this product addresses high-income people (which would probably be the case even if the price comes down from $100k to even $1k), then it still seems a lost cause for this reason.
- SamoyedFurFluff 2y agoFast fashion clothing increasingly cannot be ironed. But also it’s increasingly hard to buy good quality clothes because of the influence of fast fashion. Even very expensive designers will have shit like unlined coats or thin sweaters. Part of this is that the supply chain for good quality clothing has been greatly reduced. Even if you wanted as a designer to acquire good quality fabric, you have to pay more for it than you used to.
- transfire 2y agoThey need better hardware. Show me a robot that can button a shirt.
- LoganDark 2y agoLove to see mecanum wheels being used here. They're so much rarer to see than they should be! I go months to years between each instance of seeing them.
- d-lisp 2y agoThere is something funny in the way it performs some of the moves in a sub-optimal manner. It reminds me of cats playing with small objects (earings on a beside table...). This is still quite impressive.
- cruffle_duffle 2y agoFolding the laundry is “the easy part”. The actual hard part for me is putting it away. You can fold all you want but it does no good unless it gets put away into whatever closet/drawer configuration you’ve got.
- j_timberlake 2y agoFolding laundry is a tiny chore, the real holy-grail is robotic arms that can cook 24/7. The job-market will never recover from robotic arms in every fast-food joint, restaurant, hotel, hospital, military base, cruise ship, and everywhere else that preps food. The biggest winners might be grocery stores that sell hot meals prepared from their own produce, which are then drone-delivered to the nearby homes. I'm probably being way too optimistic though.
- arcastroe 2y agoSend your favorite recipe to any of the local robot chefs near you to get the exact dish you want, every time. would restaurants with static menus even be relevant at that point?