5 ms·

Boston Dynamics and DeepMind form new AI partnership

95 points by mfiguiere 10mo ago

j3th9n 10mo ago
Oh great.
timzaman 10mo ago
Deepmind has its own robotics team, but doesn't get much done. Best folks leave
mattlondon 10mo ago
I wonder if Google regret selling Boston Dynamics? It was a interesting proposition at the time - self driving delivery vans with a humanoid delivery robot (charging from the van's traction battery between deliveries) for the last few steps from van to door etc. Ahead of its time perhaps ... but these days perhaps that will become viable again "soon"? At least they didn't kill it I guess and BD got to live on as an independent.
- Etheryte 10mo ago
  The problem with hardware is that it's always viable soon, but not quite yet. Hardware is multiple orders of magnitude more difficult than anticipated, the fact that the richest companies in the world can't quite make it work is a testament to that. In my mind, hardware moonshots are kind of like trying to embed Doom in a SharePoint Framework Extension while high on psilocybin — impressive if someone manages to pull it off, but not for the sane of mind.
  - mym1990 10mo ago
    The big time suck I see with robotic anything is that simulation for training will only take it so far...eventually it needs to be in the real world, making mistakes, and this comes with far more red tape and much higher risk, slowing down the process. I don't see hardware as the bottleneck, its software and hardware working together in an environment where the stakes are much higher than just in the lab.
  - wolttam 10mo ago
    I feel like this point is refuted by what we're seeing out of robotics in China? And to a pretty good extend the U.S. Of course there is a curve which plots dexterity (hardware) and resulting capability, but we don't need /that/ much dexterity for some jobs. We have tele-operated humanoids 'doing things' where it is self evident that the bottleneck is the ability of the robot to act autonomously, not its hardware.
    - trhway 10mo ago
      >I feel like this point is refuted by what we're seeing out of robotics in China? Humanoid robot Olympic Games in China: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Y-tElcmJVE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Y-tElcmJVE Also, reminded - Russian "localization" (typical Russian hi-tech today, especially when on government investment, is simple rebadge of a Chinese tech) - even good Chinese robots starts to fall like drunk: https://youtu.be/WVKxw72vlmo?t=15 https://youtu.be/WVKxw72vlmo?t=15 and for the GGP comment: >self driving delivery vans with a humanoid delivery robot why humanoid? Glorified Roomba-like robots would do such job just fine. Every time seeing how the Amazon driver parks his van and runs around in our complex placing packages in front of the doors and making photos of the placed packages i'm wondering why Amazon wouldn't use 5-10 such Roombas per van instead. (and every time i think that i have to make such a startup myself, and after that i immediately think that Amazon would easily beat me by developing it 100x faster - in a week where i'd spend 2 years - and so i don't do it, and Amazon apparently doesn't do it too)
      - seanmcdirmid 10mo ago
        Many houses don't have flat approaches, our definitely doesn't. Whatever delivers a package to our town home at least needs to navigate paver stones. Dog bots could probably do it though.
      - maxwellsdeamons 10mo ago
        The simple reason why they don’t do it: It has to be 100% reliable. Robots get stuck, need charge, software has bugs, … So your fleet of robots would need supervision. Probably for years to come. And a human driver only costs like 70-80k a year.
- paxys 10mo ago
  Every single attempt at lifelike autonomous hardware over the last few decades has been a bottomless money pit, and despite all the recent advances the entire field is yet to be proven. A partnership with a robotics company is probably the best outcome for Google at this stage, because it will let them focus on what they do best - software
  - ghaff 10mo ago
    Humans are often really good at unstandardized tasks that require a lot of physical manipulation even when they're considered "unskilled" or at least blue collar. I think of so many things I pay people to do with respect to my house and the idea that autonomous hardware could handle pretty much any of them is pretty much laughable. There are probably some exceptions. I can imagine robo lawnmowers getting good enough to handle my yard at some point if not adjacent cleanup. But doing a monthly housecleaning? Don't think so. (And a Roomba really wouldn't be very useful; it's barely useful at my brother's house that is practically built for a Roomba.)
    - silisili 10mo ago
      I agree completely with this. However, houses and things inside it were designed by humans for humans, for either aesthetic or 'easy for humans to do' reasons. I sometimes wonder then what if they were designed from the ground up with let's call it 'robot repairability'/automation in mind. I don't know exactly what that looks like, but I'd imagine a lot more modular, a lot more brutalist/uglier, and probably a lot more expensive. But it's an interesting thing to think about nonetheless.
    - emmelaich 10mo ago
      I see a future where some humanoid robot mows the lawn, picks up trash, puts the bins outside weekly, vacuums the house, loads the dishwasher, does the clothes washing. While not actively doing those things, it will plug itself in and be passive security. They will need help doing the finer control things, and they won't do everything. But definitely useful enough, especially for older folk.
    - seanmcdirmid 10mo ago
noahmbarr 10mo ago
Let’s see if this is the time for industrial robots, Boston Dynamica: Majority Owner: Hyundai Motor Group (80%) Minority Owner: SoftBank (20%)
- Zigurd 10mo ago
  Factories already buy over $25 billion worth of industrial robots every year. Humanoid robots are neither going to displace specialized industrial robots, nor are they going to be particularly useful since industrial robots can lift entire car chassis, or perform precision work that would be impossible for a robot that can walk around. Surgical robots are neither humanoid, nor are they equipped with human like hands, for very good reasons. I don't know where people get the idea that humanoid robots are the dawn of the robot era. It's a blind alley, a dead end, impractical, un-competitive with specialized robots, and dangerous.
  - baq 10mo ago
    Humanoid robots have advantages industrial robots don’t: they fit where humans fit and can use tools humans use. They’ll fold your proverbial laundry with nothing more than their robot hands, then they’ll unpack your dishwasher and mow your lawn.
    - samtp 10mo ago
      It would be great to see an example of this that simply isn't a human wearing a VR headset.
      - overfeed 10mo ago
        Even if it's unglamarous, there's loads of economic value in tele-operated humanoid bots. They can improve productivity via one pilot driving N robots and issuing high-level commands. They can also allow factories to import labor from 3rd world countries without bothering with the visa stuff. Providing complete manufacturing synergy using world-class, follow-the-sun shifts, minimizing disruptions and ensuring you meet your re-onshored manufacturing goals.
7777777phil 10mo ago
There was this one Black Mirror episode..
robrain 10mo ago
What could possibly go wrong? Lame, I know, but seriously can we have some good, not sinister news for a week or two? With no AI or evil tech-bro, or senile despot overtones if possible.
- ed_mercer 10mo ago
  What’s with the negativity? Deepmind is one of the lesser evil companies. Remember Alphafold? If there’s someone that can do something useful for humanity, it’s Demis.
  - robrain 10mo ago
    As I said, I was being lame. But I get real Terminator vibes when a very good robotics company joins forces with a company that might make those robots autonomous. Terminator and Asimov robot stories make me pessimistic. It was a knee-jerk reaction as opposed to detailed analysis.
behnamoh 10mo ago
tbh I think Google should sell all the companies they bought because Google can't deliver any products anymore. There are product companies (hello OpenAI, Anthro) and then there are corporate companies. Google is the latter. Their attempts at making new products have been failure after failure recently: Bard → Gemini → Jules → Antigravity (they can't even come up with a good product name) Their GCP console is a mess. Wanna get a Gemini API? Good luck with that. And where is the "internet through balloons"? Where's their quantum HPC? Where is half the stuff they demo every year to devs to prove that they're still relevant but never ship them? e.g., where is that smart glass they used in their demo last year that had Gemini in it and could analyze what you see? Where's their "calls any restaurant on your behalf" ML model they introduced many years ago? Google has lost it, and to make things even worse, occasionally they poke at their successful products and googllify them too (YT likes disappearing, Gmail with Gemini, Google Search performing worse than Bing, etc.)
- jeffbee 10mo ago
  Without regard to the rest of your comment, with which I largely disagree, at least this one feature I can confirm still exists and works fine: "Where's their "calls any restaurant on your behalf" ML model they introduced many years ago?" It might not run on your LibreNut 9000, but it works on my Pixel.
- alienbaby 10mo ago
  I thought antigravity was a great name, I assumed obliquely referencing xkcd
- mullingitover 10mo ago
  This entire AI boom is happening because Google published their Attention Is All You Need paper and made transformers.
caycep 10mo ago
granted, I find it somewhat amusing that the head of Boston Dynamics got invited to give a keynote at NEURIPS 2016 or 2017 and admitted than Spot the Dog didn't really use any learning...
- miduil 10mo ago
  As a close follower of Boston Dynamics since my high-school years, I feel like in hindsight that was a good call, they've managed to progress everything else seemingly very well - which now gives them a head-start for an industry that surpasses any amount of money Boston Dynamics could ever get by many times. The data and capabilities around data would unlikely have brought similar scale of innovation, as other companies could now come up with. Now instead, they're ahead of end2end integration of their section of robotics - especially with actual business customers that gave them a great head-start in figuring out how to integrate them as a product.
Rebuff5007 10mo ago
Few things that go overlooked from someone that works in industrial robotics: - note that google already has investment in industrial robotics with intrinsic ai (that is the confluence of OSRF, bot and dolly, and a few other robotics/ai companies) - this partnership specifically seems to be focused on humanoid robotics, which is not taken seriously by industrial manufacturing folks
deleted 10mo ago
[deleted]
fennecbutt 10mo ago
Makes sense. AFAIK BD were using a lot of traditional programming and outdated ml concepts and haven't really managed to hop on board the choo choo transformer train a la VLMs/VLAs.

95 points by mfiguiere 10mo ago

j3th9n 10mo ago

Oh great.

timzaman 10mo ago

Deepmind has its own robotics team, but doesn't get much done. Best folks leave

mattlondon 10mo ago

I wonder if Google regret selling Boston Dynamics? It was a interesting proposition at the time - self driving delivery vans with a humanoid delivery robot (charging from the van's traction battery between deliveries) for the last few steps from van to door etc. Ahead of its time perhaps ... but these days perhaps that will become viable again "soon"? At least they didn't kill it I guess and BD got to live on as an independent.

Etheryte 10mo ago
The problem with hardware is that it's always viable soon, but not quite yet. Hardware is multiple orders of magnitude more difficult than anticipated, the fact that the richest companies in the world can't quite make it work is a testament to that. In my mind, hardware moonshots are kind of like trying to embed Doom in a SharePoint Framework Extension while high on psilocybin — impressive if someone manages to pull it off, but not for the sane of mind.
- mym1990 10mo ago
  The big time suck I see with robotic anything is that simulation for training will only take it so far...eventually it needs to be in the real world, making mistakes, and this comes with far more red tape and much higher risk, slowing down the process. I don't see hardware as the bottleneck, its software and hardware working together in an environment where the stakes are much higher than just in the lab.
- wolttam 10mo ago
  I feel like this point is refuted by what we're seeing out of robotics in China? And to a pretty good extend the U.S. Of course there is a curve which plots dexterity (hardware) and resulting capability, but we don't need /that/ much dexterity for some jobs. We have tele-operated humanoids 'doing things' where it is self evident that the bottleneck is the ability of the robot to act autonomously, not its hardware.
  - trhway 10mo ago
    >I feel like this point is refuted by what we're seeing out of robotics in China? Humanoid robot Olympic Games in China: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Y-tElcmJVE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Y-tElcmJVE Also, reminded - Russian "localization" (typical Russian hi-tech today, especially when on government investment, is simple rebadge of a Chinese tech) - even good Chinese robots starts to fall like drunk: https://youtu.be/WVKxw72vlmo?t=15 https://youtu.be/WVKxw72vlmo?t=15 and for the GGP comment: >self driving delivery vans with a humanoid delivery robot why humanoid? Glorified Roomba-like robots would do such job just fine. Every time seeing how the Amazon driver parks his van and runs around in our complex placing packages in front of the doors and making photos of the placed packages i'm wondering why Amazon wouldn't use 5-10 such Roombas per van instead. (and every time i think that i have to make such a startup myself, and after that i immediately think that Amazon would easily beat me by developing it 100x faster - in a week where i'd spend 2 years - and so i don't do it, and Amazon apparently doesn't do it too)
    - seanmcdirmid 10mo ago
      Many houses don't have flat approaches, our definitely doesn't. Whatever delivers a package to our town home at least needs to navigate paver stones. Dog bots could probably do it though.
    - maxwellsdeamons 10mo ago
      The simple reason why they don’t do it: It has to be 100% reliable. Robots get stuck, need charge, software has bugs, … So your fleet of robots would need supervision. Probably for years to come. And a human driver only costs like 70-80k a year.
paxys 10mo ago
Every single attempt at lifelike autonomous hardware over the last few decades has been a bottomless money pit, and despite all the recent advances the entire field is yet to be proven. A partnership with a robotics company is probably the best outcome for Google at this stage, because it will let them focus on what they do best - software
- ghaff 10mo ago
  Humans are often really good at unstandardized tasks that require a lot of physical manipulation even when they're considered "unskilled" or at least blue collar. I think of so many things I pay people to do with respect to my house and the idea that autonomous hardware could handle pretty much any of them is pretty much laughable. There are probably some exceptions. I can imagine robo lawnmowers getting good enough to handle my yard at some point if not adjacent cleanup. But doing a monthly housecleaning? Don't think so. (And a Roomba really wouldn't be very useful; it's barely useful at my brother's house that is practically built for a Roomba.)
  - silisili 10mo ago
    I agree completely with this. However, houses and things inside it were designed by humans for humans, for either aesthetic or 'easy for humans to do' reasons. I sometimes wonder then what if they were designed from the ground up with let's call it 'robot repairability'/automation in mind. I don't know exactly what that looks like, but I'd imagine a lot more modular, a lot more brutalist/uglier, and probably a lot more expensive. But it's an interesting thing to think about nonetheless.
  - emmelaich 10mo ago
    I see a future where some humanoid robot mows the lawn, picks up trash, puts the bins outside weekly, vacuums the house, loads the dishwasher, does the clothes washing. While not actively doing those things, it will plug itself in and be passive security. They will need help doing the finer control things, and they won't do everything. But definitely useful enough, especially for older folk.
  - seanmcdirmid 10mo ago

noahmbarr 10mo ago

Let’s see if this is the time for industrial robots, Boston Dynamica: Majority Owner: Hyundai Motor Group (80%) Minority Owner: SoftBank (20%)

Zigurd 10mo ago
Factories already buy over $25 billion worth of industrial robots every year. Humanoid robots are neither going to displace specialized industrial robots, nor are they going to be particularly useful since industrial robots can lift entire car chassis, or perform precision work that would be impossible for a robot that can walk around. Surgical robots are neither humanoid, nor are they equipped with human like hands, for very good reasons. I don't know where people get the idea that humanoid robots are the dawn of the robot era. It's a blind alley, a dead end, impractical, un-competitive with specialized robots, and dangerous.
- baq 10mo ago
  Humanoid robots have advantages industrial robots don’t: they fit where humans fit and can use tools humans use. They’ll fold your proverbial laundry with nothing more than their robot hands, then they’ll unpack your dishwasher and mow your lawn.
  - samtp 10mo ago
    It would be great to see an example of this that simply isn't a human wearing a VR headset.
    - overfeed 10mo ago
      Even if it's unglamarous, there's loads of economic value in tele-operated humanoid bots. They can improve productivity via one pilot driving N robots and issuing high-level commands. They can also allow factories to import labor from 3rd world countries without bothering with the visa stuff. Providing complete manufacturing synergy using world-class, follow-the-sun shifts, minimizing disruptions and ensuring you meet your re-onshored manufacturing goals.

7777777phil 10mo ago

There was this one Black Mirror episode..

robrain 10mo ago

What could possibly go wrong? Lame, I know, but seriously can we have some good, not sinister news for a week or two? With no AI or evil tech-bro, or senile despot overtones if possible.

ed_mercer 10mo ago
What’s with the negativity? Deepmind is one of the lesser evil companies. Remember Alphafold? If there’s someone that can do something useful for humanity, it’s Demis.
- robrain 10mo ago
  As I said, I was being lame. But I get real Terminator vibes when a very good robotics company joins forces with a company that might make those robots autonomous. Terminator and Asimov robot stories make me pessimistic. It was a knee-jerk reaction as opposed to detailed analysis.

behnamoh 10mo ago

tbh I think Google should sell all the companies they bought because Google can't deliver any products anymore. There are product companies (hello OpenAI, Anthro) and then there are corporate companies. Google is the latter. Their attempts at making new products have been failure after failure recently: Bard → Gemini → Jules → Antigravity (they can't even come up with a good product name) Their GCP console is a mess. Wanna get a Gemini API? Good luck with that. And where is the "internet through balloons"? Where's their quantum HPC? Where is half the stuff they demo every year to devs to prove that they're still relevant but never ship them? e.g., where is that smart glass they used in their demo last year that had Gemini in it and could analyze what you see? Where's their "calls any restaurant on your behalf" ML model they introduced many years ago? Google has lost it, and to make things even worse, occasionally they poke at their successful products and googllify them too (YT likes disappearing, Gmail with Gemini, Google Search performing worse than Bing, etc.)

jeffbee 10mo ago
Without regard to the rest of your comment, with which I largely disagree, at least this one feature I can confirm still exists and works fine: "Where's their "calls any restaurant on your behalf" ML model they introduced many years ago?" It might not run on your LibreNut 9000, but it works on my Pixel.
alienbaby 10mo ago
I thought antigravity was a great name, I assumed obliquely referencing xkcd
mullingitover 10mo ago
This entire AI boom is happening because Google published their Attention Is All You Need paper and made transformers.

caycep 10mo ago

granted, I find it somewhat amusing that the head of Boston Dynamics got invited to give a keynote at NEURIPS 2016 or 2017 and admitted than Spot the Dog didn't really use any learning...

miduil 10mo ago
As a close follower of Boston Dynamics since my high-school years, I feel like in hindsight that was a good call, they've managed to progress everything else seemingly very well - which now gives them a head-start for an industry that surpasses any amount of money Boston Dynamics could ever get by many times. The data and capabilities around data would unlikely have brought similar scale of innovation, as other companies could now come up with. Now instead, they're ahead of end2end integration of their section of robotics - especially with actual business customers that gave them a great head-start in figuring out how to integrate them as a product.

Rebuff5007 10mo ago

Few things that go overlooked from someone that works in industrial robotics: - note that google already has investment in industrial robotics with intrinsic ai (that is the confluence of OSRF, bot and dolly, and a few other robotics/ai companies) - this partnership specifically seems to be focused on humanoid robotics, which is not taken seriously by industrial manufacturing folks

deleted 10mo ago

[deleted]

fennecbutt 10mo ago

Makes sense. AFAIK BD were using a lot of traditional programming and outdated ml concepts and haven't really managed to hop on board the choo choo transformer train a la VLMs/VLAs.