10 ms·

These robots look slow and not very fluid in their motions, but LLMs like ChatGPT also looked very dumb initially. If progress is as fast as LLMs , this could h

These robots look slow and not very fluid in their motions, but LLMs like ChatGPT also looked very dumb initially. If progress is as fast as LLMs , this could have massive applications in a few years.

pwython 2mo ago
For house keeping tasks the robotics companies love showing off... it honestly doesn't matter if it takes a robot longer than a human to clean your house. As long as it gets done before you get home from work, no big deal.
- Cthulhu_ 2mo ago
  Yeah, the dishwasher takes much longer to do the dishes than I do by hand, but that's cool. That said, the dishwasher is out of the way. I don't think we'll get household robots anytime soon. Hell, the only ones that can afford them will be the same that would hire human household help.
  - FartyMcFarter 2mo ago
    > Hell, the only ones that can afford them will be the same that would hire human household help. But maybe they'd rather deal with a robot than a human?
    - RandomLensman 2mo ago
      Honestly: why?
      - terio 2mo ago
        Less liability?
        tartoran 2mo ago
        You think robots can't malfunction or be hacked to do some nefarious things in the household?
      - seasox 2mo ago
        Robots don‘t steal and don‘t want a raise.
        RandomLensman 2mo ago
        If there is a subscription in there somewhere, prices could change.
        pertymcpert 2mo ago
        It's ok, we get it you don't want one. I would happily pay $20k-$30k for one if it worked well. I know a lot of people who would.
        RandomLensman 2mo ago
        I might even get one as I like trying new tech if and when, but I have no issue with hiring humans either and humans so far "fail" very differently from machines (as in a lot of software). I find the latter far less predictable and controllable.
        lukan 2mo ago
        Also if the robot is ultimately controlled by Musk or Altman? I do want a robot serviant. But running AI that I control. Here it google says it can "And this profound intelligence can also run locally on-device", that makes it interesting for me.
        goatlover 2mo ago
        They'll just spy on you along with the smart tv, phone and flock camera at the street corner.
      - iinnPP 2mo ago
        The list of plausible answers is long enough as to question why you felt the need to include the word honestly, irony? One example: social anxiety.
        RandomLensman 2mo ago
        Not irony: why manage machines with all the issues that go with that instead of people?
        Marha01 2mo ago
        Tell me you are not an introvert without telling me... I don't want a person I barely know regularly going all over my apartment. What if they discover... nevermind. A robot, on the other hand? Hell yeah!
        luckydata 2mo ago
        you don't need to be an introvert to find that line of reasoning short sighted. I'm plenty extroverted and I still don't want to deal with people coming to my house to clean it. It's very invasive and they rarely do a good job. A robot that I can "train" to do exactly what I need and constantly works in the background would be a HUGE value add to my lifestyle.
        RandomLensman 2mo ago
        The difference might be that I don't believe in these "machine gods of cleaning" being the thing to arrive (looking at current consumer goods) and then the boundary for what to choose shifts a lot if one is willing to deal with humans. The latter also doesn't need to be so foreign, e.g., could be someone already working for a friend.
        bananaflag 2mo ago
        A robot will send whatever they discover to the FBI. My issue is different: I feel bad with someone working around me while I am lazy. A robot would not pose that problem.
      - FartyMcFarter 2mo ago
        I don't want a person I don't know very well in my space. That aside: if I'm lucky enough to find a person who's good and reliable, they might move away, switch jobs etc. It has all the headaches that come with hiring and managing someone, because, well, it is exactly that... If I don't want to be a manager at work (been there done that, happy to let others do it and get the raise that comes along with it), I sure as heck don't want to do it at home.
        nozzlegear 2mo ago
        Usually you hire a cleaning company who sends a person they've hired and vetted to clean, you don't have to deal with all of that stuff.
        FartyMcFarter 2mo ago
        Then I have to deal with whichever random person they decide to send. I can't be the only one who finds this annoying (even if I'm not in the majority).
        RandomLensman 2mo ago
        You'd need to manage the robot, too, I would think. In my experience, I rather manage people than machines.
        margalabargala 2mo ago
        Sure, but others have the opposite preference. Machines tend to be more predictable.
        RandomLensman 2mo ago
        I think machines are just unpredictable in different ways (for example, changes from software updates).
        lukan 2mo ago
        "Machines tend to be more predictable." Those controlled by LLM's maybe ain't. Here with google the LLM is even local, but will be fun with the cloud controlled robots, where the company got overwhelmed and silently uses a weaker model at certain times. With fun results.
      - fidotron 2mo ago
        Humans have emotions. Best avoided.
        RajT88 2mo ago
        It's been said that people who do not have a high EQ gravitate towards tech, because machines are easier to understand than people.
        gretch 2mo ago
        I feel like people who have high EQ should actually grasp the infinite depth and complexity of even the median human. Just imagine, there’s a woman Alice who cleans your home once a month. On this particular day, she had a fight with her husband this morning on (something completely unrelated to you). Do you expect her to check her emotions at the door when she enters your space? Or is she going to give really bad vibes while she is moving around your house?
        fidotron 2mo ago
        It's been said that people that say this are transparently trying to manipulate other people, which is why the others prefer to cut off all potential for tedious negotiations. This is the same reason people prefer buying Tesla cars direct instead of having to make a deal at a dealership. If they all had high EQ maybe they'd prefer the dealership model after all.
        RajT88 2mo ago
        > It's been said that people that say this are transparently trying to manipulate other people Tech does also attract grumpy people. The reason this idea stuck in my memory when I read it - is that it resonated with me. To some extent I feel this way.
        fidotron 2mo ago
        > Tech does also attract grumpy people. You have cause and effect wrong; it just makes people that have to deal with the people in and around the tech industry grumpy.
      - CamperBob2 2mo ago
        With a robot housemaid, I wouldn't have to get dressed. :-P More seriously: - I wouldn't feel obligated to 'pre-clean' anything. Who wants to come across as a thoughtless/careless slob whose personal habits amount to borderline-abusive demands on the cleaning staff? Not me... and where does that line get drawn, anyway? - I wouldn't worry about stuff being picked up and misplaced - I have never had problems with maids stealing stuff, but I know others have - Cleaning can be initiated or postponed as needed, with no dependencies on someone else's schedule
        kibwen 2mo ago
        > With a robot housemaid, I wouldn't have to get dressed. :-P Well, as long as you don't mind the workers in the robot company's telemetrics department whacking it to your robot's video feed.
        CamperBob2 2mo ago
        They can jerk themselves silly, IDGAF. When the 'Black Mirror' screenwriters get involved, though, I'll require some back-end participation of the financial kind. (I'm being facetious here: nothing that transmits data out of the house is going to be deployed to run household robots, at least not in my house. Even if I didn't care, I can't make that call on behalf of family members or guests. Then there's the obvious concern that the robotics company would sell the data to my homeowners' insurance company, health insurance company, and who knows who else.)
        icepush 2mo ago
        For the robot to function without teleoperation, sota is for it to be using a model that runs on chips about 5-10x the cost of what is being discussed here. How do you propose for that without transmission of data out of your house ?
        CamperBob2 2mo ago
        I've pretty much made my peace with the idea of spending on GPUs what I used to spend on sports cars. That being said, by the time the kinematic hardware needed to build a robotic housekeeper is available for home use, I don't think the brainpower is going to be a problem. There's nothing in Ex Machina that couldn't run on a couple of RTX 6000s.
      - verdverm 2mo ago
        "hey Rosie, the cat yakked on the rug again" (real-time mess handling)
  - sagarm 2mo ago
    The dishwasher is out of the way because you made space for it out of the way. We'll probably adapt our spaces for robots too eventually. For example, you could store far more things out of easy human reach.
- qurren 2mo ago
  I'm bearish that they'll be economically viable in the house for a very long time. For businesses the bar for adoption is very low: If the thing can work repetitive jobs for 24 hours a day and replace 3 shifts, the purchase bar is nominally anything less than 3 x human salary if your budgeting horizon is 1 year. That's a high number, and probably fairly easy to achieve. For homes, it's a very different bar. You'd have a hard time convincing most American families to purchase anything with a >$1000 price tag. Currently that's pretty much impossible for a humanoid.
  - heaney-555 2mo ago
    >You'd have a hard time convincing most American families to purchase anything with a >$1000 price tag. Like cars, they'll likely purchase them through finance deals, with a monthly payment. Or perhaps even rent/lease them.
    - meowkit 2mo ago
      Much easier to remotely brick a robot too I imagine
    - mbil 2mo ago
      Leasing seems like it could make sense given rapid upgrades in the technology. Why spend $15k on a home robot that will be obsoleted in the next few years?
      - garbageman 2mo ago
        Leasing is out, but locked-in subscriptions are in!
    - qurren 2mo ago
      Cars are an absolute necessity in the US unless you live in one of the small handful of cities that have viable public transit. Different thing altogether. Robots aren't a necessity, and for a price tag in the tens of thousands, most people will just mop their own floors and do their own laundry.
- doctorpangloss 2mo ago
  > it honestly doesn't matter if it takes a robot longer than a human to clean your house it depends. in order for my slow ass Roomba to clean my floors, I have to move a bunch of things out of the way and not use the room. on the flip side, i think this "the robot cannot automate the whole task" thing is reductive too. suffice it to say, EVERYTHING matters, there honestly nothing that "honestly doesn't matter."
- millerm 2mo ago
  Exactly. People buy those automated circular floor vacuums. Anyone can get it done with a regular broom/vacuum in a small fraction of the time it takes for those things. Just like I drive an electric car. It charges while I sleep. It doesn't matter if an ICE can fuel in a few minutes.
- moffkalast 2mo ago
  "That's fair, you are absolutely right I should not have unscrewed the water hose and put it away before turning on the valve to water the plants, even though you specified that order, I should've used some common sense." There is going to be so much pain from VLA malicious compliance. If the current gen of LLMs are anything to go by I can already see it being an hilariously massive problem. People are careless.
  - claaams 2mo ago
    This was my thought too. An unsupervised robot can cause 10s of thousands in damage by accidentally ripping a water line and flooding your house or just breaking all of your dishes. There’s no level to how dumb and awful LLMs can hallucinate
- Razengan 2mo ago
  We all know sexbots will be the real killer app
- trkaky 2mo ago
  which work?
cute_boi 2mo ago
yes at 1k tok/sec i think these robots will be fast and very fluid.
GaggiX 2mo ago
I believe that it's also for safety, these robots would easily destroy themselves if not restrained (and cause damage).
- drbioart 2mo ago
  Better to go slow and controlled. Giving physical action to a model is dangerous and must be carefully monitored. Slow is good. Oversight is important.
  - gretch 2mo ago
    I agree I only wish I could convince some humans in my life to slow down and do things with care.
- amelius 2mo ago
  But why use that slow speed in a press release?
ChaitanyaSai 2mo ago
We don't get virtuous feedback loops in hardware though. Muscles are incredible engineering that took half a billion years. Token generation (speech) is low hundred thousands maybe. Unless of course improved AI navigates the space of ideas so well that it can give us alloys or synthetic flesh that does twitch as fast...
hwillis 2mo ago
The time between gpt 2 and 3 was 15 months. The time between gemini robotics 1 and 2 was also 15 months: https://blog.google/products-and-platforms/products/gemini/how-we-built-gemini-robotics/ https://blog.google/products-and-platforms/products/gemini/h... The difference between gpt 2 and 3 was insane. 2 could generate limericks when it wasn't repeating a word 300x. 3 could actually do some things. By comparison gemini robotics has hardly changed at all. I will also point out that slow, non-fluid robotics is on a totally different level of difficulty from fast fluid motion. Asimov could walk pretty smoothly, but it didn't fall over because it used a very careful sequence that was never unbalanced; you could pause at any point without falling over. Move faster, like boston dynamics, and you need to account for the change in balance from your arms swinging... or rather, you need to be able to account for the rotational inertia etc from moving multiple masses along complex paths with multiple points of articulation at hundreds or thousands of times per second. An algorithm to fold tshirts 90% of the time is easy. The cloth hangs down by gravity and you can just look for right angles (corners), find their coordinates with binocular matching, and move them to meet each other. Getting 99%, or folding them quickly, so that the fabric is actually moving instead of just hanging still- incredibly, incredibly more complex.
- fc417fc802 2mo ago
  > folding them quickly, so that the fabric is actually moving instead of just hanging still- incredibly, incredibly more complex. TBF fabric is much more difficult to simulate than a bipedal body is. As I recall openai had mujoco playing soccer nearly 10 years ago. Obviously real world bodies are much more difficult but I'd be curious to learn why that is.
  - YeGoblynQueenne 2mo ago
    I don't think that there's any inherent difficulty to do with physical bodies, it's just that the learning techniques used by the big labs, that is to say, various forms of Reinforcement Learning, don't transfer to the real world. Because in the real world if you try stuff at random until you figure out the right policy, you end up destroying too many robot bodies. Imitation learning that went wild a couple years ago with ALOHA looks like a great way to get around this on paper, but then you realise that you have to train your robot for hours on every single task you want it to perform and it still won't generalise even between similar tasks. The sim-2-real gap also remains a big obstacle and you can't just train in simulation and transfer to the real world seamlessly; and then the seams end up being more like chasms. Then there's the problem of generalisation. RL is insane in figuring out the dynamics of any arbitrary environment you drop it in at any time. Unfortunately once you have a policy trained in one environment (or one task) you have to train again for the next environment (or task) you want to deal with. The number of different environments, situations or tasks in the real world ends up being overwhelmingly large. So for example DeepMind has been trying for ever to train various robots to do stuff like grasp arbitrary objects by training in the real world or in simulation and still grasping is an unsolved problem, in the general case; and in fact in most cases. With LLMs it was different in that there was a www of text to train on and the stakes are lower because there's no sim-2-real gap and there's no need to deal with the real world, in training or deployment, it's just text on a screen. That's very hard to replicate in robotics. There are major breakthroughs still to be made and they aren't currently even on the horizon. And no, I don't have the answer with my super secrete robotic AGI homebrew project either, just saying :P
mwt 2mo ago
> If progress is as fast as LLMs Is this the new "x technology is a year away" ?
ashleyn 2mo ago
Gotta admit google is pretty ballsy for directly attacking Moravec's Paradox: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec%27s_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec%27s_paradox
fidotron 2mo ago
They're fluid, but they are slow, which is highly likely to be a safety thing, which will have the side effect of making many motions more difficult, not less. LLMs aren't themselves hurting anyone, no matter how much certain people like to pretend otherwise, whereas an AI in a robot with significant motors in absolutely can and will. There are reasons industrial ones live in safety cages after all. Expecting them to be like inverse kinematic driven digital dolls is wrong because the optimization won't be for matching that but something like "net reduce energy consumption" which for electric motors in multi joint arms will look a bit odd.
bastardoperator 2mo ago
These robots are unusable in their current form. Slow and expensive, humans perform this work better and cheaper. Looks like every other robot before it, a bunch of servos and no brain.
ghostly_s 2mo ago
This is the first press videos I’ve seen of 1x speed that seems reasonable, imho. Though I see elsewhere they report only 50-75% success rate- not clear if that's first attempt, or total?
mrinterweb 2mo ago
Look at robotics demonstrations on YouTube from one or two years ago, and compare that to where we are today. It seems reasonable to me that general purpose robotics may be able to outmaneuver your average human in a few years. At least one robot has surpassed what I could do https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xha2TJ_1C6Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xha2TJ_1C6Q

pwython 2mo ago

For house keeping tasks the robotics companies love showing off... it honestly doesn't matter if it takes a robot longer than a human to clean your house. As long as it gets done before you get home from work, no big deal.

Cthulhu_ 2mo ago
Yeah, the dishwasher takes much longer to do the dishes than I do by hand, but that's cool. That said, the dishwasher is out of the way. I don't think we'll get household robots anytime soon. Hell, the only ones that can afford them will be the same that would hire human household help.
- FartyMcFarter 2mo ago
  > Hell, the only ones that can afford them will be the same that would hire human household help. But maybe they'd rather deal with a robot than a human?
  - RandomLensman 2mo ago
    Honestly: why?
    - terio 2mo ago
      Less liability?
      - tartoran 2mo ago
        You think robots can't malfunction or be hacked to do some nefarious things in the household?
    - seasox 2mo ago
      Robots don‘t steal and don‘t want a raise.
      - RandomLensman 2mo ago
        If there is a subscription in there somewhere, prices could change.
        pertymcpert 2mo ago
        It's ok, we get it you don't want one. I would happily pay $20k-$30k for one if it worked well. I know a lot of people who would.
        RandomLensman 2mo ago
        I might even get one as I like trying new tech if and when, but I have no issue with hiring humans either and humans so far "fail" very differently from machines (as in a lot of software). I find the latter far less predictable and controllable.
        lukan 2mo ago
        Also if the robot is ultimately controlled by Musk or Altman? I do want a robot serviant. But running AI that I control. Here it google says it can "And this profound intelligence can also run locally on-device", that makes it interesting for me.
      - goatlover 2mo ago
        They'll just spy on you along with the smart tv, phone and flock camera at the street corner.
    - iinnPP 2mo ago
      The list of plausible answers is long enough as to question why you felt the need to include the word honestly, irony? One example: social anxiety.
      - RandomLensman 2mo ago
        Not irony: why manage machines with all the issues that go with that instead of people?
        Marha01 2mo ago
        Tell me you are not an introvert without telling me... I don't want a person I barely know regularly going all over my apartment. What if they discover... nevermind. A robot, on the other hand? Hell yeah!
        luckydata 2mo ago
        you don't need to be an introvert to find that line of reasoning short sighted. I'm plenty extroverted and I still don't want to deal with people coming to my house to clean it. It's very invasive and they rarely do a good job. A robot that I can "train" to do exactly what I need and constantly works in the background would be a HUGE value add to my lifestyle.
        RandomLensman 2mo ago
        The difference might be that I don't believe in these "machine gods of cleaning" being the thing to arrive (looking at current consumer goods) and then the boundary for what to choose shifts a lot if one is willing to deal with humans. The latter also doesn't need to be so foreign, e.g., could be someone already working for a friend.
        bananaflag 2mo ago
        A robot will send whatever they discover to the FBI. My issue is different: I feel bad with someone working around me while I am lazy. A robot would not pose that problem.
    - FartyMcFarter 2mo ago
      I don't want a person I don't know very well in my space. That aside: if I'm lucky enough to find a person who's good and reliable, they might move away, switch jobs etc. It has all the headaches that come with hiring and managing someone, because, well, it is exactly that... If I don't want to be a manager at work (been there done that, happy to let others do it and get the raise that comes along with it), I sure as heck don't want to do it at home.
      - nozzlegear 2mo ago
        Usually you hire a cleaning company who sends a person they've hired and vetted to clean, you don't have to deal with all of that stuff.
        FartyMcFarter 2mo ago
        Then I have to deal with whichever random person they decide to send. I can't be the only one who finds this annoying (even if I'm not in the majority).
      - RandomLensman 2mo ago
        You'd need to manage the robot, too, I would think. In my experience, I rather manage people than machines.
        margalabargala 2mo ago
        Sure, but others have the opposite preference. Machines tend to be more predictable.
        RandomLensman 2mo ago
        I think machines are just unpredictable in different ways (for example, changes from software updates).
        lukan 2mo ago
        "Machines tend to be more predictable." Those controlled by LLM's maybe ain't. Here with google the LLM is even local, but will be fun with the cloud controlled robots, where the company got overwhelmed and silently uses a weaker model at certain times. With fun results.
    - fidotron 2mo ago
      Humans have emotions. Best avoided.
      - RajT88 2mo ago
        It's been said that people who do not have a high EQ gravitate towards tech, because machines are easier to understand than people.
        gretch 2mo ago
        I feel like people who have high EQ should actually grasp the infinite depth and complexity of even the median human. Just imagine, there’s a woman Alice who cleans your home once a month. On this particular day, she had a fight with her husband this morning on (something completely unrelated to you). Do you expect her to check her emotions at the door when she enters your space? Or is she going to give really bad vibes while she is moving around your house?
        fidotron 2mo ago
        It's been said that people that say this are transparently trying to manipulate other people, which is why the others prefer to cut off all potential for tedious negotiations. This is the same reason people prefer buying Tesla cars direct instead of having to make a deal at a dealership. If they all had high EQ maybe they'd prefer the dealership model after all.
        RajT88 2mo ago
        > It's been said that people that say this are transparently trying to manipulate other people Tech does also attract grumpy people. The reason this idea stuck in my memory when I read it - is that it resonated with me. To some extent I feel this way.
        fidotron 2mo ago
        > Tech does also attract grumpy people. You have cause and effect wrong; it just makes people that have to deal with the people in and around the tech industry grumpy.
    - CamperBob2 2mo ago
      With a robot housemaid, I wouldn't have to get dressed. :-P More seriously: - I wouldn't feel obligated to 'pre-clean' anything. Who wants to come across as a thoughtless/careless slob whose personal habits amount to borderline-abusive demands on the cleaning staff? Not me... and where does that line get drawn, anyway? - I wouldn't worry about stuff being picked up and misplaced - I have never had problems with maids stealing stuff, but I know others have - Cleaning can be initiated or postponed as needed, with no dependencies on someone else's schedule
      - kibwen 2mo ago
        > With a robot housemaid, I wouldn't have to get dressed. :-P Well, as long as you don't mind the workers in the robot company's telemetrics department whacking it to your robot's video feed.
        CamperBob2 2mo ago
        They can jerk themselves silly, IDGAF. When the 'Black Mirror' screenwriters get involved, though, I'll require some back-end participation of the financial kind. (I'm being facetious here: nothing that transmits data out of the house is going to be deployed to run household robots, at least not in my house. Even if I didn't care, I can't make that call on behalf of family members or guests. Then there's the obvious concern that the robotics company would sell the data to my homeowners' insurance company, health insurance company, and who knows who else.)
        icepush 2mo ago
        For the robot to function without teleoperation, sota is for it to be using a model that runs on chips about 5-10x the cost of what is being discussed here. How do you propose for that without transmission of data out of your house ?
        CamperBob2 2mo ago
        I've pretty much made my peace with the idea of spending on GPUs what I used to spend on sports cars. That being said, by the time the kinematic hardware needed to build a robotic housekeeper is available for home use, I don't think the brainpower is going to be a problem. There's nothing in Ex Machina that couldn't run on a couple of RTX 6000s.
    - verdverm 2mo ago
      "hey Rosie, the cat yakked on the rug again" (real-time mess handling)
- sagarm 2mo ago
  The dishwasher is out of the way because you made space for it out of the way. We'll probably adapt our spaces for robots too eventually. For example, you could store far more things out of easy human reach.
qurren 2mo ago
I'm bearish that they'll be economically viable in the house for a very long time. For businesses the bar for adoption is very low: If the thing can work repetitive jobs for 24 hours a day and replace 3 shifts, the purchase bar is nominally anything less than 3 x human salary if your budgeting horizon is 1 year. That's a high number, and probably fairly easy to achieve. For homes, it's a very different bar. You'd have a hard time convincing most American families to purchase anything with a >$1000 price tag. Currently that's pretty much impossible for a humanoid.
- heaney-555 2mo ago
  >You'd have a hard time convincing most American families to purchase anything with a >$1000 price tag. Like cars, they'll likely purchase them through finance deals, with a monthly payment. Or perhaps even rent/lease them.
  - meowkit 2mo ago
    Much easier to remotely brick a robot too I imagine
  - mbil 2mo ago
    Leasing seems like it could make sense given rapid upgrades in the technology. Why spend $15k on a home robot that will be obsoleted in the next few years?
    - garbageman 2mo ago
      Leasing is out, but locked-in subscriptions are in!
  - qurren 2mo ago
    Cars are an absolute necessity in the US unless you live in one of the small handful of cities that have viable public transit. Different thing altogether. Robots aren't a necessity, and for a price tag in the tens of thousands, most people will just mop their own floors and do their own laundry.
doctorpangloss 2mo ago
> it honestly doesn't matter if it takes a robot longer than a human to clean your house it depends. in order for my slow ass Roomba to clean my floors, I have to move a bunch of things out of the way and not use the room. on the flip side, i think this "the robot cannot automate the whole task" thing is reductive too. suffice it to say, EVERYTHING matters, there honestly nothing that "honestly doesn't matter."
millerm 2mo ago
Exactly. People buy those automated circular floor vacuums. Anyone can get it done with a regular broom/vacuum in a small fraction of the time it takes for those things. Just like I drive an electric car. It charges while I sleep. It doesn't matter if an ICE can fuel in a few minutes.
moffkalast 2mo ago
"That's fair, you are absolutely right I should not have unscrewed the water hose and put it away before turning on the valve to water the plants, even though you specified that order, I should've used some common sense." There is going to be so much pain from VLA malicious compliance. If the current gen of LLMs are anything to go by I can already see it being an hilariously massive problem. People are careless.
- claaams 2mo ago
  This was my thought too. An unsupervised robot can cause 10s of thousands in damage by accidentally ripping a water line and flooding your house or just breaking all of your dishes. There’s no level to how dumb and awful LLMs can hallucinate
Razengan 2mo ago
We all know sexbots will be the real killer app
trkaky 2mo ago
which work?

cute_boi 2mo ago

yes at 1k tok/sec i think these robots will be fast and very fluid.

GaggiX 2mo ago

I believe that it's also for safety, these robots would easily destroy themselves if not restrained (and cause damage).

drbioart 2mo ago
Better to go slow and controlled. Giving physical action to a model is dangerous and must be carefully monitored. Slow is good. Oversight is important.
- gretch 2mo ago
  I agree I only wish I could convince some humans in my life to slow down and do things with care.
amelius 2mo ago
But why use that slow speed in a press release?

ChaitanyaSai 2mo ago

We don't get virtuous feedback loops in hardware though. Muscles are incredible engineering that took half a billion years. Token generation (speech) is low hundred thousands maybe. Unless of course improved AI navigates the space of ideas so well that it can give us alloys or synthetic flesh that does twitch as fast...

hwillis 2mo ago

The time between gpt 2 and 3 was 15 months. The time between gemini robotics 1 and 2 was also 15 months: https://blog.google/products-and-platforms/products/gemini/how-we-built-gemini-robotics/ https://blog.google/products-and-platforms/products/gemini/h... The difference between gpt 2 and 3 was insane. 2 could generate limericks when it wasn't repeating a word 300x. 3 could actually do some things. By comparison gemini robotics has hardly changed at all. I will also point out that slow, non-fluid robotics is on a totally different level of difficulty from fast fluid motion. Asimov could walk pretty smoothly, but it didn't fall over because it used a very careful sequence that was never unbalanced; you could pause at any point without falling over. Move faster, like boston dynamics, and you need to account for the change in balance from your arms swinging... or rather, you need to be able to account for the rotational inertia etc from moving multiple masses along complex paths with multiple points of articulation at hundreds or thousands of times per second. An algorithm to fold tshirts 90% of the time is easy. The cloth hangs down by gravity and you can just look for right angles (corners), find their coordinates with binocular matching, and move them to meet each other. Getting 99%, or folding them quickly, so that the fabric is actually moving instead of just hanging still- incredibly, incredibly more complex.

fc417fc802 2mo ago
> folding them quickly, so that the fabric is actually moving instead of just hanging still- incredibly, incredibly more complex. TBF fabric is much more difficult to simulate than a bipedal body is. As I recall openai had mujoco playing soccer nearly 10 years ago. Obviously real world bodies are much more difficult but I'd be curious to learn why that is.
- YeGoblynQueenne 2mo ago
  I don't think that there's any inherent difficulty to do with physical bodies, it's just that the learning techniques used by the big labs, that is to say, various forms of Reinforcement Learning, don't transfer to the real world. Because in the real world if you try stuff at random until you figure out the right policy, you end up destroying too many robot bodies. Imitation learning that went wild a couple years ago with ALOHA looks like a great way to get around this on paper, but then you realise that you have to train your robot for hours on every single task you want it to perform and it still won't generalise even between similar tasks. The sim-2-real gap also remains a big obstacle and you can't just train in simulation and transfer to the real world seamlessly; and then the seams end up being more like chasms. Then there's the problem of generalisation. RL is insane in figuring out the dynamics of any arbitrary environment you drop it in at any time. Unfortunately once you have a policy trained in one environment (or one task) you have to train again for the next environment (or task) you want to deal with. The number of different environments, situations or tasks in the real world ends up being overwhelmingly large. So for example DeepMind has been trying for ever to train various robots to do stuff like grasp arbitrary objects by training in the real world or in simulation and still grasping is an unsolved problem, in the general case; and in fact in most cases. With LLMs it was different in that there was a www of text to train on and the stakes are lower because there's no sim-2-real gap and there's no need to deal with the real world, in training or deployment, it's just text on a screen. That's very hard to replicate in robotics. There are major breakthroughs still to be made and they aren't currently even on the horizon. And no, I don't have the answer with my super secrete robotic AGI homebrew project either, just saying :P

mwt 2mo ago

> If progress is as fast as LLMs Is this the new "x technology is a year away" ?

ashleyn 2mo ago

Gotta admit google is pretty ballsy for directly attacking Moravec's Paradox: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec%27s_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec%27s_paradox

fidotron 2mo ago

They're fluid, but they are slow, which is highly likely to be a safety thing, which will have the side effect of making many motions more difficult, not less. LLMs aren't themselves hurting anyone, no matter how much certain people like to pretend otherwise, whereas an AI in a robot with significant motors in absolutely can and will. There are reasons industrial ones live in safety cages after all. Expecting them to be like inverse kinematic driven digital dolls is wrong because the optimization won't be for matching that but something like "net reduce energy consumption" which for electric motors in multi joint arms will look a bit odd.

bastardoperator 2mo ago

These robots are unusable in their current form. Slow and expensive, humans perform this work better and cheaper. Looks like every other robot before it, a bunch of servos and no brain.

ghostly_s 2mo ago

This is the first press videos I’ve seen of 1x speed that seems reasonable, imho. Though I see elsewhere they report only 50-75% success rate- not clear if that's first attempt, or total?

mrinterweb 2mo ago

Look at robotics demonstrations on YouTube from one or two years ago, and compare that to where we are today. It seems reasonable to me that general purpose robotics may be able to outmaneuver your average human in a few years. At least one robot has surpassed what I could do https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xha2TJ_1C6Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xha2TJ_1C6Q