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Show HN: Shoggoth Mini – A soft tentacle robot powered by GPT-4o and RL
- sparrish 1y agoHell no! I seen this movie and I don't want any face-hugger sitting on my desk.
- ceejayoz 1y agoHentai enthusiasts, on the other hand...
- sexy_seedbox 1y agoBut if its tentacle was longer and you can program it to harass your coworkers, then it could be fun!
- regularfry 1y agoI seem to remember that the SpiRobs paper behind the (extremely neat) tentacle mechanism indicated that they were going for a patent.
- lukeinator42 1y agoIf it's described in a paper doesn't that make it prior art though?
- blamestross 1y agoNot if it is the authors of the paper filing for the patent. Otherwise people would never publish papers.
- varispeed 1y agoThis always grinds my gears. For some people "discoveries" are so obvious, they don't bother writing a paper let alone patenting it. Then someone goes and patents it...
- dotancohen 1y agoExamples?
- varispeed 1y agohttps://ppubs.uspto.gov/pubwebapp/static/pages/ppubsbasic.html https://ppubs.uspto.gov/pubwebapp/static/pages/ppubsbasic.ht... Have a look. For instance in the search box enter "categories".
- dotancohen 1y ago> Search results > Results for query "(Categories).pn." > No records found
- varispeed 1y agoI am sorry for not being precise. You should enter "Categories" in "For" input. (in the "Or" section)
- jameshart 1y agoPatents are intended to be the form of first public disclosure of an idea. Disclosing it before patenting it can prevent the patent application being valid. US has a 1 year grace period. In most countries, any public disclosure makes an idea unpatentable. https://outlierpatentattorneys.com/patent-public-disclosure https://outlierpatentattorneys.com/patent-public-disclosure
- ethan_smith 1y agoThe SpiRobs team did file a patent (US20210170594A1) for their pneumatic continuum robots in 2019, which was published in 2021 but appears to still be pending approval.
- typs 1y agoThis is so sick. I agree that it’s a little lame that we have all these AI capabilities right now, robotics improving, and all we can think of making is humanoid robots. Like I want a spider/squid hybrid robot running around my house
- tsunamifury 1y agoWe are looking to make robotics most compatible with a humanoid world. That being said he makes some points that alternate limb types could be interesting as well
- mrcwinn 1y agoAll this concern about AI safety, and this nice person wants a spider-squid hybrid robot running around!
- pixl97 1y agoThe Matrix should have been a warning, not a manual.
- dunefox 1y agoA Lovecraft reference, nice. I'm wondering whether a smaller model would suffice as well.
- troyvit 1y agoYeah I came here to say the same thing. It seems like it would simplify things. They do say: "I initially considered training a single end-to-end VLA model. [...] A cable-driven soft robot is different: the same tip position can correspond to many cable length combinations. This unpredictability makes demonstration-based approaches difficult to scale.[...] Instead, I went with a cascaded design: specialized vision feeding lightweight controllers, leaving room to expand into more advanced learned behaviors later." I still think circling back to smaller models would be awesome. With some upgrades you might get a locally hosted model on there, but I'd be sure to keep that inside a pentagram so it doesn't summon a Great One.
- joshuabaker2 1y agoI was surprised it pinged gpt-4o. I was expecting it to use something like https://github.com/apple/ml-fastvlm https://github.com/apple/ml-fastvlm (obviously cost may have been a factor there), but I can see how the direction he chose would make it more capable of doing more complex behaviours in the future w.r.t adding additional tentacles for movement and so on.
- zkms 1y agohttps://knowyourmeme.com/memes/shoggoth-with-smiley-face-artificial-intelligence https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/shoggoth-with-smiley-face-art... https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/30/technology/shoggoth-meme-ai.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/30/technology/shoggoth-meme-...
- tsunamifury 1y agoI e been wanting to do this with a basic stuffed animal now for a while. Just basic interactions with a child plus lessons and a voice would be game changing for the toy world.
- ceejayoz 1y agoLike using phones as babysitters, just 100x worse. I don't doubt someone's gonna invent it, but yikes. Imagine telling kiddo their beloved sentient toy is dead because mum and dad can't afford the ever-rising subscription fees anymore.
- mattigames 1y ago"Who was your best friend in your childhood?" "The AI teddy bear, definitely, I remember every single ad he would tell me, then I would nag my mom to buy me those toys, good times"
- ceejayoz 1y ago"But then my dad lost his job so we had to kill him to save money. Sometimes I still snuggle his corpse."
- coolcoder613 1y agoCareful with that ambiguity...
- floren 1y agoA teddy bear is too bulky for convenience. How about Tamagotchi but it talks to you. Talkagotchi. Basically that horrible Friend necklace but in a cutely-colored egg shape that clips to your backpack. I want to not be alive. edit: when my kid asks for one I'll know it's time to move the family to a cabin deep in the woods.
- haiku2077 1y agoIf you like point and click adventures check out https://store.steampowered.com/app/1426010/STASIS_BONE_TOTEM/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/1426010/STASIS_BONE_TOTEM... - one of the playable characters is an AI teddy bear and is a great character with fantastic writing.
- huevosabio 1y agoThis is so cool! I love the idea of adding expressivity to non verbal, non human entities.
- accrual 1y agoAgreed! I think the Pixar lamp is a great starting point. Having the robot be able to flex and bend, shake yes/no, look curious or upset, and perhaps even let it control LEDs to express itself.
- rainingmonkey 1y agoWhat a fascinating intersection of technology and human psychology! "One thing I noticed toward the end is that, even though the robot remained expressive, it started feeling less alive. Early on, its motions surprised me: I had to interpret them, infer intent. But as I internalized how it worked, the prediction error faded Expressiveness is about communicating internal state. But perceived aliveness depends on something else: unpredictability, a certain opacity. This makes sense: living systems track a messy, high-dimensional world. Shoggoth Mini doesn’t. This raises a question: do we actually want to build robots that feel alive? Or is there a threshold, somewhere past expressiveness, where the system becomes too agentic, too unpredictable to stay comfortable around humans?"
- anotherjesse 1y agoThis feels similar to not finding a game fun once I understand the underly system that generates it. The magic is lessened (even if applying simple rules can generate complex outcomes, it feels determined)
- parpfish 1y agoOnce you discover any minmaxxing strategy, games change from “explore this world and use your imagination to decide what to do” to “apply this rule or make peace with knowing that you are suboptimal”
- dmonitor 1y agoa poorly designed game makes applying the rules boring. a fun game makes applying the rules interesting.
- anyfoo 1y agoMaybe that's why I like Into The Breach so much, and keep coming back to it. It's a turn based strategy game, but one with exceptionally high information, compared to pretty much all the rest. You even fully know your opponent's entire next move! But every turn becomes a tight little puzzle to solve, with surprisingly many possible outcomes. Often, situations that I thought were hopeless, do have a favorable outcome after all, I just had to think further than I usually did.
- SequoiaHope 1y agoThis is adorable! I did some research on tentacle robots last year. The official term is “continuum robots” and there’s actually a great deal of research into their development due to their usefulness in medical robotics. This lecture is a great overview for the curious: https://youtu.be/4ktr10H04ak https://youtu.be/4ktr10H04ak
- dvngnt_ 1y agoI've seen enough media from Japan to know where this is heading
- bravesoul2 1y agoSame comments were made when the spine mechanism was posted to reddit a while back.
- linsomniac 1y agoThankfully it has a flared base for safety.
- hoseja 1y agoI am INCREDIBLY baffled it's not there already.
- dylan604 1y ago"ah, you hesitated" no more so than on every single other question. the delay for the GPT to process a response is very unnerving. I find it worse than when the news is interviewing a remote site with a delay between responses. maybe if the eyes had LEDs to indicate activity rather than it just sitting there??? waiting for a GPT to do its thing is always going to force a delay especially when pushing the request to the cloud for a response. also, "GPT-4o continuously listens to speech through the audio stream," is going to be problematic
- accrual 1y ago> also, "GPT-4o continuously listens to speech through the audio stream," is going to be problematic This seems like a good place to leverage a wake word library, perhaps openWakeWord or porcupine. Then the user could wake the device before sending the prompt off to an endpoint. It could even have a resting or snoozing animation, then have it perk up when the wake word triggers. Eerie to view, I'm sure... https://github.com/dscripka/openWakeWord https://github.com/dscripka/openWakeWord https://github.com/Picovoice/porcupine https://github.com/Picovoice/porcupine
- datameta 1y agoThis also saves energy to the point of enabling this device to be wireless.
- surfandshow 1y ago[dead]
- jszymborski 1y agoI wonder how well suited some of the smaller LLMs like Qwen 0.6B would be suited to this... it doesn't sound like a super complicated task. I also feel like you can train a model on this task by using the zero-shot performance of larger models to create a dataset, making something very zippy.
- accrual 1y ago
- zhyder 1y agoBeautiful work! I appreciate how this robot clearly does NOT try to look like any natural creature. I don't want a future where we can't easily distinguish nature from robotics. So far humanoid robots look clearly robotic too: hope that trend continues.
- dotancohen 1y agoI feel the same about photorealistic renderings. We really need to be clear about what are photographs and what are renderings today. As the renderings get closer to photographs, and with e.g. Starship the actual photographs and videos are of events that until recently were science fiction. I know that bad actors will poison the pot, but in general I'd love to see images labelled "AI", "Drawing", "Content Edited", "Colours Adjusted" where appropriate. Cropping is fine. I'm enthralled about robotics and generative techniques. But let's not quickly confuse them with nature. Not yet.
- KaoruAoiShiho 1y agoTime to live out my dreams of that guy from spiderman.
- krunck 1y agoThat would be Doctor Octopus. Yes I would love A wearable suit with a number of tentacles for locomotion and subduing... I mean interacting.. with people.
- micromacrofoot 1y agooh no I just saw a future where LLMs are the new wifi and touchscreens in appliances, we're going to let my refrigerator cry aren't we
- ge96 1y agoGet 4, Doc Oc Also was thinking of Oogie Boogie Tim Burton
- AtlasBarfed 1y agoOptimus robots can do anything without actually indians?
- therealbilliam 1y agoI am both super impressed and creeped out
- dcre 1y agoGreat video of SpiRobs, the inspiration: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2GFyFmMm9-A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2GFyFmMm9-A
- insane_dreamer 1y agonow we know how those spiders in Minority Report originate
- mparramon 1y agoThat's how Steve Irwin died.
- alex_suzuki 1y agoWow, really setting the bar here for personal projects!
- jeisc 1y agoscary looking probe: a torture tool for aliens?
- rob_c 1y ago[flagged]
- vanderZwan 1y agoI feel obliged to link to my favorite (but Very Unwise) maker project I have ever seen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pQ2dI_B_Ycg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pQ2dI_B_Ycg
- kayhantolga 1y agoseems like missed a chance to become scorpion
- AstralStorm 1y agoThat's exactly what we want, a lamp that's just as annoying as an orange cat. /s
- poulpy123 1y agoJust waiting for the azathoth version