7 ms·

The title sounds to me like: I am going to spend $1000 in groceries and dance lessons. That is, two very different things lumped together. Memory chips are lik

by GuB-42 4mo ago

The title sounds to me like: I am going to spend $1000 in groceries and dance lessons. That is, two very different things lumped together. Memory chips are like groceries, essential commodity parts, a no-nonsense investment. Humanoid robots are like dance lessons, it is cool, it is sexy, and it may pay off in the future, but the value is much less certain.

deleted 4mo ago
[deleted]
Schiendelman 4mo ago
Humanoid robots that can do manual labor are going to be make or break for wealthy economies in the next two decades. Aging populations need help, and most successful nations do not have enough young people to do half the work they need done.
- HerbManic 4mo ago
  This is the path that Japan tried to go down and it hasn't worked out yet, but we have also solved a lot more of the technical issues since they began. going to be interesting to see if we pull it off this time.
  - Schiendelman 4mo ago
    I think they mostly tried to go down this path before we had the transformer. With VLA models, or really now "Large Behavior Models", what's possible has changed dramatically. I've seen robot arms fold laundry now. Textile work is insanely hard, now it's just putting a lot of learned behavior together.
  - missedthecue 4mo ago
    Humanoid robots barely progressed between 2000-2020. There have obviously been incremental improvements in things like dexterity, vision, self-balancing, and locomotion, but in terms of having a useful humanoid robot, Honda's ASIMO released in the year 2000 is not crazily behind what we had in 2020. So it's not surprise we haven't seen economic dividends yet in the real world. I think AI is what could make humanoids turn from parlor tricks to huge amounts of utility, but we're really going to have to see how it plays out in the next 5-10 years.
  - numpad0 4mo ago
    The current humanoid hype don't have much substances or key technologies in it, and incumbent industrial robotics companies like FANUC are already in the process of rolling the techniques created for humanoids into their robots. I personally think this is going to be just series of incremental gains for big welding bots, and nursery equipment becoming mildly robotic, like Aperture Science wall panels, than humanoids walking into retirement homes and doing dishes in the future.
    - imtringued 4mo ago
      Those were never techniques created for humanoid robots. Google researched using transformers as vision language action models to drive robots back in 2023 on a mobile manipulator and probably did non VLA work even earlier. This is something people refuse to understand. The shape of the robot changes absolutely nothing about robot intelligence unless it abandons the basic concept of joints and links. Continuum robots are very difficult to control but they are also incredibly niche.
      - numpad0 4mo ago
        I really can't shrug off my suspicion since one of Chinese humanoid startups had added few female type body bumps on a robot and the online humanoid hype cluster("but does it do laundry or dishes" types) responded in panic with shared sentiments of defeat, that, those humanoid hype types might be just yearning for HBO Westworld bots, to state it with modesty, not even Data or Marvin who we can share drinks with. The absolute humanoid obsession doesn't make sense to me otherwise. The cookie cutter "humanoids are best poised for leveraging pre-existing human infra" response make close to zero sense otherwise.
  - bitwize 4mo ago
    Sounds like "That's a bold strategy, Cotton, let's see if it pays off for 'em."
- deleted 4mo ago
  [deleted]
- Barrin92 4mo ago
  >Aging populations need help, They're pretty good at helping themselves. Close to where I used to live in Bavaria we had a pilot project of communal living for the elderly in a community of about a hundred people that included people with quite severe conditions such as dementia. Medical and care personell routinely checked in but they were largely self sufficient and did a remarkably job of taking care of themselves, maybe most importantly the were happy and quite dignified, something I cannot imagine is the case when your only contact is a humanoid robot. Of course in an age where every solution is yet another technology rethinking social life isn't very high up the list.
  - red75prime 4mo ago
    The "help" goes beyond taking care of themselves. What about food, clothing, infrastructure maintenance, and so on? An inverted population pyramid requires massive increase in the productivity of the economically active part of the population.
    - mikem170 4mo ago
      Or a regression in the standard of living. Ideally to a comfortable sweet spot for people.
      - Schiendelman 4mo ago
        The elderly already have a significant regression in standard of living, often catastrophically. That's a pretty big problem I would like to improve. There are so many people who don't leave their house because they struggle to get clean and they're embarrassed, and then their social connections collapse. It's going to be a long time before we have the technology to really help with elder care, but boy is it worth it. It's also something we could help by getting rid of zoning in cities, of course, because we constantly push low income elderly out to the edges of urban areas where they can afford to live, rather than allowing supply to keep up with demand in dense, walkable, accessible places where people who can't drive can actually have quality of life.
- Teynah 4mo ago
  I agree they may be strategically necessary. I’m just less convinced that “commercial humanoids by 2028” means anything close to replacing a meaningful amount of labor by then
  - Schiendelman 4mo ago
    Certainly. I would imagine that by the end of 2028, there are less than 1000 humanoid robots replacing a human worker. By the end of 29, maybe 5000.
- stouset 4mo ago
  I honestly think the opposite. Successful nations haven’t had enough young people to care for the elderly because they’ve all been employed as knowledge workers. Knowledge work is going away rapidly. The only work that will be left are things that require actual human bodies (for now). In short, jobs like elder care are suddenly going to have an enormous number of new job seekers, since it requires human presence and isn’t taxing physical labor.
  - Schiendelman 4mo ago
    Are you familiar with Jevon's paradox? I think knowledge work is exploding.
    - stouset 4mo ago
      Food has gotten progressively cheaper. At the same time, both the compensation demand for farm labor have plummeted. Demand for the output of knowledge work can increase while demand for those who produce it falls. “Knowledge work” is not a product with inherent demand, just like you and I don’t go to the store to buy farm labor.
      - Schiendelman 4mo ago
        I'm not sure I agree with the premise of that analogy. Demand for farm labor has increased, but more of it is done by machines. The number of people employed in agriculture has increased if you include agriculture technology, over the same period. Not that I'm not saying the proportion of all humans working in agriculture has increased, I'm saying the raw number has, which is what matters to people along their lifetime. Also, both the pay rates for agricultural labor and the pay for developing agricultural machinery are much higher than the pay for agricultural labor was in the past. Knowledge work is an ever expanding umbrella, just as agricultural work is.
taneq 4mo ago
I’d say it’s more like “on groceries and a fancy dinner”. Humanoid robots sure do need RAM, both in data centres for training and in the robots themselves. :)
- kijin 4mo ago
  Vertical integration. Produce the chips, build data centers to run LLMs on the chips, and the robots to deliver the result to end users.
timerol 4mo ago
$585B on new fabs, $357B on AI data centers, and $5.8B on humanoid robots. One of those numbers is not like the others
- kijin 4mo ago
  [dead]
- b112 4mo ago
  Androids (humanoid robots) will require loads of ram, and loads of model training under the current paradigm. So it sort of makes sense. At least, I see robots as the top of the pyramid.
  - gavinsyancey 4mo ago
    Autonomous (non-teleoperated) humanoid robots that can do useful work in an unfamiliar environment do not exist. And nobody's close enough to making them to understand if they're possible with our current level of technology, let alone how.
    - red75prime 4mo ago
      If there's no unknown unknowns in the brain, it's most likely possible. As the universal approximation theorem and empirical results of scaling SGD+RL suggest. Whether it will be economically viable remains to be seen. The human cerebellum has a peculiar structure and 80% of the brain's neurons after all.
      - ben_w 4mo ago
        The parameter count equivalent of a human brain is not yet known, but if it was one per synapse then a full human brain replica would need about 1.5e14. We also don't yet know how to be as efficient with training examples as any living creatures' brain, and we only partially make up for this by training on so many examples it would take you a million or so years to do the same, so we'd still stuggle with something proportionally smaller-brained such as a cat. That said, remote controlled androids are going to be economically disruptive, as they make every (unlicensed) job open to outsourcing from an office in a low wage country.
fragmede 4mo ago
The value is pretty clear. The problem is the pay off is uncertain.
chaostheory 4mo ago
> Humanoid robots are like dance lessons, it is cool, it is sexy, and it may pay off in the future, but the value is much less certain They need a solution to their plummeting birthrates which are officially worse than either China’s or Japan’s
summerlight 4mo ago
The title is kinda misleading. The actual wording is not specific about humanoid robots but "physical AI" which encompasses every machinery that can be potentially integrated with AI, especially focused on mass manufacturing for the Korean case. Basically this project is about all physical infrastructures to automate high tech manufacturing industry.
ekianjo 4mo ago
we will need humanoid robots since nobody makes kids anymore
dist-epoch 4mo ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodity: > The wide availability of commodities typically leads to smaller profit margins and diminishes the importance of factors (such as brand name) other than price. I'm not aware of many commodities which have only 3 world-wide sellers.
Teynah 4mo ago
I think there's a reason they're being lumped together. Memory is the reliable industrial bet. Humanoids are the speculative "what will all this AI hardware actually enable?" bet

by GuB-42 4mo ago

deleted 4mo ago

[deleted]

Schiendelman 4mo ago

Humanoid robots that can do manual labor are going to be make or break for wealthy economies in the next two decades. Aging populations need help, and most successful nations do not have enough young people to do half the work they need done.

HerbManic 4mo ago
This is the path that Japan tried to go down and it hasn't worked out yet, but we have also solved a lot more of the technical issues since they began. going to be interesting to see if we pull it off this time.
- Schiendelman 4mo ago
  I think they mostly tried to go down this path before we had the transformer. With VLA models, or really now "Large Behavior Models", what's possible has changed dramatically. I've seen robot arms fold laundry now. Textile work is insanely hard, now it's just putting a lot of learned behavior together.
- missedthecue 4mo ago
  Humanoid robots barely progressed between 2000-2020. There have obviously been incremental improvements in things like dexterity, vision, self-balancing, and locomotion, but in terms of having a useful humanoid robot, Honda's ASIMO released in the year 2000 is not crazily behind what we had in 2020. So it's not surprise we haven't seen economic dividends yet in the real world. I think AI is what could make humanoids turn from parlor tricks to huge amounts of utility, but we're really going to have to see how it plays out in the next 5-10 years.
- numpad0 4mo ago
  The current humanoid hype don't have much substances or key technologies in it, and incumbent industrial robotics companies like FANUC are already in the process of rolling the techniques created for humanoids into their robots. I personally think this is going to be just series of incremental gains for big welding bots, and nursery equipment becoming mildly robotic, like Aperture Science wall panels, than humanoids walking into retirement homes and doing dishes in the future.
  - imtringued 4mo ago
    Those were never techniques created for humanoid robots. Google researched using transformers as vision language action models to drive robots back in 2023 on a mobile manipulator and probably did non VLA work even earlier. This is something people refuse to understand. The shape of the robot changes absolutely nothing about robot intelligence unless it abandons the basic concept of joints and links. Continuum robots are very difficult to control but they are also incredibly niche.
    - numpad0 4mo ago
      I really can't shrug off my suspicion since one of Chinese humanoid startups had added few female type body bumps on a robot and the online humanoid hype cluster("but does it do laundry or dishes" types) responded in panic with shared sentiments of defeat, that, those humanoid hype types might be just yearning for HBO Westworld bots, to state it with modesty, not even Data or Marvin who we can share drinks with. The absolute humanoid obsession doesn't make sense to me otherwise. The cookie cutter "humanoids are best poised for leveraging pre-existing human infra" response make close to zero sense otherwise.
- bitwize 4mo ago
  Sounds like "That's a bold strategy, Cotton, let's see if it pays off for 'em."
deleted 4mo ago
[deleted]
Barrin92 4mo ago
>Aging populations need help, They're pretty good at helping themselves. Close to where I used to live in Bavaria we had a pilot project of communal living for the elderly in a community of about a hundred people that included people with quite severe conditions such as dementia. Medical and care personell routinely checked in but they were largely self sufficient and did a remarkably job of taking care of themselves, maybe most importantly the were happy and quite dignified, something I cannot imagine is the case when your only contact is a humanoid robot. Of course in an age where every solution is yet another technology rethinking social life isn't very high up the list.
- red75prime 4mo ago
  The "help" goes beyond taking care of themselves. What about food, clothing, infrastructure maintenance, and so on? An inverted population pyramid requires massive increase in the productivity of the economically active part of the population.
  - mikem170 4mo ago
    Or a regression in the standard of living. Ideally to a comfortable sweet spot for people.
    - Schiendelman 4mo ago
      The elderly already have a significant regression in standard of living, often catastrophically. That's a pretty big problem I would like to improve. There are so many people who don't leave their house because they struggle to get clean and they're embarrassed, and then their social connections collapse. It's going to be a long time before we have the technology to really help with elder care, but boy is it worth it. It's also something we could help by getting rid of zoning in cities, of course, because we constantly push low income elderly out to the edges of urban areas where they can afford to live, rather than allowing supply to keep up with demand in dense, walkable, accessible places where people who can't drive can actually have quality of life.
Teynah 4mo ago
I agree they may be strategically necessary. I’m just less convinced that “commercial humanoids by 2028” means anything close to replacing a meaningful amount of labor by then
- Schiendelman 4mo ago
  Certainly. I would imagine that by the end of 2028, there are less than 1000 humanoid robots replacing a human worker. By the end of 29, maybe 5000.
stouset 4mo ago
I honestly think the opposite. Successful nations haven’t had enough young people to care for the elderly because they’ve all been employed as knowledge workers. Knowledge work is going away rapidly. The only work that will be left are things that require actual human bodies (for now). In short, jobs like elder care are suddenly going to have an enormous number of new job seekers, since it requires human presence and isn’t taxing physical labor.
- Schiendelman 4mo ago
  Are you familiar with Jevon's paradox? I think knowledge work is exploding.
  - stouset 4mo ago
    Food has gotten progressively cheaper. At the same time, both the compensation demand for farm labor have plummeted. Demand for the output of knowledge work can increase while demand for those who produce it falls. “Knowledge work” is not a product with inherent demand, just like you and I don’t go to the store to buy farm labor.
    - Schiendelman 4mo ago
      I'm not sure I agree with the premise of that analogy. Demand for farm labor has increased, but more of it is done by machines. The number of people employed in agriculture has increased if you include agriculture technology, over the same period. Not that I'm not saying the proportion of all humans working in agriculture has increased, I'm saying the raw number has, which is what matters to people along their lifetime. Also, both the pay rates for agricultural labor and the pay for developing agricultural machinery are much higher than the pay for agricultural labor was in the past. Knowledge work is an ever expanding umbrella, just as agricultural work is.

taneq 4mo ago

I’d say it’s more like “on groceries and a fancy dinner”. Humanoid robots sure do need RAM, both in data centres for training and in the robots themselves. :)

kijin 4mo ago
Vertical integration. Produce the chips, build data centers to run LLMs on the chips, and the robots to deliver the result to end users.

timerol 4mo ago

$585B on new fabs, $357B on AI data centers, and $5.8B on humanoid robots. One of those numbers is not like the others

kijin 4mo ago
[dead]
b112 4mo ago
Androids (humanoid robots) will require loads of ram, and loads of model training under the current paradigm. So it sort of makes sense. At least, I see robots as the top of the pyramid.
- gavinsyancey 4mo ago
  Autonomous (non-teleoperated) humanoid robots that can do useful work in an unfamiliar environment do not exist. And nobody's close enough to making them to understand if they're possible with our current level of technology, let alone how.
  - red75prime 4mo ago
    If there's no unknown unknowns in the brain, it's most likely possible. As the universal approximation theorem and empirical results of scaling SGD+RL suggest. Whether it will be economically viable remains to be seen. The human cerebellum has a peculiar structure and 80% of the brain's neurons after all.
    - ben_w 4mo ago
      The parameter count equivalent of a human brain is not yet known, but if it was one per synapse then a full human brain replica would need about 1.5e14. We also don't yet know how to be as efficient with training examples as any living creatures' brain, and we only partially make up for this by training on so many examples it would take you a million or so years to do the same, so we'd still stuggle with something proportionally smaller-brained such as a cat. That said, remote controlled androids are going to be economically disruptive, as they make every (unlicensed) job open to outsourcing from an office in a low wage country.

fragmede 4mo ago

The value is pretty clear. The problem is the pay off is uncertain.

chaostheory 4mo ago

> Humanoid robots are like dance lessons, it is cool, it is sexy, and it may pay off in the future, but the value is much less certain They need a solution to their plummeting birthrates which are officially worse than either China’s or Japan’s

summerlight 4mo ago

The title is kinda misleading. The actual wording is not specific about humanoid robots but "physical AI" which encompasses every machinery that can be potentially integrated with AI, especially focused on mass manufacturing for the Korean case. Basically this project is about all physical infrastructures to automate high tech manufacturing industry.

ekianjo 4mo ago

we will need humanoid robots since nobody makes kids anymore

dist-epoch 4mo ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodity: > The wide availability of commodities typically leads to smaller profit margins and diminishes the importance of factors (such as brand name) other than price. I'm not aware of many commodities which have only 3 world-wide sellers.

Teynah 4mo ago

I think there's a reason they're being lumped together. Memory is the reliable industrial bet. Humanoids are the speculative "what will all this AI hardware actually enable?" bet