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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
by horsawlarway 3mo 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 3mo agoYes, PEs of 400 turned out to be unsustainable. Quelle Surprise?
- rwz 3mo 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.
- horsawlarway 3mo agoWorth buying? Maybe. Actually bought and distributed? No. Again, hardware just doesn't roll out that fast, and you're talking about trying to distribute expensive hardware to a population with a 47k median yearly wage. I've built robots. Even if the software expense is ~$0... you're not going to escape the fact that a robot that can do anything remotely similar to household work is just going to be expensive. Like, several thousand dollars in actuators and sensors alone, not counting any compute. LLMs are a SaaS - Robots are delivered hardware. The graveyard is littered with software folks who thought they could deliver hardware like it was software.
- djhn 2mo agoI agree. Not to mention safety. To be useful they’re gonna have to be capable and powerful. If they’re good enough to be useful, they will be dangerous. Advanced household robots are closer to fully autonomous cars and airplanes than roombas. The code is safety critical. Imagine something capable of flooding or burning down a building with hundreds of people if left to the vibe coders?
- fuzzythinker 3mo agomajority of population? I'll take that bet I'll even bet < majority of the US