3 ms·

I would argue we still have not even really gotten started. What do we have in the decade ahead? Robotics in every household, models 10x+ faster and more intel

I would argue we still have not even really gotten started. What do we have in the decade ahead? Robotics in every household, models 10x+ faster and more intelligent than today. Really no significant impact in life sciences, R&D, and 'offline' world / robotics today as of yet, which is where most of the value will live.

Waterluvian 2mo ago
The absolutely massive scale and influence of the Web happened after the dot com burst.
Cthulhu_ 2mo ago
Robotics in the household has been the realm of science fiction for decades and it still hasn't happened. We get dedicated, compact machines like dishwashers and washing machine/dryers, that's it. Most recent innovation has been the automatic vacuum. If you want someone else to do household chores, hire someone. You can pay someone to do your house chores for years for the cost that these things will have initially.
- ghaff 2mo ago
  >Most recent innovation has been the automatic vacuum Which are pretty useless for a lot of home layouts and degree of putting cords etc. away. I took a look a few years back and got a stick vac instead. (And have a monthly housekeeper who does a lot more than a robo-vac would.)
- novia 2mo ago
  What it we would prefer that there were not other people in our homes for interpersonal reasons?
  - kibwen 2mo ago
    All robotic home appliances will feature cameras with which people will be watching you and microphones with which people will be listening to you, all the time, forever.
    - novia 2mo ago
      Sounds false
- CuriouslyC 2mo ago
  The cost of a timeshare robot will come down first, so you'll be hiring a robot before you own one. But that might not take so long to occur as you imagine.
  - habinero 2mo ago
    People have been talking about this for literally a hundred years at this point. It's not a thing and isn't gonna be one.
    - senordevnyc 2mo ago
      Exactly. I was telling my friend Orville something similar, but he just wouldn’t listen!
- sumedh 2mo ago
  > Robotics in the household has been the realm of science fiction for decades and it still hasn't happened. Wasnt AI science fiction (research) for decades but just took couple of years after Chatgpt to become mainstream. Why do you that wont happen to robotics?
  - habinero 2mo ago
    We don't have sci-fi AI, and in any case "this thing is now possible, therefore [much more difficult thing] will be possible soon" is not a rational thought.
    - bonoboTP 2mo ago
      > We don't have sci-fi AI Current frontier models are absolutely sci-fi AI by any measure that existed up until the late 2010s. If you showed a current frontier agentic AI, with bidirectional speech, tool use etc. to a person from 2010, they'd say it can't be real, there must be a person inside that mechanical turk.
      - ozlikethewizard 2mo ago
        Sci-fi AI has always been characterised by learning on the fly, which these models do not do. I guess we've got pretty close to what sci fi has often called "VI", autonomous machines that can carry out pre determined tasks to a level that looks concious, but are incapable of learning further.
        bonoboTP 2mo ago
        They learn again when the labs train the next version. The previous version often has an indispensable role in orchestrating that process, as a critic and from usage transcripts of the previous model that they have access to. And between two training runs the model can assemble a lot of md files, memory files, and load them in on-demand. I think this is enough to make it scifi-level, but I agree there should be some way to customize it at a deeper level and adapt to each person's context. But things are still moving too fast for that to make sense. If they fine tuned a specific LoRA for Claude just for your projects and workflows, it would get outdated quite fast and you'd have to retrain it at quite a cost for the new version.
FrustratedMonky 2mo ago
Yep, that is what the bet is. The build out will continue, even if it looks different. The Internet was a 'bubble' at one point, and after it crashed in 2000, it didn't go away, it continued to build out. We're still using the Internet after the Internet bubble popped.
- hajile 2mo ago
  On a $100B AI datacenter, some 60-70% of the center needs to be replaced every 2-6 years. These companies claim the hardware lasts 6 years while simultaneously claiming they are relying on new hardware to lower inference costs (implying much more frequent updates). Over 40 years, that's 7-20 hardware changes, that turns into between $420B and $1.4T of ongoing investment (not accounting for inflation). The $30B that is called "infrastructure" only accounts for 2-7% of the overall bill. This is NOTHING like fiber buildouts because the fiber lasts the whole 40 years with ZERO replacements and very close to 100% of the cost is infrastructure rather than a tiny percentage.
  - FrustratedMonky 2mo ago
    I've been through several network upgrades. You are saying the fiber in the ground lasts a long time, but all the equipment on either end gets replaced every ~5 years. I agree this build out seems pretty crazy, but people were saying the same thing with the internet. Arguing if the equipment has a replacement rate of 2-6 years or 30-40 years, I think isn't the part that makes this a bubble.
    - kibwen 2mo ago
      For fiber, the main costs were not the fiber itself, but acquiring the rights to lay the fiber and the labor to do so. The equipment at either end has a lifespan of somewhat less that 50 years, but that's a minor cost. Conversely, for the data centers we're talking about, the cost of the things that need replacing every five years is one of the primary costs.
      - 2mo ago
horsawlarway 2mo ago
Even if we agree with this take (and I do think it's a likely take that you're right on the long term), it doesn't change that it seems likely we're in a bubble, and it probably will pop. We see a similar paradigm with lots of revolutionary technology. The initial promise is high, people get very excited, lots of money pours in, and.... 15-30 years go by before we start seeing real impact across the economy at large. It's just a real slog to actually implement and roll out new tech. So take robots: I can promise you that you won't see robotics in every household in the next decade (especially so if we exclude the current market of robot vacuums). Even if a company makes an incredibly capable robot "today" (and to be clear - they are not) it won't have time to scale out production, reduce costs, generate a used market that's accessible to less wealthy consumers, deal with regulatory hurdles and quality problems that only pop up in real-world usage, etc... It's just slower than you're implying. The change very well will happen (I'm inclined to agree that things are going to shift). That doesn't mean that the current investment is sane and will pay off. So many historical examples of this, just two here real quick: - Ford built his first automobile in 1896, founded a company in 1901, went out of business, got sued by ALAM, didn't build more than 10k Model T's until 1910, then only finally hit real scale (of low hundred of thousands of units) in 1913: More than a decade to "basic scale". Household ownership didn't hit 60% until 1929... 30+ years later. - The initial web enthusiasm, followed by the dot-com crash in early 2000s...
- LogicFailsMe 2mo ago
  Yes, PEs of 400 turned out to be unsustainable. Quelle Surprise?
- rwz 2mo ago
  > So take robots: I can promise you that you won't see robotics in every household in the next decade (especially so if we exclude the current market of robot vacuums). People in 2016 were adamant that the current frontier LLM capabilities would not be achievable in the next decade. Modern home robots prototypes look awkward and mostly useless the same way GPT-2 was looking like a curious but mostly useless thing in 2016. I can totally see a capable and affordable home robots that are worth buying for the majority of the population being a reality by 2036. Maybe not _every_ household, but a good number of them.
deleted 2mo ago
[deleted]

Waterluvian 2mo ago

The absolutely massive scale and influence of the Web happened after the dot com burst.

Cthulhu_ 2mo ago

Robotics in the household has been the realm of science fiction for decades and it still hasn't happened. We get dedicated, compact machines like dishwashers and washing machine/dryers, that's it. Most recent innovation has been the automatic vacuum. If you want someone else to do household chores, hire someone. You can pay someone to do your house chores for years for the cost that these things will have initially.

ghaff 2mo ago
>Most recent innovation has been the automatic vacuum Which are pretty useless for a lot of home layouts and degree of putting cords etc. away. I took a look a few years back and got a stick vac instead. (And have a monthly housekeeper who does a lot more than a robo-vac would.)
novia 2mo ago
What it we would prefer that there were not other people in our homes for interpersonal reasons?
- kibwen 2mo ago
  All robotic home appliances will feature cameras with which people will be watching you and microphones with which people will be listening to you, all the time, forever.
  - novia 2mo ago
    Sounds false
CuriouslyC 2mo ago
The cost of a timeshare robot will come down first, so you'll be hiring a robot before you own one. But that might not take so long to occur as you imagine.
- habinero 2mo ago
  People have been talking about this for literally a hundred years at this point. It's not a thing and isn't gonna be one.
  - senordevnyc 2mo ago
    Exactly. I was telling my friend Orville something similar, but he just wouldn’t listen!
sumedh 2mo ago
> Robotics in the household has been the realm of science fiction for decades and it still hasn't happened. Wasnt AI science fiction (research) for decades but just took couple of years after Chatgpt to become mainstream. Why do you that wont happen to robotics?
- habinero 2mo ago
  We don't have sci-fi AI, and in any case "this thing is now possible, therefore [much more difficult thing] will be possible soon" is not a rational thought.
  - bonoboTP 2mo ago
    > We don't have sci-fi AI Current frontier models are absolutely sci-fi AI by any measure that existed up until the late 2010s. If you showed a current frontier agentic AI, with bidirectional speech, tool use etc. to a person from 2010, they'd say it can't be real, there must be a person inside that mechanical turk.
    - ozlikethewizard 2mo ago
      Sci-fi AI has always been characterised by learning on the fly, which these models do not do. I guess we've got pretty close to what sci fi has often called "VI", autonomous machines that can carry out pre determined tasks to a level that looks concious, but are incapable of learning further.
      - bonoboTP 2mo ago
        They learn again when the labs train the next version. The previous version often has an indispensable role in orchestrating that process, as a critic and from usage transcripts of the previous model that they have access to. And between two training runs the model can assemble a lot of md files, memory files, and load them in on-demand. I think this is enough to make it scifi-level, but I agree there should be some way to customize it at a deeper level and adapt to each person's context. But things are still moving too fast for that to make sense. If they fine tuned a specific LoRA for Claude just for your projects and workflows, it would get outdated quite fast and you'd have to retrain it at quite a cost for the new version.

FrustratedMonky 2mo ago

Yep, that is what the bet is. The build out will continue, even if it looks different. The Internet was a 'bubble' at one point, and after it crashed in 2000, it didn't go away, it continued to build out. We're still using the Internet after the Internet bubble popped.

hajile 2mo ago
On a $100B AI datacenter, some 60-70% of the center needs to be replaced every 2-6 years. These companies claim the hardware lasts 6 years while simultaneously claiming they are relying on new hardware to lower inference costs (implying much more frequent updates). Over 40 years, that's 7-20 hardware changes, that turns into between $420B and $1.4T of ongoing investment (not accounting for inflation). The $30B that is called "infrastructure" only accounts for 2-7% of the overall bill. This is NOTHING like fiber buildouts because the fiber lasts the whole 40 years with ZERO replacements and very close to 100% of the cost is infrastructure rather than a tiny percentage.
- FrustratedMonky 2mo ago
  I've been through several network upgrades. You are saying the fiber in the ground lasts a long time, but all the equipment on either end gets replaced every ~5 years. I agree this build out seems pretty crazy, but people were saying the same thing with the internet. Arguing if the equipment has a replacement rate of 2-6 years or 30-40 years, I think isn't the part that makes this a bubble.
  - kibwen 2mo ago
    For fiber, the main costs were not the fiber itself, but acquiring the rights to lay the fiber and the labor to do so. The equipment at either end has a lifespan of somewhat less that 50 years, but that's a minor cost. Conversely, for the data centers we're talking about, the cost of the things that need replacing every five years is one of the primary costs.
    - 2mo ago

horsawlarway 2mo ago

Even if we agree with this take (and I do think it's a likely take that you're right on the long term), it doesn't change that it seems likely we're in a bubble, and it probably will pop. We see a similar paradigm with lots of revolutionary technology. The initial promise is high, people get very excited, lots of money pours in, and.... 15-30 years go by before we start seeing real impact across the economy at large. It's just a real slog to actually implement and roll out new tech. So take robots: I can promise you that you won't see robotics in every household in the next decade (especially so if we exclude the current market of robot vacuums). Even if a company makes an incredibly capable robot "today" (and to be clear - they are not) it won't have time to scale out production, reduce costs, generate a used market that's accessible to less wealthy consumers, deal with regulatory hurdles and quality problems that only pop up in real-world usage, etc... It's just slower than you're implying. The change very well will happen (I'm inclined to agree that things are going to shift). That doesn't mean that the current investment is sane and will pay off. So many historical examples of this, just two here real quick: - Ford built his first automobile in 1896, founded a company in 1901, went out of business, got sued by ALAM, didn't build more than 10k Model T's until 1910, then only finally hit real scale (of low hundred of thousands of units) in 1913: More than a decade to "basic scale". Household ownership didn't hit 60% until 1929... 30+ years later. - The initial web enthusiasm, followed by the dot-com crash in early 2000s...

LogicFailsMe 2mo ago
Yes, PEs of 400 turned out to be unsustainable. Quelle Surprise?
rwz 2mo ago
> So take robots: I can promise you that you won't see robotics in every household in the next decade (especially so if we exclude the current market of robot vacuums). People in 2016 were adamant that the current frontier LLM capabilities would not be achievable in the next decade. Modern home robots prototypes look awkward and mostly useless the same way GPT-2 was looking like a curious but mostly useless thing in 2016. I can totally see a capable and affordable home robots that are worth buying for the majority of the population being a reality by 2036. Maybe not _every_ household, but a good number of them.

deleted 2mo ago

[deleted]