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We accidentally solved robotics by watching 1M hours of YouTube
- okdood64 1y agoDoes YouTube allow massive scraping like this in their ToS?
- dangoodmanUT 1y agoWhat ToS
- bobmcnamara 1y agohttps://www.youtube.com/static?template=terms https://www.youtube.com/static?template=terms ?
- mouse_ 1y agoProbably not. Who cares at this point? No one is stopping ML sets from being primarily pirated. The current power is effectively dismantling copyright for AI related work.
- perching_aix 1y ago> The current power is effectively dismantling copyright for AI related work. Out of the loop apparently, could you elaborate? By "the current power" I take you mean the current US administration?
- bgwalter 1y agoTrump fired the head of the copyright office: https://www.heise.de/en/news/After-criticism-of-AI-training-practices-Trump-fires-head-of-copyright-office-10379873.html https://www.heise.de/en/news/After-criticism-of-AI-training-... The "Big Beautiful Bill" contains a clause that prohibits state "AI" legislation. Trump has a "Crypto and AI czar" who is very active in promoting "AI" on his YouTube propaganda outlet. The same czar also promoted, pre-election of course, accelerated peace with Russia and then stopped talking about the subject altogether.
- perching_aix 1y agoOh wow okay, genuinely missed these. Thanks.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- snickerdoodle12 1y ago> Who cares at this point Anyone who has a shred of integrity. I'm not a fan of overreaching copyright laws, but they've been strictly enforced for years now. Decades, even. They've ruined many lives, like how they killed Aaron Swartz. But now, suddenly, violating copyright is totally okay and carries no consequences whatsoever because the billionaires decided that's how they can get richer now? If you want to even try to pretend you don't live in a plutocracy and that the rule of law matters at all these developments should concern you.
- shadowgovt 1y agoAaron Swartz died of suicide, not copyright. His death was a tragedy but it wasn't done to him.
- marcus_holmes 1y agoThere's an English phrase "hounded to death", meaning that someone was pursued and hassled until they died. It doesn't specify the cause of death, but I think the assumption would be suicide, since you can't actually die of fatigue. I think that's what was done to Aaron Swartz.
- shadowgovt 1y agoMany people have dealt with the law, with copyright infringement, even with gross amounts of it, and had the book thrown at them, and survived the experience. Swartz was ill. It is a tragedy he did not survive the experience, and indeed, trial is very stressful. But he was no more hounded than any defendant who comes under federal scrutiny and has to defend themselves in a court of law via the trial system. Kevin Mitnick spent a year in prison (first incarceration) and survived it. Swartz was offered six months and committed suicide. I don't know how much we should change of the system to protect the Aaron Swartzs of the world; that's the mother of all Chesterton's Fences.
- shiroiuma 1y ago
- MaxPock 1y agoThey don't and neither do I allow my site - whose content I found on Gemini -scraped
- klysm 1y agoI don't think they can legally prevent it
- perching_aix 1y agoMy "lawyer" (gpt4o) claims that since YouTube is merely a non-exclusive licensee of the user content upload to their service, even if they have such restrictions in their ToS (they do), they likely would not hold up in court, citing [0]. Something about that non-exclusivity meaning they cannot constrain the copyright further on their own terms. Which I guess makes sense? And since scraping of publicly available data is not illegal (in the US, according to the aforementioned "lawyer"), it seems like it's okay? Not legal advice. [0] https://www.skadden.com/insights/publications/2024/05/district-court-adopts-broad-view https://www.skadden.com/insights/publications/2024/05/distri...
- nerdsniper 1y agoPer HiQ vs. LinkedIn, it doesn't matter what their ToS says if the scraper didn't have to agree to the ToS to scrape the data. YouTube will serve videos to someone who isn't logged in. So if you've never agreed to YouTube's ToS, you can scrape the videos. If YT forced everyone to log in before they could watch a video, then anyone who wants to scrape videos would have had to agree to the ToS at some point.
- olyjohn 1y agoIt won't serve me videos if I'm not logged in. It tells me to sign in to prove I'm not a bot. How do these people get around this?
- nerdsniper 1y agoIt does for me, in USA on AT&T Fiber using Safari in private browsing mode. Chrome in incognito as well. And phone on mobile YouTube (though I didn't test with uninstalling/reinstalling to reset IDFA and IDFV, so it's not really a valid test)
- rzzzt 1y agoFriendly unit conversion man at your service: 114 years.
- isoprophlex 1y agoHow much is that in football fields?
- forks 1y agoIf you accept 30 years as the average lifespan of an nfl stadium, 3.8
- washadjeffmad 1y agoGood catch. Approximately 9,192,631 Turkish decibels.
- rzzzt 1y agoFun fact: the International Bureau of Weights and Measures in Paris is the owner of a perfect 0 dB noise floor enclosed in a perfect titanium sphere (with some sheep's wool filling to avoid reflections). There is a small door on the side over which microphone capsules can be inserted for calibration. (/joke)
- klaff 1y agoToo bad the joke doesn't work if you understand decibels.
- ReptileMan 1y agoSo a half zoom meeting... or 1/3 Teams one.
- perching_aix 1y agoI genuinely wish there was a cost estimation feature built into them. Doesn't even have to be even remotely close to the true cost if it's anything like the meetings I attend, there will be enough people and it will go on for long enough to make up for it.
- contingencies 1y agoThis is interesting for generalized problems ("make me a sandwich") but not useful for most real world functions ("perform x within y space at z cost/speed"). I think the number of people on the humanoid bandwagon trying to implement generalized applications is staggering right now. The physics tells you they will never be as fast as purpose-built devices, nor as small, nor as cheap. That's not to say there's zero value there, but really we're - uh - grasping at straws...
- foobarian 1y agoI wonder if a generalized machine would have an advantage from scale, and then putting all the specialized stuff into software. We have seen this play out before.
- ahmedbaracat 1y agoWell, there’s a middle ground, kinda. Using more specialized hardware (ex: cobots) but deploy state-of-art Physical AI (ML/Computer Vision) on them. We’re building one such startup at ko-br (https://ko-br.com/ https://ko-br.com/) :))
- contingencies 1y agoQuite a few startups in your space. Many deployed with customers. Good luck finding a USP!
- jjangkke 1y agoVery good point! This area faces a similar misalignment of goals in that it tries to be a generic fit-all solution that is rampant with today's LLMs. We made a sandwich but it cost you 10x more than it would a human and slower might slowly become faster and more efficient but by the time you get really good at it, its simply not transferable unless the model is genuinely able to make the leap across into other domains that humans naturally do. I'm afraid this is where the barrier of general intelligence and human intelligence lies and with enough of these geospatial motor skill database, we might get something that mimics humans very well but still run into problems at the edge, and this last mile problem really is a hinderance to so many domains where we come close but never complete. I wonder if this will change with some sort of computing changes as well as how we interface with digital systems (without mouse or keyboard), then this might be able to close that 'last mile gap'.
- imranq 1y agoThis was a bit hard to read. It would be good to have a narrative structure and more clear explanation of concepts.
- signal-intel 1y agoVery intentional. Their response would be: “if you need narrative structure and clear explanation of concepts, yngmi”.
- YeGoblynQueenne 1y agoAnd the answer to that would be: WNGTI. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4xmckWVPRaI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4xmckWVPRaI Capitalia tantum.
- Aurornis 1y ago> This was a bit hard to read. This writing style is prominent on Twitter and niche Discords. It's funny how much I've come to be able to cut right through it, but if you haven't seen much of it it's really hard to parse. That's by design, too. The vibe of this writing style is to project an air of confidence so strong that the author doesn't care if you get it or not. It's a sort of humblebrag where the writing is supposed to flex the author's understanding of the subject while also not caring if you get it or not. As others have already covered, there's also some heavy stretching of the truth and rewriting of history going on in this post. That's also common of the extreme bravado in this style of semi-impenetrable writing: The vagueness and ambiguities allow the author to make grandiose claims but then wiggle out of them later if someone is astute enough to catch on. For example: The blog post is written as “We…” but is the author part of the team? Or is he using “we” meaning society in general?
- Pyxl101 1y agoWhat's the point in writing something while "not caring" if the reader understands or not? Seems like a false confidence or false bravado to me; it reads like an attempt to project an impression, and not really an attempt to communicate.
- richard___ 1y agoSolved??? Where?
- chihuahua 1y agoYeah, wake me up when they have a robot that can wash, peel, cut fruit and vegetables; unwrap, cut, cook meat; measure salt and spices; whip cream; knead and shape dough; and clean up the resulting mess from all of these. Then they will have "solved" part of robotics.
- YeGoblynQueenne 1y ago>> Yeah, wake me up when they have a robot that can wash, peel, cut fruit and vegetables; unwrap, cut, cook meat; measure salt and spices; whip cream; knead and shape dough; and clean up the resulting mess from all of these. Someone's getting peckish :P
- pr337h4m 1y agoIMO, VideoMimic is a better proof-of-concept https://www.videomimic.net/ https://www.videomimic.net/ https://www.videomimic.net/page1.html https://www.videomimic.net/page1.html
- Keyframe 1y agoLooks like it was trained on Shaolin Drunken Fist videos. Does it look drunk because of the videos or because there's a discrepancy between videos and it not accounting for gravity and physics in general?
- jdmichal 1y agoMy guess would be lack of actuators. For instance, this robot looks like it has an ankle that can only go up and down, but not roll like a human's. Also, I wonder if there's a center of gravity issue, as it almost always appears to be leaning backwards to even out. I think it's still pretty impressive in its recoveries, even though there's an unnaturally large number of them necessary. About 8 seconds into the video on the homepage, it almost misses and ends up slipping off the second step. I've eaten shit at missing a couple inch curb, though I don't think "graceful" has ever been used as a descriptor for me. So the fact that it just recovers and keeps going without issue is impressive to me.
- namibj 1y ago> So the fact that it just recovers and keeps going without issue is impressive to me. I'm pretty sure that's just a matter of reaction speed and it maintaining a constant focus/vigilance on it's movement that you'd usually not reserve outside of some sports and situations pre-identified as deserving the attention due to danger, like concentrating on balance and not getting into a position that overstresses your joints when you know it's icy.
- isoprophlex 1y ago[flagged]
- throwaway198846 1y agoI have never seen "ngmi" before, I wonder in which subculture it is common
- mensetmanusman 1y agoSeen budding lot in Ivy League hacker subculture 15 years ago when I was there
- spencerflem 1y agonot sure, by my college friend group uses it occasionally
- panarky 1y agoIt's the second most common four-letter acronym in crypto hype threads right after hfsp.
- canyp 1y agoThe Urban Dictionary definition is hilarious, opens with "HFSP is an acronym used typically in the crypto community against non-belivers". Hasn't defined the term yet and I know I'm in for a hell of a ride.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- jasonjmcghee 1y agovery popular on tech twitter. Right up there with "we're back" and "we're so back"
- perching_aix 1y ago> gen z douchebag Hello there! As a fellow gen-z douchebag, the article looks authentic, albeit a bit slim on Discord screencaps. Will be fun(?) to be proven wrong though.
- throwaway198846 1y agoI wonder how much language does this model understand. If we pan across text will it fill in sensible next word? How good will it be?
- ErrorNoBrain 1y agoSomeone watched 'Devs' ? if you havent - highly recommended.
- andruby 1y agoDo you have a link or a less generic search term?
- hshshshshsh 1y ago[flagged]
- conception 1y agoDo we have a “let me ChatGPT that for you..” site yet?
- VladVladikoff 1y agoIt’s a TV show made by Adam Garland https://m.imdb.com/title/tt8134186/ https://m.imdb.com/title/tt8134186/ It’s pretty good sci fi IMHO
- root_axis 1y agoNot sure why people love this show. Really terrible writing.
- dmix 1y agoLove Alex Garland but the characters ruin the show.
- accidentallfact 1y ago[flagged]
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- aaron695 1y ago[dead]
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- hahaxdxd123 1y agoExtremely oversold article. > the core insight: predict in representation space, not pixels We've been doing this since 2014? Not only that, others have been doing it at a similar scale. e.g. Nvidia's world foundation models (although those are generative). > zero-shot generalization (aka the money shot) This is easily beaten by flow-matching imitation learning models like what Pi has. > accidentally solved robotics They're doing 65% success on very simple tasks. The research is good. This article however misses a lot of other work in the literature. I would recommend you don't read it as an authoritative source.
- accidentallfact 1y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44073183 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44073183
- sailingparrot 1y agoThis article contains so many falsehoods and history rewrites that it's pretty painful to read.
- rozab 1y agoI just wrote a reply to a comment talking about the AI tells this writing has, but it got flagged so my comment disappeared when I hit post. I'll rephrase out of spite: My first thought upon reading this was that an LLM had been instructed to add a pithy meme joke to each paragraph. They don't make sense in context, and while some terminally online people do speak in memes, those people aren't quoting doge in 2025. There's also a sense of incoherence in the whole piece. For instance, this section: "- after: 22 million videos + 1 million images (now we're talking) they basically hoovered up everything: something-something v2, kinetics, howto100m, and a billion youtube videos" Was it a billion vids or 22m? It turns out the latter sentence is just rephrasing the list of sources in a cool casual way, and the last one is called YT-Temporal-1B. That's a billion frames of video, not a billion videos.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- billstar 1y agoAlso, the author of the blog "Ksagar Atharva" doesn't appear anywhere in the list of authors on the linked FB research paper with Yann LeCun as a co-author. Unless the blog author is using a heavily modified pseudonym. The research is very real but the blog post appears to be very fake.
- SV_BubbleTime 1y ago> some terminally online people do speak in memes, those people aren't quoting doge in 2025. You may be surprised to find out how incorrect this. I can think of two popular conservative sites likely to quote Doge people off hand that do this. I read all news in order not be an insufferable ideologue. So again, off the top of my head, NotTheBee (I think affiliated to BabylonBee (conservative The Onion)) and Twitchy. Among YouTubers, I think Asmond Gold, and I’m sure others like Steven Crowder who himself is in a famous meme. That said… yea, you are probably right.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- daft_pink 1y agoMy mom said I was throwing away my life watching YouTube all day and clearly I just haven’t been watching YouTube enough. 1 million YouTube videos here I come!
- october8140 1y agoI was unable to make through the article (now we're talking).
- dimatura 1y ago"why didn't we think of this sooner?", asks the article. Not sure who the "we" is supposed to be, but the robotics community has definitely thought of this before. https://robo-affordances.github.io/ https://robo-affordances.github.io/ from 2023 is one pretty relevant example that comes to mind, but I have recollections of similar ideas going back to at least 2016 or so (many of which are cited in the V-JEPA2 paper). If you think data-driven approaches are a good idea for manipulation, then the idea of trying to use Youtube as a source of data (an extremely popular data source in computer vision for the past decade) isn't exactly a huge leap. Of course, the "how" is the hard part, for all sorts of reasons. And the "how" is what makes this paper (and prior research in the area) interesting.
- a_t48 1y agoI definitely saw somebody at Actuate last year talking about supplementing training videos for VLA with Youtube, but I think they actually found that "any" video of the real world helped give a better physics "understanding" to the model.
- canyp 1y agoI don't know. I'm not the expert, but if you've ever tried to a backflip or anything where your toes are above your head, then you'll know that spatial awareness goes well beyond vision. Or if you throw a frisbee for the dog to catch, they don't actually look at it while running; they look, predict position, then move in. Veni, vidi, vici. So any model that "learns physics" just through vision seems flawed from the start. What's your thought there?
- dchftcs 1y agoPure vision will never be enough because it does not contain information about the physical feedback like pressure and touch, or the strength required to perform a task. For example, so that you don't crush a human when doing massage (but still need to press hard), or apply the right amount of force (and finesse?) to skin a fish fillet without cutting the skin itself. Practically in the near term, it's hard to sample from failure examples with videos on Youtube, such as when food spills out of the pot accidentally. Studying simple tasks through the happy path makes it hard to get the robot to figure out how to do something until it succeeds, which can appear even in relatively simple jobs like shuffling garbage. With that said, I suppose a robot can be made to practice in real life after learning something from vision.
- namibj 1y agoIf the robot already knows "how to" the happy path, the training difficulty falls severely at least if it can continue after a recovery.
- dchftcs 1y agoThe tasks you do to recover from the failure is often different from the happy path. For example, the happy path of dumping garbage is carrying a garbage bag to a collection bin. The non-happy path is that the bin is overflowing and you have to put the bag on the ground, or if the bag leaks and you need to move to a new bag, or if the bag breaks entirely and you have to pick up the trash again. But yeah, I think a better way to put it is that sampling the happy path would indeed make the failure case easier, but sampling just happy paths is far from sufficient from completing even some of the simplest human tasks with failure.
- rocqua 1y agoOn humans, you can generally see the force they apply by looking at strain.
- dchftcs 1y agoThe error margins will be huge, and for small enough force (like the skinning part or handling fine mechanical stuff) there's basically almost zero signal.
- m3kw9 1y agoSolving robotics is some claim.
- dfedbeef 1y agoSpoiler: not solved
- Joel_Mckay 1y agoIndeed, the robotics edge-case problem space complexity balloons far faster than most assume. Physics informed training is a real methodology (simple introduction to the subject: https://www.youtube.com/@Eigensteve/videos https://www.youtube.com/@Eigensteve/videos ). However, the slop article is 80% nonsense. =3
- m3kw9 1y agoJust the hand, you have 50 things you just can’t do unless you have certain feel. Handling glass? Oh it’s greasy, now your rubber grip is screwed, now go wash it off, and dry it to start again.
- Joel_Mckay 1y agoIndeed, there is a whole category of Adaptive Compliant Grippers for specific use-cases like handling delicate brittle objects. Things that randomly change shape or appearance are also very difficult to interact with safely. The force sensing platform from Universal Robots is safer for users, but it has limitations like all platforms. =3
- amelius 1y agoBetteridge not only applies to headlines with questions but it also works quite well with Twitter style headlines.
- moneywaters 1y agoSo video gen models basically can be extrapolated to control robotics ? How long until Veo3 robots take over?
- a-dub 1y agoi thought all the cool data driven robotics stuff was like reinforcement learning from sensors that track moving effectors in the real world with online retraining that mimics the sensorimotor experimentation that is observed during the developmental phases of real neurobiological systems? so you just kinda let it run for a while and it bumps and squirms around until it stands up or whatever. seems also the future for real ai?
- hbarka 1y agoDr Fei-Fei Li talks about this as the LWM (Large World Model) during this interview: https://youtu.be/fQGu016AlVo https://youtu.be/fQGu016AlVo and with https://www.worldlabs.ai/ https://www.worldlabs.ai/
- column 1y ago> right now, you need to show the robot pictures of what you want it to do. want it to "clean the kitchen"? better have a photo of a clean kitchen handy. What about using Flux Kontext (or Controlnets) to turn the messy kitchen into a clean kitchen?
- seydor 1y agoSure thing, let me just put the fridge in the washing machine.
- weinzierl 1y agoI do not know and do not care much about robotics per se, but I wish LLM's were better with spatial reasoning. If the new insight helps with that - great! I dabbled a bit in geolocation with LLM's recently. It is still surprising to me how good they are with finding the general area a picture was taken. Give it a photo of a random street corner on this earth and it is likely will not only tell you the correct city or town but most often even the correct quarter. On the other hand, if you ask it for a birds eye view of a green, a brown and a white house on the north side of a one-way street (running west to east) east of an intersection running north to south, it may or may not get it right. If you want it to add an arrow going in the direction of the one-way street, it certainly has no clue at all and the result is 50/50.
- 6510 1y agoPut tiny cams on robot arms and let it control them. They can be flimsy for safety. If it is sure something is happening say nothing, if it is 70-99% sure have it guess what is going on, if <70% have it ask what is going on.
- trhway 1y ago>camera pose sensitivity >the model is basically a diva about camera positioning. move the camera 10 degrees and suddenly it thinks left is right and up is down. Reminds that several years ago Tesla had to finally start to explicitly extract 3D model from the net. Similarly i expect here that it would get pipelined - one model extracts/builds 3D, and the other is actually the "robot" working in that 3D. Each one can be alone trained much better and efficiently, with much better transfer and generalization, than the large monolithic model working from the 2D video. In pipeline approach, it is very easy to generate synthetic input 3D data better covering interesting scenario space for the "robot" model. And, for example, you can't just, without significant training, feed the large monolithic model a lidar point space instead of videos. Whereis in a pipelined approach, you just switch the 3D generating pipeline input model.
- liendolucas 1y agoI didn't understand a single word about this post and what was supposed to be solved and had to stop reading. Was this actually written by a human being? If so, the author(s) suffer from severe language communication problems. Doesn't seem to be grounded at least with reality and my personal experience with robotics. But here's my real world take: Robotics is going to be partially solved when ROS/ROS2 becomes effectively exterminated and completely replaced by a sane robotics framework. I seriously urge the authors to use ROS/ROS2. Show us, implementing your solution with ROS, pushing it to a repository and allow others to verify what you solved, maybe?. Suffer a bit with the framework and then write a real post about real robotics hands-on, and not just wander on fancy uncomprehensible stuff that probably no-one will ever do. Then we can maybe start talking about robotics.
- rage4774 1y agoI totally agree with you. On the other hand the theory behind it -to combine image recognition to predict the outcome based on specific physical impacts- does sound intriguing and like a somewhat newer idea. But besides that, you‘re totally right. It’s too „loose“ since to realize that idea the process would have to be way different (and properly explained)
- w4 1y agoIt is readily understandable if you are fluent in the jargon surrounding state of the art LLMs and deep learning. It’s completely inscrutable if you aren’t. The article is also very high level and disconnected from specifics. You can skip to FAIR’s paper and code (linked at the article’s end) for specifics: https://github.com/facebookresearch/vjepa2 https://github.com/facebookresearch/vjepa2 If I had to guess, it seems likely that there will be a serious cultural disconnect as 20-something deep learning researchers increasingly move into robotics, not unlike the cultural disconnect that happened in natural language processing in the 2010s and early 20s. Probably lots of interesting developments, and also lots of youngsters excitedly reinventing things that were solved decades ago.
- godelski 1y ago> if you are fluent in the jargon surrounding state of the art LLMs and deep learning It is definitely not following that jargon. Maybe it follows the tech influencer blog post jargon but I can definitively say it doesn't follow jargon used in research. Which, they are summarizing a research paper. Consequently they misinterpret things and use weird phrases like "actionable physics," which is self referential. "A" physics model is necessarily actionable. It is required to be a counterfactual model. While I can understand the rephrasing to clarify to a more general audience that's a completely different thing than "being fluent in SOTA work." It's literally the opposite... Also, it definitely doesn't help that they remove all capitalization except in nouns.
- poulpy123 1y agoNo you didn't, and I don't even need to click on the link to know it
- teleforce 1y agoIt seems that in order for robotics and automation to work properly, AI models including LLMs, YOLO, RL and others need helps from their distant cousins namely logic, optimization and constraint programming that can be attributed as intelligent automation or namely IA [1],[2],[3],[4]. [1] Logic, Optimization, and Constraint Programming: A Fruitful Collaboration - John Hooker - CMU (2023) [video]: https://www.youtube.com/live/TknN8fCQvRk https://www.youtube.com/live/TknN8fCQvRk [2] "We Really Don't Know How to Compute!" - Gerald Sussman - MIT (2011) [video]: https://youtube.com/watch?v=HB5TrK7A4pI https://youtube.com/watch?v=HB5TrK7A4pI [3] Google OR-Tools: https://developers.google.com/optimization https://developers.google.com/optimization [4] MiniZinc: https://www.minizinc.org/ https://www.minizinc.org/