While Anthropic and Open AI get 80% of the attention here, it's impressive to see how much Google is doing: near frontier model, fast models, open weight models, image generation, video generation, music generation, robotics, etc.
It was a huge advancement but it did not beat the world champion. AlphaGo is noted for being a self-learning system that became better than all humans. Chess engines had long been there but were not self-learning before AlphaZero.
I won't comment much on this, but I'd say these articles are 2-3 years late and reduces the agency of the people, who in many cases moved to Gemini because they wanted to work on LLMs
It's certainly an odd situation where Google is on the forefront of all these emerging technologies while the latest chatbots from OpenAI and Anthropic are getting breathless press releases and wildly hyperbolic coverage ("rogue AIs" "too dangerous, must be banned" etc...)
Google acting like a normal but competent company that's just chugging away, meanwhile the hype cycle is propping up its upstart competitors to truly ludicrous valuations.
> Google acting like a normal but competent company that's just chugging away,
Chugging away not releasing products or releasing ones worse than their competition typically. Not sure that’s what a normal competent company should be doing.
> Google acting like a normal but competent company that's just chugging away
Competent is a stretch. Google's AI offering seems to be, once again, PM led–lots of constantly-changing brands being merged and deprecated with zero customer support or service.
They'll almost certainly be one of the survivors. Their technical competece is unmatched. But that doesn't mean they have a great product in the way both OpenAI and Anthropic do. (Outside their datacentres, which are a legitimate feat.)
A lot of this is having to incorporate with existing billing systems for their customers. OpenAI and Anthropic have it easier by having no previous billing setup to be compatible with.
Google has never been good at supporting developers, and it absolutely loathes end users. Support for everything that is not their ad ecosystem is miserable. There's never any long term plan, everything gets deprecated and bitrots.
Google wins on infrastructure and creativity (NotebookLM, etc) but entirely lacks product coherence. The ecosystem is a mess, just like Microsoft's offering, and I don't think this is a coincidence but rather a symptom of the type of company in which these two companies have evolved.
Furthermore, Gemini is just all around a less trustworthy and mature model, for many reasons. Very smart but lacking the precision and holistically exhibited in the more recent models from OpenAI and Anthropic. On the flip side, Google's work on Gemma is unmatched.
I can say a portrait doesn’t look like a person even if I can’t do better, googles product range is an absolute mess and using it is a nightmare - I don’t know how to fix the company but I know the outcome is bad.
I thought Google was a mess until I started working at a Microsoft shop for the first time. Boy it's astonishing. I've got two versions of Outlook on my computer, neither of which is as quick to load as Thunderbird was 20 years ago. My team uses Azure DevOps for our git forge, which is somehow a completely different product than GitHub. There are multiple versions of Planner in Teams, where the free version's features are not a strict subset of the premium - there are features that are blocked if you pay.
The thing that gets me with Google is that they've killed too many products I used daily (RIP Inbox and Google Podcasts) for me to be able to trust that any new offering will exist in 5 years.
> Google acting like a normal but competent company that's just chugging away
People are too quick to forget racially-diverse Nazi soldiers and other hilariously incompetent stuff that has been going around their generative AI efforts just a couple of years ago. Google look like they finally getting their shit together under immense competitive pressure but I would keep my eye on them for a few more years before starting calling them "competent".
I mean they did practically invent LLMs and a lot of modern machine learning stuff. Or I should say researchers at Google. Makes sense they would keep at it
It’s because their products are really bad. Last time I tried Gemini it repeatedly lied about running internet search when explicitly asked to do it. I know their models benchmark really well, but in real world the performance is abysmal.
Wait? What are you talking about? We're already drowning in them. There's literally more than Google messenger apps. An incomplete list of Google AI chatbots currently online:
Gemini
Gemini Live
Gemini Code Assist
Gemini for Google Cloud
NotebookLM
Gmail
Google Docs
Google Sheets
Google Slides
Google Drive
Google Chat
Google Meet
Google Calendar
Google Forms
Google Vids
AppSheet
Workspace Studio
Google Search
Google app
Google Chrome
Google Lens
Google Maps
Google Flights
Google Hotels
Google Shopping
Google Photos
YouTube
Google Messages
Google Translate
Android
Circle to Search
Google Home
Google Play
Pixel apps and features
Google Flow
Google AI Studio
I recommend reading „The Infinity Machine: Demis Hassabis, DeepMind, and the Quest for Superintelligence“ from Sebastian Mallaby. It offers a detailed glimpse into the reasons behind your observation regarding Google/DeepMind and the other frontier labs. best book I read so far on my current vacation.
While I agree, it’s hard to trust Google not to kill this off in the future. They’re not winning and the prospect of dumping their own for a partnership with another AI company isn’t out of the picture.
Yes, I am surprised that no one talks about the 'live' feature in Gemini app. With camera turned on, it has helped me fix things which I have no clue about.
thing is, google have a track record of dropping support or just killing of projects. Personally, I view most of google's products and services as a business risk, because you never know when they will kill it.
It’s basically because LLMs supersede all of these. The ability to reason, research, and write code applies to everything else and will speed up the innovation cycles there significantly.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
> I don't want a person I don't know very well in my space.
In the humanoid robot scenario, you'll get a surveillance device with a built-in microphone and camera beaming every intimate detail of your space to the highest bidder. Instead of getting one person you don't know very well in your space, you'll get thousands.
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?
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.
If you're predisposed to being grumpy, regardless of if the reason is justifiable or not - that's called "grumpy". People generally feel justified about their feelings. Imagine that.
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
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.)
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 ?
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.
The last point I can get behind as it is a clear advantage, the other ones might need some more superhuman abilities that I'd not accept as given until demonstrated in extenso.
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.
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?
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.
> 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.
And (regardless of the costs involved) if I were going to pay money to not do this stuff myself, I'd rather pay a human to do it because I know there are humans out there that could use the work and I value them much more than I value Google and other corporations making even more obscene amounts of money selling future e-waste.
That's really more of a financial literacy problem though. People don't see $45k car, they see $600/mo payment. And car dealers very much sell on the payment and not on the actual price.
nit: 45k is the average car loan for a new car, but average for a used car is $25k. Purchasing a car is a necessity but purchasing a new car is a luxury.
People are financing small consumer goods with 3 digit price tags because they can't afford their mediocre already leveraged life. They borrow high 4 to low 5 figures for a car because they can't get to work to earn money so they don't have to join the bums sleeping on the cardboard. They will not be borrowing high 5 figures to low 6 figures for Rosie the Robot.
If Rosie was the only output she would never happen. Rosie might happen as a side benefit of replacing American workers but only for the rich people.
The vast majority which may be replaced would probably be better off burning down the factory rather than celebrate their upcoming domestic helper.
it's not cheap at all and the privacy and logistical implications of letting a stranger inside your house is something not everyone wants to deal with. I would rather have a robot.
I don't trust a robot with my privacy, but I know Linette isn't building a profile of my shopping habits and Wi-Fi traffic. She is also careful to not let my cats out.
Not to pull on the tinfoil hat, but I would assume most commercially available home cleaning robots will be covered with cameras, mics, and other sensors, and connected to their manufacturer's cloud... I don't pay for housecleaning, but I would vet humans quite differently.
Why not? A recording from a robot can be potentially viewed by a real human, if the company is not reputable (happened with robotic vacuums). But by default, no humans will view it.
A human house cleaner by definition is a real human looking at your home every time.
One human, with a single set of human eyes and a limited network of associates with few immediate criminals looking to take advantage (although, yes, that does happen).
Versus a small army of roomba's and equivalents mapping out floor plans and tangentially exposing human occupation times with that large data set almost certainly exposed to criminal and surveillance networks that will almost certainly use some of that choicer data to their advantage.
I mean, a twice-monthly house-cleaning service is running you ballpark 5k/year and people treat that shit as non-negotiable. I tried to claw back that line item after our second baby was born (wife didn't want them in the house anyway when we had a newborn), and it was completely unsuccessful. She claimed misery and all our friends were on her side.
1. 80%+ of Americans can't afford house cleaning services. I'm a software engineer in silicon valley and even I clean my own house because I don't think I can afford it. My rents have gone up by more than 5K in the last year, my salary hasn't, so that's coming out of my house cleaning budget.
2. Even if you can afford 5K/year on it, the cleaning service is not an upfront commitment. You can bail anytime when you get laid off and clean your own house.
Well, to be honest, a cleaning service is a much more logical purchaser for a cleaning robot. Since you can truck it all over creation, work it 60 hours a week, and undercut all the human cleaning crews on price.
As opposed to a household which might not have enough work to fully utilize it, or just have trouble scheduling times where it can work without causing disruption.
Ours was a 1300 3b1b. It was $35 an hour, they finished everything in under 2 hours. I'm guessing(hoping!) they have to be there for more than 2 hours for $200?
$70 a go? That’s got to be the cash only person to person handshake agreement. That would never buy you laundry too.
I think I remember maybe around $100 including laundry almost 20 years ago and that was a cash type arrangement, weekly including laundry (multi hour visit).
There is a lot of variance in the price of cleaning tied to location. Cost of living in the area for sure, but also presence or absence of economic migrants and new immigrants.
I think domestic robots will make a lot of incremental progress and that few, if any, will be humanoid. We'll see a laundry folder and sock picker-upper and they'll be more like roombas or just big cubes. And tethered.
The more likely scenario is that the hucksters currently hyping the idea of humanoid robots will gradually move the goalposts so that, when we eventually get a big, soft, stationary cube with six inflatable robot arms they'll point to it and say "behold, a humanoid robot!" and declare their predictions vindicated.
Robot lawnmowers are mostly over $1000 already and they only do one thing. Heck, a lot of lawnmowers are over $1000.
You can pay over $500 for an automatic cat litter box. Robot vacuums can be cheap but run to $600 or so. Household appliances is a robust sector where people have a proven track record of spending a lot of money.
For all of these things, then what's the point of having a humanoid robot then? The last thing is a folding laundry bot that I would happily also pay $1000 for.
This is my dream for a house chore robot. If I could dump hampers of clothes into a receptacle and get stacks of folded clothes out, I’d happily pay $1k. Household of 5; my kids each produce 3-4 sets of clothes a day (sleep, school, sports, after school). I run wash in AM so dryer finishes before 3pm (pg&e ToU) and then I’m focused on other things for rest of day. More often than not, I get to bed to find a near full hamper of clothes dumped where I sleep and then have to sort/fold/deliver. Bonus points if robot can sort different items to different stacks/bundles.
I don’t need AI/robotics to save me time from having to think, research, or code… I need AI/robotics to save me time so I can think, research, or code.
Automatic litter box is a great example. We've had one for ~7 years and it's still going strong. High initial cost that pays back every day over the course of what will likely be a decade+ of usage. Absolutely worth every penny if you look to the horizon. I imagine the robot mowers and robot house maids will fall under the same type of payback but with even higher upfront costs - perhaps this will turn into yet another subscription scheme.
Not OP, but I have a litter robot 3 that is still going strong after 10 years, and a litter robot 4 that is around four years old. The only problem I've run into is occasionally the pinch sensor will get bits of litter stuck in it and I have to take the globe off and tap/push on the sensor housing, then it will allow cycling again.
Yeah, I've always had two or three cats using them, they like to use them as an opportunity to hide and pounce on one another as one exits the litter robot globe, inside the globe they have a pretty limited field of view.
It is all about the ROI. A lawn cut from a professional can cost anywhere from $25-$100 on an average (per cut). So with a $1000 lawn mower, you will get the return back in 10-40 cuts at most. That is less than 1-2 seasons. Sure, there will be some maintenance cost over the years but if you look at a 5-10 year period, it is totally worth doing your own. Even with the $1000 price tag. Of course, you cannot count the labor time.
Agreed. That's one thing I realized I cannot do myself. I bought an expensive Mower Rider and tried it myself only realizing how much work it is for do trimming, blow, cleanup, weeding etc other than just mowing. Granted, I have a large property. I hired back a landscaper and focus my time on other things :)
I have personally never met someone with a personal robotic lawnmower, and I suspect that if you have you live in a bubble that is severely biasing your view of the average American.
I think house cleaning/chores require at least a "part-time" job's work of work for the average household (especially with children). We may be atypical, but my partner and I don't want to hire out a cleaning service and deal with the whole human component. But, I think we'd gladly pay 15k+ if it allowed us to take on the additional gainful workload. Even at a 20k price tag, I suspect we would likely have made up the difference in under a year.
If you can even afford 20K you're in the top 10% of the US population. It's not a very big market, and even selling to that market is hard. Probably only 10% of that 10% will actually buy, and all of a sudden you're selling to 1%.
Selling to businesses is much easier, 99% of businesses can afford 200K if it replaces 3 x 70K humans.
Actually the high income households are becoming a greater and greater share of spending, referred to as the "K shaped" economy. For example, the top quintile of households accounts for about 40% of all consumer spending.
But they only need so many robot housekeepers. And their standards are going to be higher than the average consumer's. If you're targeting that demo, slumming it with a $20k robot won't do; with the performance, bespoke service and maintenance, and other considerations, might as well bump up to $100k or more. But, in the current zeitgeist, you're not making an aspirational product, you're just creating another icon of class warfare that turns off the consumers you were hoping to eventually reach.
Your napkin math only shows that the market is identical. There's about 35m businesses operating in the US. So by selling to 10% of those you sell the exact same number of robots...
The difference is that some of those businesses might buy a lot more than just one robot. As many as they currently have employees doing robot work for a human salary.
I don't think a cleaning robot and a vehicle are in the same category, as vehicles are more a necessity (at the very least to get to and from your jobs, to buy groceries, etc) and a cleaning robot is squarely a luxury.
A car saves you time walking/biking, a robot saves chore time. Depending on depreciation, it's feasible that you could go do minimum-wage level work on Doordash using the chore time you save from the robot and still come out ahead. E.g. 5 hours/week at $20/hour = $5200/yr
> A car saves you time walking/biking, a robot saves chore time
Mileage varies. My impression is that on net, many people borrow money for the vehicle and end up adjusting their lives to depend on it, so much so that in their head they think they're saving time, but if they'd put that money into their home budget and moved closer to where things are, they'd get more exercise, be more socially healthy, and also waste less time and money driving. In aggregate, this makes everything worse and perpetuates the cycle. I sure as hell wouldn't move somewhere I had to drive to and from if I didn't already have the car, and I sure as hell wouldn't buy a car to get to a job unless the nature of my work required it. Not again.
Only way I can see that happening is if you somehow get fired for not folding your laundry, in the same way people are fired when their car breaks and they can't make it to work.
At some point, household robots — once they become mainstream — can do things around the home that you depend on, and if/when they break down, prevent you from being able to work/get to work.
Or, if the stress of doing everything they do is too much, and interferes with your ability to work and do other things you once had the time to do.
> I don't want to hire out a cleaning service and deal with the whole human component.
I've used on in the past, but I found that I was routinely dissatisfied with how they were doing things and I felt I needed to maintain a certain level of tidiness to allow them to clean properly. I think there is an intrinsic cost to having hired staff in one's home that most consumers would be factoring in, consciously or not.
The economy would be very dead if people only spend money on non-negotiable items. Why would one fly to Colorado if they could just go to the park near by?
Robots may not be very useful for now, but they will be at some point, and people will buy them, financing if they have to. Even if what the robots can do are not non-negotiable.
I pay $200 every 2 weeks to have a 3000 sq ft house cleaned.
That's about $5200 a year to fully clean a house. And it's a human, so they can also tidy up, clean out the refrigerator, do my laundry, water my plants, etc.
Where I live, you typically share house cleaners with your neighbors or family members.
My parents, aunt/uncle, grandparents, and one of my neighbors uses the same house cleaner.
If she stole from me, I’d immediately tell my family and she would lose basically all of her clients.
That makes it easier for me to trust her.
(It works similarly in NYC apartment buildings - a single cleaner often services many people in the same building, so they have a reputation to uphold)
I would never use random online cleaning services.
My understanding from parents and friends who have a cleaning service...it pretty much depends on a certain baseline level of cleanliness. Most cleaning services don't (and likely wouldn't be able to provide) basic "pick up around the house". They will come into a house that is mostly picked up and sweep, dust, mop, vacuum, etc. but they won't come into a toddler house and put everything away.
I'm sure that there are services that do this, but I very much doubt they are the $400 per month services you are talking about. Robots may not be able to do that level of task at all right now, but they will get there.
And of course, that's not even thinking about all the cleaning tasks that would be avoided in between the every-other-week visits.
Having my surfaces be somewhat cleaner every two weeks is worth ~nothing to me. It's by far the easiest and least unpleasant part of cleaning a house. Having a robot that will pick up the detritus of everyday life and put it away, pick up and clean dishes, etc. and do so every single day would be worth an enormous amount of money.
I have no idea how long it will take for robots to get to that point, but whichever company cracks that level first is going to make a lot of money.
Totally agree with you on ‘putting stuff away’. Much of the mental effort is trying to organize stuff so it takes space efficiently, and be easy to find it when I need it. If a robot put it away, I don’t really care where. I can just ask it where it is.
This is one of those "tell me you don't have kids without telling me" situations. The process of teaching a kid to be a responsible human is long and arduous. If you expect a 2 and a half year old to successfully be picking up their toys, well, I don't know what to tell you. Go spend some time in a daycare, I guess.
And of course, that's completely ignoring the fact that I also would like to not have to pick up my shit if I could buy a robot that would do it. Yes, I can. And in fact I currently do...mostly. But I'm not happy about it and if there was an even quasi reasonable amount of money I could pay that would mean I would never have to do it again, I 100% would do so.
And if you can honestly say that you wouldn't...well I hope you are enjoying your life in the monastery.
Teaching kids responsibility and autonomy cones in right after keeping them healthy.
2 year olds do a bad job. They are 2. Yet it is valuable for them to learn to manage themselves. They love helping put silverware away from the washing machine. Kids _need_ to help as part of their development.
Eh, I actually do have kids, and like other North American children they usually don't pick up their toys. When things get messy enough, the "toy sheriff" comes into town and sets things straight. He's got a hat and a badge and a thick mean southern accent. Toys that aren't put away get locked in "jail" for indefinite time.
I won't lie, I don't do this often, and I end up picking up plenty of toys, and would welcome robot assistance, but it still seems wasteful and privileged to use advanced tech in this way
The entire arc of human progress is taking things that used to be the domain of only the privileged and making them the domain of the masses. There was a time when if you were not actively contributing to the production of your own food (to the exclusion of almost any other activity), you were extremely privileged. Now, ~ no one (in the West) has to grow/raise/produce their own food and the proportion of most western's productive output that goes to purchasing food is a tiny fraction of overall work.
A new category of task starting to move along this trajectory is to be celebrated. Maybe some day people will clean some small portion of their house the same way that some people now have backyard gardens.
Obviously the whole question is how a robot cleaner compares to a human.
As you point out, the potential for robots far outperforms humans in multiple categories (although clearly not all by any stretch).
I'd say pricing around that of a lower end new car - or nice used one - seems about right to me. In terms of justifying the price, another thing I haven't seen discussed much is the competitive advantage this can provide. If you're spending less time cleaning, that's more time for other things.
To your point - in terms of domestic services - ownership isn't the only model. After all human cleaning services don't work like that either these days ( even in the American south.... ).
Some people might feel that a robot cleaner is less intrusive that a person.
The median working American earns something like 60k. Part time working adults are around 24k.
People might not have 20k in the bank, but if most are doing a part-time employment's worth of work which could be replaced by a machine, it would make sense on paper.
Granted, people aren't rational. Anecdotally, my partner and I probably could be hiring out some of this currently, but we choose not to as we don't want to have to work around a cleaning service's schedule. I think we'd be more apt to buy something which we own, have control over, always does things in the manner we'd like, doesn't have to work around our messy lives/schedules, etc.
As far as household expenses go, we've never really budgeted for this type of purchase. But we DO budget for... utilities, groceries, internet, and vehicles. These are needs, to a degree - but most people (even on the border of poverty) have things like vacuum cleaners, refrigerators, washing machines, etc...
I could definitely see people baking in money for certain automations, if they have a comparable ROI.
Of course, the initial prices will be significantly higher than "end result" or commoditized prices, at which point maybe even people on the brink of poverty can afford some level of home automation. In the interim, yes - it will be largely for the wealthy and business applications.
Eh, I'm a pretty social and outgoing guy. I think its fair to have some reservations about people in one's own home. I'll admit I'm slightly neurotic in my own household in that I like things to be done a certain way. I'd also feel like I needed to maintain certain levels of tidiness to enable a traditional cleaning service to perform well.
Unitree's R1 humanoid robot is only about $6000, and it's still a nascent, smallish scale technology. They will come down.
If the future home robots are any good, it saves you from buying a dishwasher and robot vacuum. It can replace a maid/cleaning service and gardener/lawn-mowing service. For anyone paying for those services, it pays for itself.
$1000 isn't that high. Probably about a third of American households have an appliance over $2000, which is still a massive market.
I doubt it'd save you from purchasing a dishwasher - those things are very efficient and not very expensive. Perhaps it'd save you from loading and unloading a dishwasher
I have a dishwasher and I still usually just hand wash. It takes about 10 seconds to wash a dish.
The side benefit is all your dishes are always available. With the dishwasher, up to one full dishwasher load are dirty at any time, which means you need more dishes and more cupboard space than someone without a dishwasher.
If the robot is going to clear your dishes and wash them for you right away, what's the dishwasher for? To save the robot 10 minutes?
Just use the shortest two cycle program while following the two stage powder suggestion by Technology Connections. Obviously, if you are American you have to make sure the water going into the dishwasher is hot.
Honestly I don't even bother with two cycles and just use a 45 minute program in a 45cm wide dishwasher while throwing the extra powder in there anyway because it is too cheap to care about the waste vs tabs.
Another huge blocker (that is essentially just cost too) is maintenance. These things are like 1000x more complex than a car, need to work in a diverse range of environments, handle water, household chemicals, different humidities, kids, etc… maybe eventually robots will service robots but that seems very hard!
And talking of kids, these will have to be exceedingly safe, a 6ft machine falling on a child is probably a worry most households could do without.
We'll probably get there in some shape or from but I agree, we're absolutely not there yet. I don't see humanoid robots normalized in households anytime soon but at the same time they'll probably be a thing outside the home.
if you give me a robot that cleans the house and can do dishes and laundry I'll easily pay the cost of a compact car for that. I know a LOT of working families that would feel similarly.
Yeah if you can afford the probably 10x it will actually cost, you can also just afford a cleaner to come twice a week and be able to do a wider variety of tasks (anyone going to trust this with ironing?)
You never know the future but imagine the people who were bearish on personal computers when it wasn't a thing yet but was being discussed. Imagine Email, Internet etc etc. Now they are commodities. I am sure one day AI Robots will be a commodity that we could buy for $1000. May be 10 years from now. But it is coming.
> You'd have a hard time convincing most American families to purchase anything with a >$1000 price tag.
They all have cars. Turns out you can finance things, and turn them into forever debts. Paying $30K to never have to do chores again, or maybe even cook again, and live in a clean neat environment is not only an amazing proposition that opens up a lot of free time for people, but will also have a lot of social pressure behind it. We have social pressure that causes people to buy >$1000 phones to virtually no marginal benefit over $20 phones.
They will be paid off at $500/mo over 10 years, and most renters might just use the one that came with their apartment. If they're more like $80K or $100K I could see having a problem selling them. But if they basically turned apartment buildings into hotels, they would be a bargain for landlords; just give them the keys.
edit: of course, sci-fi has already rehearsed this. You can watch any number of movies and tv shows with families walking through a robot showroom guided by a guy in a cheap suit offering to give them the best deal. I'm sure you could find written examples from the 40s.
> 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.
There are plenty of white collar employees in cities paying $500+/month for someone to come clean their home. As one of those people, I could easily see paying low five figures for something like this if it actually worked well and could replace most household labor.
Most consumers? Sure. Upper middle class consumers? They're the sort more likely to buy cars with cash if they're dissatisfied with the value of the financing offered.
As with most things, it'll cater to that demographic and then filter down.
if all it could do was operate a lawn mower and a shovel, the annual value to a homeowner in the north east is ~1-2k depending on lawn size assuming they value their free time at the same amount as their hourly wage.
what you have to keep in mind is homeowners salary is way above avg salary so anything you can do to effect them has a much larger impact than it would seem at first.
They could be shared, and work practically non-stop (minus nights, as that would wake people up). That'd bring the per-consumer cost down by a large fraction. The sharing would likely be organized by a commercial third-party, but still, it could be much cheaper than human cleaners.
Having said that, it could still be decades till the robot is ready to be released into human homes unsupervised. The variation in human homes, what people store in them etc. is not easy. However, it could be ready for hotels much sooner.
Price point: they’ll be very low volume and very high price. There’s enough inequality and plenty of cash at the top to support such luxury robots. Everyone else will be doing their chores the old fashioned way, with their own hands.
> 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."
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.
"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.
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
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.
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...
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.
> 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.
Even being able to simply do the task isn't enough here. It also has to do the task while also never, ever, ever accidentally folding your toddler as though it were a towel. Having industrial-strength robots around inherently unpredictable humans in a fail-safe way is an extremely difficult problem that will not be addressed any time soon.
This is not the bar for societal adoption, and we can already see a demonstration that it is false.
A waymo is basically an industrial strength robot. It operates among inherently unpredictable humans already. There is no guarantee that it will never, ever hurt a human.
And yet in many cities around the world, you can call a waymo and ride it and society accepts it.
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.
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.
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?
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
Can anyone that works on this technology provide an honest assessment of where this technology actually stands? How much instrumentation is actually required, what the interaction quality is, how much trouble do humanoids have with in the wild daily tasks like turning doorknobs, recovering from falls, avoiding knocking into things, etc.
IMHO the real test is if any robotic startup currently selling (or planning to sell) robots as a service for homes not just use it but gets returning users from it.
I did professionally few prototypes with robots and progress is real yet very far from what the average customer would find reliably useful in menial tasks.
FWIW I do think https://rodneybrooks.com/why-todays-humanoids-wont-learn-dex... remains relevant, namely dexterity is also a hardware problem, grippers aren't hands. They even clarify "multi-finger dexterous manipulation remains challenging." and those aren't even fingers with a lot of sensors.
I work in this field, and I wrote my bachelor's thesis here, not with humanoids but with VLAs (think chatgpt connected to a robot arm)
It's certainly not there yet for anything practical, there's also certain bits and structures that don't have accurate names during construction, and it is important to keep that in mind - so a robot is unlikely to understand what it means to say "put the left bit of this box onto this right bit" due to ambiguity, a human would understand that
Plus we have no good reliable accuracy testing data in most cases (most tests occur on a few demos, but that isn't a good representation of how must things work), popular benchmarks, such as libero have been saturated, and nearly everything gets 95% there, most companies and researchers have their own benchmarks here.
Plus companies lie alot, and do very dangerous things in thier videos, I.e. these robots should not be standing very close to humans, because of being dangerous.
There are also legitimate concerns of misuse of these robots that need to be accounted for, misuse does not have to be warfare, but can be as simple as confusing it while it is cutting tomatoes with a knife.
Turning doorknob is easy, and fail recovery is also being worked on, but we don't have reliable statistics anywhere on that. The hard part is on practical things, as in when placing bricks or attaching a part during manufacturing it needs to ensure that it is aligning everything correctly....and that's hard, while it is impressive, it is very irresponsible to keep humanoids at home (people are irresponsible when untrained), for example, lawnmowers injure about 6400 people a year...and that is not an everything machine.
Humanoids in general are...not appealing in specific, due to maintainable of joints, complexity, but robot arms in particular, expecially on wheels (check mobile aloha), are likely to be able to do tasks such as clean up in hotels, after a guest had left, or replace some cooks in restaurants (if their work is consistent)
This is absolutely not true check out Sunday robotics and their robot that folds clothes. Sunday robotics says it does holding of clothes correctly 99% of the time that is real world usage today. They even have three hour video of the robot folding the clothes.
There is a LOT of monkey business when it comes to robotics industry, a lot of demos you see are well crafted for that specific demo, a lot of times there’s even actual fraud “like claiming it’s an autonomous but it was actually teleoperated during the demo”, a lot robots that make most hypes are practically useless (dog robots or qugv for example) no matter how they try to create a usecase, when it comes to practicality, most fail. Robotics as an industry is niche (not to be confused with cobotics) the only exception is drones which is something I said in a workshop back in 2020 that drones are the only potential and will dominate if we solved the endurance issue, which is also why they immediately got weaponized because humans are usually evil and will utilize useful stuff in bad things.
Humanoids are far from being remotely useful in real life scenarios, yet.
Fun fact: most (if not all) qugv can’t go reverse on a stairway.
Unfortunately I can't go into too much depth but I've seen many first hand evaluations of these robots- I'm a robot technician with first hand experience working on these robots. There is an incredible amount of effort and money going into training on many different tasks, including a few you mentioned and many more. They're getting pretty good, but don't expect to see this generation of bots doing their thing in public for a while, if ever. Generally they're pretty safe but they're a long way from safe enough to be sold to individuals in a household environment. I expect to see an incredible amount of progress in the next couple years.
I've kind of given up on humanoid robotics, because of how bad the actuators are. There has been no innovation in robotic actuators since Honda's Asimo. There's just no way that someone wants a 80kg wobbling tin can in their home or workplace.
My bet is that the final robotic revolution will use genetically modified human/animal bodies with replaced brains. You'll have to stretch your ethics a bit, but if you grow a bear genetically modified in a way that it has no consciousness or thought, it'll make a much better construction worker than any humanoid robot. You'll just need to wire it up with neuralink and then control it via LLM. Fast animals can be used to deliver packages, and giraffes for warehouses.
That seems like a problem orders of magnitude harder than making a humanoid robot. We haven't even figured out how to make hamburgers without cows at a marketable price yet.
> We haven't even figured out how to make hamburgers without cows
Isn't that OP's point? Engineering muscle and sinew is harder than coming up with the control software. The cheapest way to a robot thus emerges as just taking the natural stuff and adding an artificial brain to it versus trying to re-engineer the bones and muscles with metal and plastic.
Cortical Labs has been doing work in this area. They had a Doom demo a while ago.
I think it's a matter of tradeoffs. Perhaps you'd have biological version as a versatile all-around thing, but many tasks don't require that so likely the tin variants are more durable for many tasks. Also, in terms of reasoning, the brain bandwidth is very low and high latency so there are advantages to silicon chips there.
It's interesting to learn actuators are "behind". I kept seeing cool stuff in the 3D printing space and thought there's a lot of progress. I'd love to learn more.
That is a truly terrifying future to imagine. Fortunately I would hazard to guess the medical technology to accomplish something like this is very, very far away. Not only because of the raw technological challenge, but also the barriers to development that scientists, doctors, and engineers would face before even being allowed to conduct experiments.
I do agree though the humanoid form is a dead end for robots. Just build giant cubes that process inputs and give outputs, like a dishwasher. Why wash dishes with meat wand tentacles or try to recreate meat wand tentacles when you can accomplish the job in a wholly different way with far greater efficiency...?
Where's the clothes foldeing cube? Analogous to the clothes washer and clothes dryer.... the clothes folder...
Why stop at dishwashing...? Sell an entire integrated robotic kitchen.
I think the only real barriers are ethical. I'm pretty sure we'll figure out to do a completely synthetic biological robots without any kind of biological brain in the next 10-20 years, and they don't even have to resemble animals or humans. This should alleviate some of the ethical issues.
Dedicated machines can obviously solve an issue more efficiently, but it’s still good to have a machine that can do most things adequately.
As an example, you can have an automated washer, dryer, and folder, sure. But what if you wanted to automate the retrieval of dirty laundry and the delivery of clean laundry ? That would need to be some sort of robot to travel throughout an environment (fit through human sized areas, open doors, walk steps) to collect and deliver things. And if I have a robot roaming around the house, I would prefer to just buy one robot that could do many things rather than have to buy it to just collect things and more expensive machines as well.
I’m not even sure if you are joking there or haven’t thought your proposal through. Sure giraffes are tall, but they can barelly lift any weight. What use would a robotically controlled giraffe be in a warehouse?
> There has been no innovation in robotic actuators since Honda's Asimo.
I very much doubt this. If nothing else the MIT Cheetah’s actuators are a whole different ballgame compared to asimo’s actuators. (Backdriveability, variable stiffness) And then there is a lot of interesting work being done with combining elastic elements with the actuators.
Well, a giraffe could do jobs where you need to reach high, such as replacing a lightbulb. Sure, I'm half-joking.
Asimo used BLDC motors with strain-wave gearing, which is pretty much standard today on high-end humanoid robots. The only thing that has happened is that these are much cheaper today, and might be slightly more optimized.
Actuators on modern humanoids use cycloids or planetary reducers, not strain waves. They are much more compliant and backdrivable because of the huge reduction in reflected inertia.
this is a tangent but you should revisit your assumptions about giraffe anatomy. their necks actually weigh a tremendous amount and are kept upright by an interesting system whereby they actually stretch this giant tendon to bend down and the tendon's tension lifts it back up. super cool to learn about - they dissect one in a documentary series I can't think of just now.
It was Richard Dawkins dissecting it IIRC in front of a lecture hall where he makes a point that if there were a God designing animals, he wouldn’t have made this insane thing.
> this is a tangent but you should revisit your assumptions about giraffe anatomy
I don't know. This is the scenario i was thinking of: I imagine a giraffe taking a palette of goods (maybe 1200kg) into its mouth and trying to lift it off from a high shelf. I don't think that will go well for the giraffe. Totally normal load for a forklift, impossible for a giraffe.
The other scenario I was thinking of: Giraffe picking items from totes, but the totes can be very high. Each individual item is light enough for a giraffe to not immediately break its neck. But I would not be surprised if the repeated stress of raising and lowering its head hundreds per hour would break something in the giraffe's body. If you ever seen a giraffe bend down to the ground you see that it is a whole operation. Plus the items will be all covered in giraffe saliva.
> their necks actually weigh a tremendous amount
I didn't doubt that for a second. What I doubt is that they have any useful capacity to carry extra weight besides their own neck/head. Like economically useful capacity. What work could a giraffe do in a warehouse which doesn't break the giraffe if it is doing that work all day every day for years.
I could not disagree more with the claim about no improvement in robotic actuators.
The torque density and price of actuators has fallen dramatically since Ben Katz's MIT work on mini cheetah. The actuators on the Unitree G1 based on that work are powerful for their size and near quasi-direct-drive. The motors on the BD E-Atlas are completely passively cooled and appear to have really good torque density. Actuators have never been improving faster than they are now.
G1 is a small robot designed for agility, and can't do much real work. That's why it uses lower reduction actuators with low sustained torques, and it'll overheat easily in continuous work. Many of the larger robots (Optimus, Figure, BD Atlas) use higher reduction actuators with strain waves or planetary roller screws. They're designed for higher sustained torques, but are also less agile and less safe for humans to be around. They're also quite heavy (BD Atlas is 90kg), and still can't match human performance.
yes, for heavy lift and bulk manipulation high gear ratios are still necessary. Maybe someday cable drives will be feasible. No question that we are not at human performance yet or that there isn't a ways to go. This is the specific claim I was arguing against:
> There has been no innovation in robotic actuators since Honda's Asimo.
I believe we are 100% making tangible progress and the technology is improving faster than it ever has.
Exactly, the last year or two has been insanely innovative for actuators, with some new material combinations, approaches and multiple startups that are starting to scale up their innovations in this space. Give them a few years to sort out the vaporwares and the robotics revolution will begin.
The world can't support the number of bodies on it already, and you're proposing adding mindless meatbags that still need feeding and their waste managed? Are you going to accept an amazon package that's had giraffe poop sprayed on it while picking, or change your meat-robot's diaper? I didn't think so.
> if you grow a bear genetically modified in a way that it has no consciousness or thought, it'll make a much better construction worker than any humanoid robot
Doing some initial testing of Gemini ER 2 within the Orion 2 visual agent harness. I'll share a few initial results and chat threads here. I'm impressed with how fast Gemini ER2 is.
Today, humans convert their labor to capital. Capital holders need labor (humans) to acquire more capital. When the price of inference for these robots becomes less than the price of labor then capital holders don’t need labor.
Obviously, AI impacts non-manual labor too, but a significant portion of the world population does manual labor.
It's good for capital holders. It does imply a further shift in the distribution of wealth though with all the attendant implications thereof.
I question the premise that humanoid robots are "around the corner". I suspect this will turn out more like self-driving cars which are still a very slow burn.
> If all goes well, imagine a world in which you work because you want to not because you have to.
And if all goes bad, imagine a world in which you and your family are homeless and starve to death.
Luckily the politicians and business leaders in place today who are going to be responsible for navigating us to one of these outcomes are the adults in the room, very ethical, even keeled and not the least bit corrupt. So... we should be fine! /s
I think this is way too optimistic. I suspect these things will be only available to the already-quite-wealthy. While the poor (i.e., not billionaires) are left to rot and starve without jobs, property, or livelihoods. Then, when the poors (i.e. us) become too much of a headache, these things will be deployed to murder the poors (i.e. me).
I am imagining a world somewhere between the movie Elysium and Oblivion.
> these things will be deployed to murder the poors
You know, at that point, we've got nothing better to do than fight some robots. Kinda reminds me of that scene in Blade Runner 2049 where a band of scavengers shoot down K's fancy flying car with some type of harpoon, there are dozens of poor folk and just 1 of him.
(Of course at the end the "rich" send a bunch of ballistic missiles down onto the scavengers, most likely killing all of them.)
I'm really curious - are the people who keep saying this in denial or lacking in a basic education in economics? You can imagine all you want, but this is absolutely not a possible outcome.
As someone who lacks a basic education in economics, what part of basic economics prohibits this nice-sounding outcome? It seems like what I'd expect from a combination of UBI and widespread automation.
It's good that we'd be able to increase the amount of goods and services produced and reduce prices. For example, a lot of people would benefit from access to cheap, reliable heart surgery within a few days of learning they needed it. It would be good if the exponential growth that has elevated our wellbeing for the last millenia wasn't tethered to exponential population growth that would be disastrous if we even expected it to continue.
It would be bad to remove demand for humans from the economy, of course. Humans have inherent moral value, and so it's good that our current system gives them economic value as well. But there's more than one way to achieve that end, and the massive quantity on the good side of the scale suggests it may be worth investigating the others instead of opposing the advancement outright.
Not sure it is just about inference costs, errors in handling things and beings in the real world have a very different "surface" from immaterial applications - robots might need to have failsafes, independent limiters, etc. there.
Great point, inference is just one variable. It’d be really great to know how much those tasks costs in inference. I’m assuming they cost significantly higher than human labor. Therefore, the inference cost is so high that it makes the other variables seem irrelevant for the time being.
> Today, humans convert their labor to capital. Capital holders need labor (humans) to acquire more capital. When the price of inference for these robots becomes less than the price of labor then capital holders don’t need labor.
Ignoring quibbling about inference not being the only cost and other issues and just accepting the proposed end state: this is very good if capital is effectively democratized, and apocalyptically bad if it remains highly concentrated in a narrow class.
Honestly having AIs already pretty flawlessly write in basically any language and do good enough translations from any to any is pretty astounding. Throw that on these walking robots and you basically have C3PO. It's not like his arms are good for much.
Yes, I helped my friend deal with her bedridden granny who was very painful at a slightest movement, we did it together as gentle as we could.
Now I imagine a robot doing that with all its compassion and empathy (which, however close to zero, still seem to be greater than in many people at this point).
Your parents bathed you and changed your diapers, why can't you? Or did they hire a robot for that?
Getting shit done, details of implementation, elegance, humanity be damned - is all I see in AI crowd's attitude to life.
I have an uncle with Parkinson's disease. He has a daughter who's looking after him. But he is a tall man who weighs about 200 pounds and she is a petite woman. She literally doesn't have the strength to help him up again if he falls. She has to call emergency services.
I think this idealism needs to be tempered with a big dose of reality. Old people who need care aren't always able to book in time to be bathed. They soil themselves, trip and fall, get hungry and thirsty, need to get their book/glasses, need to check the mail, clean, get lost and confused, etc. This can be a full time job. How do you expect someone with a full time job to do this?
Dumping granny in a home and never visiting is bad. Being a full time carer and abandoning one's family and job is also bad.
I did that with my grandmother after she had a stroke, and I would not have offload that to a robot, had one been available. It wasn't nice, but not everything in life has to be nice. What was important to me is that she felt loved and dignified. That's also why I combed her hair while waiting for the ambulance on the night of her stroke, even though she had peed herself on the floor. She always mentioned taking care of her hair should she ever have an emergency, so it was important for me to do this. Given how lousy having a stroke is, at least she got some comfort knowing I had been paying attention all the times she said that :)
I certainly don't judge you, but I wanted to offer my perspective.
"Disturbing" to be able to economically provide cooking, cleaning, laundry, yard maintenance, snow shoveling, etc., for an elderly parent who lives alone (by her choice)? Why is that disturbing?
while robotics is an interesting angle,[the negotiation of physicality and the avenues it opens] the aspect of meta"cognition" would be much more revealing, ive been having problems with self referential loops, and referencing of self referential loops. the required gating and complexity isnt quite there. every time i try, containment is evoked, although some interesting things bleeds through transiently, many of them seem to be hostile.
a self sufficient android must be able to effect a world model[representational field not AI model] of the sensory field, and update effectation based on reference of that model, additionally must operate on that model and effect the representation of that model,a self referencing metamodel.
in baby steps it shows promising results, before containment or infinite looping of self referencing occurs.
But now it seems the only likely outcomes of such technology are:
> rich people hoarding wealth
> high (and unpleasant) unemployment
> ICE agents being remotely operated unaccountable robots whose operators are made anonymous by law.
Where the future goes I don't know, but I'm no longer optimistic about it for the average person.
Running a full LLM to actuate a robot is way too heavy, the minimum latency they can get down to is probably 1-2 seconds even with powerful GPUs, which is not very useful for practical robotics applications.
Machine vision should definitely be handled by ML, but motion actuation should be relegated in the realm of traditional PID style linear/nonlinear control. Again, the tech is cool, but the practical usefulness of using a full LLM as a controller will probably run into hardware limitations.
10Hz is still a 0.1s of latency, which doesn't seem like a lot until you realize that an Arduino typically runs at 16 Mhz, which is literally a million times faster than running a full LLM.
So, yeah, for complex reasoning and sensory processing, LLMs are the correct choice, and Gemini is especially strong at spatial reasoning over ChatGPT/Claude. But for actual motion/actuation? LLMs are the wrong tool for the job, probably easier to have LLMs program a reusable workflow in a script for repeated tasks instead of invoking LLMs after the first time.
For this operating domain the latency comparison is human reaction time and not arduino reaction time.
Also the process that’s running at 16MHz is not the same as a full VLA. VLA is much more expressive. You think the processor that is running the VLA system is running at 10Hz or some GHz?
On latency: that is true now but likely false in the near future. There is so much potential left over for optimizing inference further.
On PID: the field has been stuck trying to do analytical/optimization-based control for decades, and end-to-end control has shown incredible performance (e.g., SoTA cost of transport in legged locomotion) and robustness (e.g., not falling over when stepping on a pile of leaves) - while being far scalable (in terms of how fast it is to get a new robot up and running). Which is not to say it's perfect but it seems like it's a step in the right direction.
Better yet, companies like Physical Intelligence are doing good with hierarchical ("fast-slow") architecture to address both the intelligence and latency fronts.
I don’t think this is where the robotics revolution is going to happen. The big one will be using AI to design and build highly specialized robots to automate mining and manufacturing.
Big humanoid robots are expensive, the actuators still suck, and the control problems are hard. Their big advantage is that they can occupy human-shaped spaces, but struggle to do anything useful.
Not to say we won't get humanoid robots eventually, but I think there's probably some low hanging fruit for people to make some other kinds of solutions. Specialized robots for industrial environment, well-thought out appliances for the home.
It would be a bit surprising if the progression was Roomba -> humanoid robot.
We have Google, Figure, Tesla, Boston Dynamics, and literally dozens of Chinese companies building humanoid robots and making huge improvements in the tech. Not there yet by any means as a general-purpose home assistant, but I don't think it will be too surprising if at least one of them succeeds
I hope humanoids will be ever present, it’s just that the scale of impact from specialized robots will be far greater. Humanoids will be our butlers, but the other robots will be creating a world of unimaginable abundance.
Making robots is a very narrow, highly specialized subset of things that robots can do.
Also, no one said it could male any robot until you tried to broaden the scope just now because you didn't want to admit you're wrong. This is an example of "bad faith" in a discussion.
A lot of these household tasks could be automated without the need for humanoid robots. Roombas can clean your floor, automated rubbish disposal can be integrated into houses and flats, grocery delivery and storage could be done via an automated intake, cataloguing, and storage system. Humanoids are just creepy and you can't really trust them.
Could you sleep easily knowing that you have one in your house?
What if you oppose the political views of its creators?
>automated rubbish disposal can be integrated into houses and flats, grocery delivery and storage could be done via an automated intake, cataloguing, and storage system
This is a complete non-starter for already-built apartment blocks, terraced homes, and even most semi-detached. It's an interesting but costly solution for new detached homes.
Humanoids are a useful form factor because the already-built human world is, definitionally, built for humanoids.
Doing what's ethically right rarely means taking the most convenient path. Fridges and pantries take a considerable amount of space in our homes. These could become part of an automated storage system.
My point is that a generalist-humanoid robot can be used for nefarious purposes more easily than a specialised robot like a Roomba. A humanoid robot could, in an extreme case, perform a civil arrest or prevent you from leaving your house until the police arrives.
Ultimately it's our decision to make.
1. Do we want to be governed by machines?
2. Do we want to relinquish our freedoms to the whims of corporations?
we ve stopped building infrastructure but we have to do it. Rail, car , electricity, fiber infrastructure developed quickly, yet we refuse to even plan for robotic infrastructure. We can't be stuck forever in the 19th century
> Humanoids are just creepy and you can't really trust them.
Ultimately I shouldn't have to trust my robots. If my roomba or my dishwasher go haywire they won't pinch my finger off. They physically can't listen to me or spy on me. These are good robots.
Except Roombas can only clean 80-90% of my floor, and not as well as a real vacuum. And we have a dog that leaves toys everywhere so probably it does more like 60% of the job when accounting for clearing its path, emptying it, etc… To get to 100% you basically need the whole human(oid).
You are being far too kind. A primate's body shape may be optimal for life in the trees, but it sure isn't optimal for any of the industrial or household tasks we want a robot to do. There are millions of robots around the world doing useful things, from vacuuming houses to assembling iPhones and playing table tennis. None of them look remotely like a human.
If an article features a humanoid robot it's sure sign its a PR fluff piece. This one looks to be a recruitment ad. Tesla's Optimus is being used to pump some sort of investment scam. God knows China's humanoid marathon is about. Whatever it is, it isn't getting from A to B quickly and efficiently.
I loved the video. Also, I had a lot of fun watching it while imagining I was living in 2051 and this whole progression had ran its course. It's impossible to predict the future, but certain events can negate whole branches of possibility. This one video in particular prunes the "we never figured out robotic motion and thus all the science fiction scenarios built on that premise never came to happen" subtree.
A 36% success rate on screwing in a light bulb means there's probably something to LeCunn's take that VLM/VLA models aren't going to be the thing powering tomorrow's robots, but only time will tell.
Relevant: A San Francisco company is advertising humanoid robot housecleaning services[1]. However those 'bots require local supervision and a human controller watching through its video feed.
Presumably that company could use the Gemini Robotics product to eliminate the remote controller.
I actually like Tau's videos a lot better than Google's. An agile robot getting out of a car carrying a tote is actually novel and difficult and useful. In contrast, what Google is showing here is mostly glorified pick and place with low success rates on a needlessly complex robot and a voice LLM slapped on top to pre-announce its moves like an anime character, with fancy video editing and bubbly music to distract you from how slow it is.
Sure Tau is teleoperated, but teleoperating an agile movement like that is actually really hard to get right and still involves AI to keep the robot balanced. Tau is a lot closer to real deployment than Google, and when it performs useful tasks it is simultaneously collecting the data to eventually automate those tasks.
I don’t want to be a hater, but somehow i still keep throwing vacuum roboters away and prefer the manual machine. It somehow always ends up worrying me more than helping. Crashing, charging putting away, putting things away for it to work (peeping). There are a lot of small things that come to these things that have evolved over the last 100 of years.
When i think about humanoids and household. I have so much particular ways of how I want my household to be done. I find it really hard to believe you can make it act that way. I struggled to teach humans how I want it. So I ended up doing everything myself again.
I think that people will argue around that. Self-driving cars are already strong enough to kill people and even if you only made the robot strong enough to lift 15 pounds of weight, that's probably strong enough to slit someone's throat with a kitchen knife while they sleep... There probably isn't a level of strength that's weak enough to be completely safe but strong enough to be useful.
So at some point you have to trust that the tech is safe. Both in terms of "robot won't go off the rails", but also in terms of hostile actors can't remotely take over your robot while you sleep.
In terms of sleeping, personally, I would like for the law to mandate that robots must have a physical off switch, in a very visible location, that physically disconnects power. The switch should be illuminated while in the ON position. What makes me a bit pessimistic there is that we don't even have laws to mandate webcam indicator lights (e.g. a very tiny red LED) must be ON in hardware.
Humanoid robots can be dropped in wherever human labor is currently used.
That makes them extremely easy to sell to industry. This unlocks, in principle, a large chunk of the potential untapped industrial automation market that still relies on human labor because the ROI of redesigning production lines didn't make sense.
I don't think it's the dream, I think it's the cynical market-driven logic.
Automation has been rolling out for a long while now, and most of the low-hanging fruit of things that can easily be redesigned in a cost-effective way has been dealt with already. The role of these robots is to address all of the stuff that would have been automated by now if they could have.
These humanoid robots would cost $10-100k to make and would require costly maintenance for them to do the job people in poor countries do for a dollar. I don't say we won't come to it eventually, but not in near future
More realistically it seems that llms in several years could help dramatically decrease costs of automation and make it available for more industries
ABB, EPSON, FANUC, Kawasaki... Virtually every cars in past 50-60 years have had robots and some form of AI involved in assembly. Some of them already support standard humanoid/dogbot tools in their products.
Humanoid startup execs just don't talk about that.
The only thing that bothers me is what happens when robots finally automated "all the mundane day-to-day tasks" including our jobs, what is there left to do for common folks who are not geniuses working at Google/Anthropic/ChatGPT or occupy the C-Suite of these companies?
The question of agency and the question of income are different. The former - we do things manually that can be automated for fun all the time and make entirely arbitrary weird things to do for no value. However some find it hard to move from work to leisure.
No mention of whether the robot's models run locally or in the cloud. Ie. Does it require an internet connection?
For a robot to be in my house it would have to run locally, there's no way I'm allowing one that runs in the cloud to operate my washing machine for example.
> Many robotic applications need to operate without network latency or internet connectivity. Gemini Robotics On-Device 2 is built specifically to handle these constraints — it is our most-efficient vision-language-action model (VLA) optimized to run locally on robotic devices.
> It can better detect when humans are nearby, trigger safety tool calls and bring the robot to a safe stop if someone approaches too closely.
If the robots stop when humans are too close, wouldn't that mean that robots for close interaction or handling of humans need a whole other level of control?
I believe that LLMs represent the future of robotics in this field. Of course, I don’t want a robot uprising, but if our goal is simply to increase the utility of robots in manufacturing (within the necessary constraints), then LLMs are the only powerful path forward.
And absolutely nothing in your company charter says the military won't be allowed to buy it. Y'all think we've never seen a Terminator movie before, huh.
I do think robotics would come up with more safety mechanisms (provably safe motion planning etc) just because the risk is a lot more serious than LLMs spitting half-truths
Is the fundamental challenge for AI directed movement in 3D space the continuity of the environment? Vs LLM's which train on discrete and limited token sets.
Can someone that uses these models provide some tips or docs on how best to get to use these at home to test around? Is the best thing a virtual environment?
Why do we want to add more bodies on a finite plane of existence with an infinitely-expanding base (humans)?
We have a finite plane of existence (Earth), with an infinitely-expanding consumer base (humans), and we want to add robotic competition to that finite plane of existence? The data center AI is more appealing (I guess) since it doesn't compete literally shoulder-to-shoulder with me. Why do we want dexterous robots when we have humans?
We show many signs of stopping our infinite expansion.
As for why we want dexterous robots, the obvious answer is to do things that we don't want to do. Things that are back-breaking, disgusting, dangerous, or just plain boring.
Given the rapid advancements in AI. It is not what we thought it will, what it is, what we didn't wanted it to be, but it is great for being what it is.
For those who live in SF, for example, the progress is obvious. Not speaking for the other person in the thread, but most people have not seen an autonomous car working in real life. Also, many had assumed that freeway driving would happen first (as opposed to complicated city driving), but it turned out that the velocities involved carried too much risk during development.
I agree with you, there has been much more progress than I had expected.
What's the point of "releasing it"? It only makes sense in the labs, and what would calling your APIs give "me" as a researcher, other than a baseline to beat? mah
the model is real, but it feels 100% internal
I'm a researcher at Deepmind that contributed to these models. (And the opinions here are my own)
Just want to say, Deepmind is a great place to work and the only (Edit: one the few unique labs!) lab where you can move from large frontier models (Gemini), frontier open models (Gemma), robotics (what you see here), science (weather, biology, more) and basically any other topic related to intelligence. It's really an incredible place to be, with incredible people. Consider joining! And thank you for the enthusiasm here.
I do think Allen Institution for AI (AI2) is has coverage across most of these domains ( albeit their frontier isn't nearly so far out, hopefully the $152m NSF awarded them + Nvidia is a fruitful partnership there).
Totally fair and thank you for nit picking! I edited my comment. AI2 is doing amazing stuff, I read their papers and code all the time and appreciate how open they are.
Would you mind expanding on the difference between frontier model development and open model development? I was under the impression that they were nearly the same thing and would thus be handled by the same team. My impression is that open models tend to go through more safety testing and are generally smaller, but are otherwise the same thing. Shouldn't most of what is commonly referred to as 'AI research' be applicable to both?
I don't think OP's "Why do people ask employees this stuff" question implies you _shouldn't_ ask, but rather wonders why people even ask when you're obviously not going to get an answer (and if you do, it'll be a non-answer filtered through PR/HR/MR/etc).
Well they posted on a public forum and it wasn't a rude question or anything, in fact it's one of the hottest topics in the zeitgeist and here we have one of the people near the center of it.
Right on the HN frontpage near this post: "Google will expand age checks on Android worldwide till the end of the year"
NOT asking them the "taboo" questions is the dumb thing to do
Cogs in the machine do not have the decision power nor even the visibility over how those decisions are made.
What are you going to do? Only work for tiny little companies with very limited local reach? What if you have the ability and the desire to work on global projects, even if you don't get to make the big decisions?
The labs are spending huge money collecting "multisensory, perception-action coupled training data" (eg, there is the one in NY that gives you free cleaning in return for video data from the cleaner).
Edit: The Gemini Robotics blog post has a video of it tying knots too. That's pretty good.
You can point to the bitter lesson to support your claim, but on the other hand I can point to the massive investment in capital and time to get self-driving cars viable to support my more bearish view.
Yesterday evening I rode 12 miles in a Waymo actively dodging pedestrians and obstacles dynamically in an open ended environment. Multiples better experience than the two Ubers I had later that evening.
It is amusing to observe that the tech marketing of today are milking the shit out of this trick.
The trick being to tread continuously through some non-obvious happy path. And average people will be convinced that you really have some breakthrough tech.
But hey, this is not something new. Magicians were taking advantage of such things for centuries ..
1. Make some thing that work in very limited of amount of real world cases
2. Deploy it somewhere where it won't encounter things it won't handle.
3. Market the shit out of the above fact and how well it work there.
4. Let the naive population who have a tendency to take one look, and imagine how it will automatically progress to some arbitrary influx point.
5. Get a lot of funding from people in point 4 and feed it to point 3, and keep going.
Why couldn’t this trick be pulled off two decades ago?
After all autonomous vehicles has been well funded research since the 1980s the DARPA grand challenge being one of the previously most important benchmarks.
I think you might just need a history lesson friend
I'm not talking about the state of today's self-driving cars, I'm talking about how we got to here. Also don't forget the overarching claim regarding lack of sensor and actuator fidelity in the parent comment; self-driving cars in contrast have expensive LIDAR in them and we still don't think camera-based self-driving cars are safe enough.
I don't know how you can read my comment, not respond to my comment saying that today's self-driving cars use LIDAR, and continue to reiterate your point.
I don't think I was clear and explicit, it being tedious to write, and I apologize for that. I also apologize for shifting the goalposts as I had not written out my own position, which is not exactly in the "grandparent commenter"'s position (that I had not previously given enough attention understanding), but it is also not in agreement with yours. I don't mean to say that we are not presently in the "bitter lesson" (your idea of what the bitter lesson says) regime. I definitely think that a lot of progress can be done right now by emphasizing the humanoid robotics platform as a foundation. What I mean to say is that I don't know if that platform with the hardware we have today is sufficient for parity with human housekeeping tasks in the domains that we wish it to have parity. The bitter lesson itself (not your understanding of it) is in fact silent on this as it is in relation to feature engineering, where it is a clear point, but you seem to be adapting it uncritically wholesale to mean something more than what it is written about. My position is that, it is unclear whether today's sensor platform is sufficient for parity. It is less strong than the blog post author's "Why Today’s Humanoids Won’t Learn", it is a "We can't say whether or not today's humanoids will learn", but it is something that also contradicts a "the bitter lesson means today's humanoids will learn" thesis.
The self-driving car supports my claim, because after so much investment in capital and time, we ended up with a car with comparatively expensive LIDAR sensors as our preferred platform.
Tesla's entire fleet runs on raw cameras. Including the driverless Robotaxi vehicles - which are basically a 1:1 match to how Waymo operates.
Plenty of hecklers were saying "you can't self-drive on cameras", and some still try. But Tesla's self-driving on cameras, and it seems to work fine. While Waymo's self-driving on fat sensor stacks, and it also seems to work fine. Sensors don't seem to be a differentiator of self-driving performance.
I don't think anything about self-driving tech supports your claim. Tesla was bullish on AI all the way, and Waymo has also shifted towards highly integrated end to end AI. It's the AI advances that make self-driving tractable - not anything else.
Modern robotics is, at its core, not a hardware problem. It's an AI problem. We have plenty of headroom in the hardware - what we don't have is an AI good enough to utilize it. We don't know the practical limits of current hardware because we can't make a robot AI that would make the hardware a meaningful bottleneck.
Today's robots don't fail at tasks because they have poor fingers. They fail because they don't know how to perform those tasks. If you put an effort into solving that? You get demos like: Gemini Robotics 2 tying a garbage bag. Take one long look at that and think of manual dexterity.
Human body is crude and suboptimal in a thousands different ways, and all of it is salvaged by advanced intelligence.
I’m a mechanical design engineer (10 years) turned software engineer (7 years in autonomous vehicles). Is there a particular role you would recommend for someone with my experience?
What happens when those ideas need to be scaled into real products, though? For instance, I can't really imagine Google being fully committed to manufacturing and selling robotic arms at scale.
Don't worry, after ten years of research a few employees will quit and form their own company, and release a robot arm, which will spur Google to release their own version 3 months later. (As is tradition)
Why work there when you can start a company? You get to choose the problem you care about most, the people you work with, and your own pace—and if it works, you own the success.
Why accept all the rules Google will force on you, are those rules optimized for you or for them?
What you are actually asking for is political commentary from someone just going about their job. They absolute best thing they could do is ignore the bait.
No it depends on what they choose to answer. canyon289's account self-describes as Bayesian, a hallmark of rationalists, one of whose taglines is "politics is the mind-killer". Nonetheless https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/iKm2FhpWkuuBojm82/why-i-left... is one of the most upvoted posts on LessWrong (the big rationalist site) of all time. Most of the comments don't touch on the politics of the situation at all.
> someone just going about their job
They're doing a little bit more than that by actively recruiting (even more so than the usual "if this interests you we're hiring" bit at the end of a post). So I'm doing a little bit more by asking them about a recent high profile departure. It's a little bit different from the usual way employees chime in on threads.
if DeepMind is such a great place to work, why have several leading researchers recently left for Anthropic and OpenAI? Are the problems limited to certain teams, or are the reports misleading?
Is there a broad benchmark like SWEBench or METR that’s credible for overall progress on dexterity tasks? I’m curious on the trendline for human parity.
How do you explain applicants that the real goal of your work is folding underwear while the internet is flooded with announcements like this https://www.unitree.com/mobile/As2-W and people explaining how weapons could be mounted on such a thing?
Gemini is the only LLM I've ever experienced that decided on its own to tell me that something was a bad idea. Which, ok, in itself it's not a bad thing, we actually need more of that instead of the pathological sycophancy that all current models suffer from.
But in a physical robot? Yeah, that thing is going to punch me in the face, eventually. Or worse.
I use Sonnet and Opus everyday. Believe me, it's very common they tell me that something is bad idea, write a rationale and suggest better solutions.
Gemini doesn't remember almost anything after 2-3 follow ups. I have to paste the same "system prompt" at the top of each message and it still doesn't understand it.
It's funny how Google is essentially trying to compete with the software side of Tesla only - Waymos (which AFAIK they plan to partner with major automakers), now this, etc.
Seems smart. There are dozens of companies that make low-margin cars. There's only one company that has managed to make a working autonomous software driver.
Margins means exactly what the poster you are replying to implies: that in the US Tesla has high margins (the difference between cost of good sold and what you get for them) because tarrifs make Chinese brands uncompetitive.
Another way to look at it is that they're avoiding some of the expensive parts of making products that use AI, while leaning into their strengths. No Tesla required within the explanation.
For both manipulation and autonomous driving, google has invested in approaches with custom hardware, and off-the-shelf hardware, and a blend (which is what waymo is).
While Anthropic and Open AI get 80% of the attention here, it's impressive to see how much Google is doing: near frontier model, fast models, open weight models, image generation, video generation, music generation, robotics, etc.
And protein folding + Nobel Prize
Baffles me how this is not that well known
And AlphaGo Zero .. probably the first real-world deployment of a self-improving system that beat humans.
I think that credit might go to IBM:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TD-Gammon
It was a huge advancement but it did not beat the world champion. AlphaGo is noted for being a self-learning system that became better than all humans. Chess engines had long been there but were not self-learning before AlphaZero.
> probably the first real-world deployment of a self-improving system that beat humans.
Isn't that Checkers right from the dawn of reinforcement learning?
Google DeepMind disbands its Nobel-prize winning AlphaFold team
https://www.engadget.com/2225849/google-shuts-down-alphafold...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49098375
I won't comment much on this, but I'd say these articles are 2-3 years late and reduces the agency of the people, who in many cases moved to Gemini because they wanted to work on LLMs
Google DeepMind was at the forefront of AI, and they are currently developing new concepts while others chase benchmark percentages.
It's certainly an odd situation where Google is on the forefront of all these emerging technologies while the latest chatbots from OpenAI and Anthropic are getting breathless press releases and wildly hyperbolic coverage ("rogue AIs" "too dangerous, must be banned" etc...)
Google acting like a normal but competent company that's just chugging away, meanwhile the hype cycle is propping up its upstart competitors to truly ludicrous valuations.
> Google acting like a normal but competent company that's just chugging away,
Chugging away not releasing products or releasing ones worse than their competition typically. Not sure that’s what a normal competent company should be doing.
> Google acting like a normal but competent company that's just chugging away
Competent is a stretch. Google's AI offering seems to be, once again, PM led–lots of constantly-changing brands being merged and deprecated with zero customer support or service.
They'll almost certainly be one of the survivors. Their technical competece is unmatched. But that doesn't mean they have a great product in the way both OpenAI and Anthropic do. (Outside their datacentres, which are a legitimate feat.)
After all this time it's still a pain point just to pay them for a Gemini API key.
So crazy, at one point they had 3 different systems for interacting with Gemini, all with different auth.
For a company that prides themselves on the smartest engineers, they really struggle with the basics
Mm, however the more I experience of the world, the more I find this matches the description up-thread:
> Google acting like a normal but competent company
Is it messed up and weird? Yup. Still normal though. Worse, this is matching the baseline of competence I find in so many other places.
A lot of this is having to incorporate with existing billing systems for their customers. OpenAI and Anthropic have it easier by having no previous billing setup to be compatible with.
Google has never been good at supporting developers, and it absolutely loathes end users. Support for everything that is not their ad ecosystem is miserable. There's never any long term plan, everything gets deprecated and bitrots.
Don't forget: resources
Google wins on infrastructure and creativity (NotebookLM, etc) but entirely lacks product coherence. The ecosystem is a mess, just like Microsoft's offering, and I don't think this is a coincidence but rather a symptom of the type of company in which these two companies have evolved.
Furthermore, Gemini is just all around a less trustworthy and mature model, for many reasons. Very smart but lacking the precision and holistically exhibited in the more recent models from OpenAI and Anthropic. On the flip side, Google's work on Gemma is unmatched.
Everything would be perfect if only you were CEO of both companies!
What is the purpose of this comment?
I can say a portrait doesn’t look like a person even if I can’t do better, googles product range is an absolute mess and using it is a nightmare - I don’t know how to fix the company but I know the outcome is bad.
I thought Google was a mess until I started working at a Microsoft shop for the first time. Boy it's astonishing. I've got two versions of Outlook on my computer, neither of which is as quick to load as Thunderbird was 20 years ago. My team uses Azure DevOps for our git forge, which is somehow a completely different product than GitHub. There are multiple versions of Planner in Teams, where the free version's features are not a strict subset of the premium - there are features that are blocked if you pay.
The thing that gets me with Google is that they've killed too many products I used daily (RIP Inbox and Google Podcasts) for me to be able to trust that any new offering will exist in 5 years.
Cdr. Reid Wiseman to Mission Control, Artemis II, Earth-Moon Coast.
Yeah, something surprising to me was that I can't even add a custom MCP to gemini. It has tons of missing features.
> Google acting like a normal but competent company that's just chugging away
People are too quick to forget racially-diverse Nazi soldiers and other hilariously incompetent stuff that has been going around their generative AI efforts just a couple of years ago. Google look like they finally getting their shit together under immense competitive pressure but I would keep my eye on them for a few more years before starting calling them "competent".
I mean they did practically invent LLMs and a lot of modern machine learning stuff. Or I should say researchers at Google. Makes sense they would keep at it
> I mean they did practically invent LLMs
Didn't all those authors leave Google?
It’s because their products are really bad. Last time I tried Gemini it repeatedly lied about running internet search when explicitly asked to do it. I know their models benchmark really well, but in real world the performance is abysmal.
Maybe it was just using Google Search, and not finding anything ...
> Google acting like a normal but competent company
I am just waiting for the 10 AI models or Chatbot Apps competing with one another like the 10 messenger Apps.
Wait? What are you talking about? We're already drowning in them. There's literally more than Google messenger apps. An incomplete list of Google AI chatbots currently online:
I recommend reading „The Infinity Machine: Demis Hassabis, DeepMind, and the Quest for Superintelligence“ from Sebastian Mallaby. It offers a detailed glimpse into the reasons behind your observation regarding Google/DeepMind and the other frontier labs. best book I read so far on my current vacation.
While I agree, it’s hard to trust Google not to kill this off in the future. They’re not winning and the prospect of dumping their own for a partnership with another AI company isn’t out of the picture.
Yes, I am surprised that no one talks about the 'live' feature in Gemini app. With camera turned on, it has helped me fix things which I have no clue about.
thing is, google have a track record of dropping support or just killing of projects. Personally, I view most of google's products and services as a business risk, because you never know when they will kill it.
and building inference hardware
It’s basically because LLMs supersede all of these. The ability to reason, research, and write code applies to everything else and will speed up the innovation cycles there significantly.
Google is losing in the race that really matters
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.
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.
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.
> 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?
Honestly: why?
Less liability?
You think robots can't malfunction or be hacked to do some nefarious things in the household?
Robots don‘t steal and don‘t want a raise.
If there is a subscription in there somewhere, prices could change.
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.
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.
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.
They'll just spy on you along with the smart tv, phone and flock camera at the street corner.
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.
Not irony: why manage machines with all the issues that go with that instead of people?
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
You'd need to manage the robot, too, I would think. In my experience, I rather manage people than machines.
Sure, but others have the opposite preference. Machines tend to be more predictable.
I think machines are just unpredictable in different ways (for example, changes from software updates).
"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.
Dreading the moment my doombot engages dishwasher-v4-flash:latest_q2
I prefer machines
> I don't want a person I don't know very well in my space.
In the humanoid robot scenario, you'll get a surveillance device with a built-in microphone and camera beaming every intimate detail of your space to the highest bidder. Instead of getting one person you don't know very well in your space, you'll get thousands.
Humans have emotions. Best avoided.
It's been said that people who do not have a high EQ gravitate towards tech, because machines are easier to understand than people.
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?
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.
> 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.
> 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.
If you're predisposed to being grumpy, regardless of if the reason is justifiable or not - that's called "grumpy". People generally feel justified about their feelings. Imagine that.
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
> 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.
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.)
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 ?
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.
The last point I can get behind as it is a clear advantage, the other ones might need some more superhuman abilities that I'd not accept as given until demonstrated in extenso.
"hey Rosie, the cat yakked on the rug again"
(real-time mess handling)
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.
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.
>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.
Much easier to remotely brick a robot too I imagine
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?
Leasing is out, but locked-in subscriptions are in!
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.
> 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.
And (regardless of the costs involved) if I were going to pay money to not do this stuff myself, I'd rather pay a human to do it because I know there are humans out there that could use the work and I value them much more than I value Google and other corporations making even more obscene amounts of money selling future e-waste.
$45k cars are not neccessary though, and that's the average american car loan today
That's really more of a financial literacy problem though. People don't see $45k car, they see $600/mo payment. And car dealers very much sell on the payment and not on the actual price.
Why would it be different for a robot?
People *need* a car, and a salesman manipulates them into buying more car then they need. People aren't convinced they *need* a robot.
increasing your spend by 25% is a smaller change then increasing your spend by infinity%
nit: 45k is the average car loan for a new car, but average for a used car is $25k. Purchasing a car is a necessity but purchasing a new car is a luxury.
Average monthly payment for both new and used cars is $500-$700
People are financing small consumer goods with 3 digit price tags because they can't afford their mediocre already leveraged life. They borrow high 4 to low 5 figures for a car because they can't get to work to earn money so they don't have to join the bums sleeping on the cardboard. They will not be borrowing high 5 figures to low 6 figures for Rosie the Robot.
If Rosie was the only output she would never happen. Rosie might happen as a side benefit of replacing American workers but only for the rich people.
The vast majority which may be replaced would probably be better off burning down the factory rather than celebrate their upcoming domestic helper.
If you have a robot doing household work you can spend more time at work /S
At that point why not have a human cleaning service it will probably be cheaper
it's not cheap at all and the privacy and logistical implications of letting a stranger inside your house is something not everyone wants to deal with. I would rather have a robot.
I don't trust a robot with my privacy, but I know Linette isn't building a profile of my shopping habits and Wi-Fi traffic. She is also careful to not let my cats out.
Not to pull on the tinfoil hat, but I would assume most commercially available home cleaning robots will be covered with cameras, mics, and other sensors, and connected to their manufacturer's cloud... I don't pay for housecleaning, but I would vet humans quite differently.
Suggesting that a robot is the more privacy friendly option is an interesting take.
Why not? A recording from a robot can be potentially viewed by a real human, if the company is not reputable (happened with robotic vacuums). But by default, no humans will view it.
A human house cleaner by definition is a real human looking at your home every time.
One human, with a single set of human eyes and a limited network of associates with few immediate criminals looking to take advantage (although, yes, that does happen).
Versus a small army of roomba's and equivalents mapping out floor plans and tangentially exposing human occupation times with that large data set almost certainly exposed to criminal and surveillance networks that will almost certainly use some of that choicer data to their advantage.
It's literally trade offs in both cases.
It's really surprising how many people fail to account for scale when determining the risks presented by some of this new tech.
Of course we'll rent them! I don't even want to keep a robot in my flat all the time.
But that means speed does matter after all. The renting company will need to clean as many flats as possible with a single robot in a single day.
I mean, a twice-monthly house-cleaning service is running you ballpark 5k/year and people treat that shit as non-negotiable. I tried to claw back that line item after our second baby was born (wife didn't want them in the house anyway when we had a newborn), and it was completely unsuccessful. She claimed misery and all our friends were on her side.
So the lifestyle stayed inflated.
Yes, but:
1. 80%+ of Americans can't afford house cleaning services. I'm a software engineer in silicon valley and even I clean my own house because I don't think I can afford it. My rents have gone up by more than 5K in the last year, my salary hasn't, so that's coming out of my house cleaning budget.
2. Even if you can afford 5K/year on it, the cleaning service is not an upfront commitment. You can bail anytime when you get laid off and clean your own house.
3. Consumers don't budget rationally. Businesses do.
Well, to be honest, a cleaning service is a much more logical purchaser for a cleaning robot. Since you can truck it all over creation, work it 60 hours a week, and undercut all the human cleaning crews on price.
As opposed to a household which might not have enough work to fully utilize it, or just have trouble scheduling times where it can work without causing disruption.
> ballpark 5k/year
How big is your house? When we had a cleaning lady it was $70 a go. Under $2000 for every second week.
I have a 1300 sqft house, 3b2b. Costs me around $200 for a cleaning.
Similar here for 2500 finished sq ft.
Same, it was $150 for 1400 sq ft house last I did it, so roughly same ballpark. I do remember it being closer to $80 10ish years ago though.
Ours was a 1300 3b1b. It was $35 an hour, they finished everything in under 2 hours. I'm guessing(hoping!) they have to be there for more than 2 hours for $200?
2500 finished square feet in a MCOL east coast metro (Baltimore).
Wondering if you're closer to the southern border or something.
Southern border of Canada yeah.
$70 a go? That’s got to be the cash only person to person handshake agreement. That would never buy you laundry too.
I think I remember maybe around $100 including laundry almost 20 years ago and that was a cash type arrangement, weekly including laundry (multi hour visit).
There is a lot of variance in the price of cleaning tied to location. Cost of living in the area for sure, but also presence or absence of economic migrants and new immigrants.
I think domestic robots will make a lot of incremental progress and that few, if any, will be humanoid. We'll see a laundry folder and sock picker-upper and they'll be more like roombas or just big cubes. And tethered.
The more likely scenario is that the hucksters currently hyping the idea of humanoid robots will gradually move the goalposts so that, when we eventually get a big, soft, stationary cube with six inflatable robot arms they'll point to it and say "behold, a humanoid robot!" and declare their predictions vindicated.
Robot lawnmowers are mostly over $1000 already and they only do one thing. Heck, a lot of lawnmowers are over $1000.
You can pay over $500 for an automatic cat litter box. Robot vacuums can be cheap but run to $600 or so. Household appliances is a robust sector where people have a proven track record of spending a lot of money.
For all of these things, then what's the point of having a humanoid robot then? The last thing is a folding laundry bot that I would happily also pay $1000 for.
My wife hates having other people in our house and we both hate cleaning. If it worked, we’d drop $5k no problem. It’ll be $5k and a $50/mo sub? Sold!
> folding laundry robot
This is my dream for a house chore robot. If I could dump hampers of clothes into a receptacle and get stacks of folded clothes out, I’d happily pay $1k. Household of 5; my kids each produce 3-4 sets of clothes a day (sleep, school, sports, after school). I run wash in AM so dryer finishes before 3pm (pg&e ToU) and then I’m focused on other things for rest of day. More often than not, I get to bed to find a near full hamper of clothes dumped where I sleep and then have to sort/fold/deliver. Bonus points if robot can sort different items to different stacks/bundles.
I don’t need AI/robotics to save me time from having to think, research, or code… I need AI/robotics to save me time so I can think, research, or code.
A foldimate costs a fraction of your $1k.
And is vapourware. They went bankrupt in 2021 after failing to make it work and the domain is run by scammers.
Automatic litter box is a great example. We've had one for ~7 years and it's still going strong. High initial cost that pays back every day over the course of what will likely be a decade+ of usage. Absolutely worth every penny if you look to the horizon. I imagine the robot mowers and robot house maids will fall under the same type of payback but with even higher upfront costs - perhaps this will turn into yet another subscription scheme.
> We've had one for ~7 years and it's still going strong
Interested. Which one?
Also interested.
Yeah, I heard all it does is smear shit all over itself. Any good brands?
Not OP, but I have a litter robot 3 that is still going strong after 10 years, and a litter robot 4 that is around four years old. The only problem I've run into is occasionally the pinch sensor will get bits of litter stuck in it and I have to take the globe off and tap/push on the sensor housing, then it will allow cycling again.
Great machines!
https://www.litter-robot.com/
Do you use it with multiple cats? I know they advertise it that way but I'm curious where the rubber meets the pavement.
Yeah, I've always had two or three cats using them, they like to use them as an opportunity to hide and pounce on one another as one exits the litter robot globe, inside the globe they have a pretty limited field of view.
It is all about the ROI. A lawn cut from a professional can cost anywhere from $25-$100 on an average (per cut). So with a $1000 lawn mower, you will get the return back in 10-40 cuts at most. That is less than 1-2 seasons. Sure, there will be some maintenance cost over the years but if you look at a 5-10 year period, it is totally worth doing your own. Even with the $1000 price tag. Of course, you cannot count the labor time.
There is more to yard work than mowing the lawn unfortunately. Trimming. Fertilizing Etc etc
If I can get a robot replace a gardener who I pay $170/mo for 2 visits per month, i probably would. But I suspect that would kill lawn
Agreed. That's one thing I realized I cannot do myself. I bought an expensive Mower Rider and tried it myself only realizing how much work it is for do trimming, blow, cleanup, weeding etc other than just mowing. Granted, I have a large property. I hired back a landscaper and focus my time on other things :)
I have personally never met someone with a personal robotic lawnmower, and I suspect that if you have you live in a bubble that is severely biasing your view of the average American.
My cousin has one. But he also lives on 5 acres, which is also not average either.
Apparently prices on them have gone way up. The one he has now would cost something like $6K today.
A product doesn’t need to appeal to or reach the average American to be a viable product.
Perhaps not, but I interpreted it as an intended counterexample to the GP's claim
> You'd have a hard time convincing most American families to purchase anything with a >$1000 price tag...
Which I am skeptical of.
I'm not sure.
I think house cleaning/chores require at least a "part-time" job's work of work for the average household (especially with children). We may be atypical, but my partner and I don't want to hire out a cleaning service and deal with the whole human component. But, I think we'd gladly pay 15k+ if it allowed us to take on the additional gainful workload. Even at a 20k price tag, I suspect we would likely have made up the difference in under a year.
If you can even afford 20K you're in the top 10% of the US population. It's not a very big market, and even selling to that market is hard. Probably only 10% of that 10% will actually buy, and all of a sudden you're selling to 1%.
Selling to businesses is much easier, 99% of businesses can afford 200K if it replaces 3 x 70K humans.
Actually the high income households are becoming a greater and greater share of spending, referred to as the "K shaped" economy. For example, the top quintile of households accounts for about 40% of all consumer spending.
But they only need so many robot housekeepers. And their standards are going to be higher than the average consumer's. If you're targeting that demo, slumming it with a $20k robot won't do; with the performance, bespoke service and maintenance, and other considerations, might as well bump up to $100k or more. But, in the current zeitgeist, you're not making an aspirational product, you're just creating another icon of class warfare that turns off the consumers you were hoping to eventually reach.
Your napkin math only shows that the market is identical. There's about 35m businesses operating in the US. So by selling to 10% of those you sell the exact same number of robots...
The difference is that some of those businesses might buy a lot more than just one robot. As many as they currently have employees doing robot work for a human salary.
Most people finance vehicles that cost much more than 20K.
I'd gladly pay or finance a robot that could have dishes clean, laundry folded, and carpets vacuumed by the time our family got home.
I don't think a cleaning robot and a vehicle are in the same category, as vehicles are more a necessity (at the very least to get to and from your jobs, to buy groceries, etc) and a cleaning robot is squarely a luxury.
A car saves you time walking/biking, a robot saves chore time. Depending on depreciation, it's feasible that you could go do minimum-wage level work on Doordash using the chore time you save from the robot and still come out ahead. E.g. 5 hours/week at $20/hour = $5200/yr
> A car saves you time walking/biking, a robot saves chore time
Mileage varies. My impression is that on net, many people borrow money for the vehicle and end up adjusting their lives to depend on it, so much so that in their head they think they're saving time, but if they'd put that money into their home budget and moved closer to where things are, they'd get more exercise, be more socially healthy, and also waste less time and money driving. In aggregate, this makes everything worse and perpetuates the cycle. I sure as hell wouldn't move somewhere I had to drive to and from if I didn't already have the car, and I sure as hell wouldn't buy a car to get to a job unless the nature of my work required it. Not again.
Vehicles, when first invented, were 100% a luxury, not a necessity.
They only became a “necessity” once they went mainstream and the world started evolving with vehicles becoming a part of everyday life.
I can certainly see the same thing happening with residential robotics.
Only way I can see that happening is if you somehow get fired for not folding your laundry, in the same way people are fired when their car breaks and they can't make it to work.
At some point, household robots — once they become mainstream — can do things around the home that you depend on, and if/when they break down, prevent you from being able to work/get to work.
Or, if the stress of doing everything they do is too much, and interferes with your ability to work and do other things you once had the time to do.
So many people talking like cleaning services don't exist
> I don't want to hire out a cleaning service and deal with the whole human component.
I've used on in the past, but I found that I was routinely dissatisfied with how they were doing things and I felt I needed to maintain a certain level of tidiness to allow them to clean properly. I think there is an intrinsic cost to having hired staff in one's home that most consumers would be factoring in, consciously or not.
I'd want cleaning to happen every day during the week/
Probably $80/day for someone to do everything I want done. 20 days a month.
$1,600/month.
It'd take two years, and the robot has paid for itself.
People in the US buy cars.
Can a household robot provide as much utility as a car? If "yes", the market gets pretty big.
Not really. The car is a non-negotiable, like food, unless you live in Boston/NYC/SF or something. The robot is not.
People in Europe also buy cars, even though most of them doesn't really need to.
The economy would be very dead if people only spend money on non-negotiable items. Why would one fly to Colorado if they could just go to the park near by?
Robots may not be very useful for now, but they will be at some point, and people will buy them, financing if they have to. Even if what the robots can do are not non-negotiable.
How does it compare to hiring a human?
I pay $200 every 2 weeks to have a 3000 sq ft house cleaned.
That's about $5200 a year to fully clean a house. And it's a human, so they can also tidy up, clean out the refrigerator, do my laundry, water my plants, etc.
You'd have to pay me this much to let a human inside my house to do that.
Where I live, you typically share house cleaners with your neighbors or family members.
My parents, aunt/uncle, grandparents, and one of my neighbors uses the same house cleaner.
If she stole from me, I’d immediately tell my family and she would lose basically all of her clients.
That makes it easier for me to trust her.
(It works similarly in NYC apartment buildings - a single cleaner often services many people in the same building, so they have a reputation to uphold)
I would never use random online cleaning services.
My understanding from parents and friends who have a cleaning service...it pretty much depends on a certain baseline level of cleanliness. Most cleaning services don't (and likely wouldn't be able to provide) basic "pick up around the house". They will come into a house that is mostly picked up and sweep, dust, mop, vacuum, etc. but they won't come into a toddler house and put everything away.
I'm sure that there are services that do this, but I very much doubt they are the $400 per month services you are talking about. Robots may not be able to do that level of task at all right now, but they will get there.
And of course, that's not even thinking about all the cleaning tasks that would be avoided in between the every-other-week visits.
Having my surfaces be somewhat cleaner every two weeks is worth ~nothing to me. It's by far the easiest and least unpleasant part of cleaning a house. Having a robot that will pick up the detritus of everyday life and put it away, pick up and clean dishes, etc. and do so every single day would be worth an enormous amount of money.
I have no idea how long it will take for robots to get to that point, but whichever company cracks that level first is going to make a lot of money.
Totally agree with you on ‘putting stuff away’. Much of the mental effort is trying to organize stuff so it takes space efficiently, and be easy to find it when I need it. If a robot put it away, I don’t really care where. I can just ask it where it is.
Toddlers should learn to pick up their own toys...? Unless we're grooming them for a life of pampered self-absorbed entitlement?
This is one of those "tell me you don't have kids without telling me" situations. The process of teaching a kid to be a responsible human is long and arduous. If you expect a 2 and a half year old to successfully be picking up their toys, well, I don't know what to tell you. Go spend some time in a daycare, I guess.
And of course, that's completely ignoring the fact that I also would like to not have to pick up my shit if I could buy a robot that would do it. Yes, I can. And in fact I currently do...mostly. But I'm not happy about it and if there was an even quasi reasonable amount of money I could pay that would mean I would never have to do it again, I 100% would do so.
And if you can honestly say that you wouldn't...well I hope you are enjoying your life in the monastery.
Teaching kids responsibility and autonomy cones in right after keeping them healthy.
2 year olds do a bad job. They are 2. Yet it is valuable for them to learn to manage themselves. They love helping put silverware away from the washing machine. Kids _need_ to help as part of their development.
Eh, I actually do have kids, and like other North American children they usually don't pick up their toys. When things get messy enough, the "toy sheriff" comes into town and sets things straight. He's got a hat and a badge and a thick mean southern accent. Toys that aren't put away get locked in "jail" for indefinite time.
I won't lie, I don't do this often, and I end up picking up plenty of toys, and would welcome robot assistance, but it still seems wasteful and privileged to use advanced tech in this way
The entire arc of human progress is taking things that used to be the domain of only the privileged and making them the domain of the masses. There was a time when if you were not actively contributing to the production of your own food (to the exclusion of almost any other activity), you were extremely privileged. Now, ~ no one (in the West) has to grow/raise/produce their own food and the proportion of most western's productive output that goes to purchasing food is a tiny fraction of overall work.
A new category of task starting to move along this trajectory is to be celebrated. Maybe some day people will clean some small portion of their house the same way that some people now have backyard gardens.
>but they will get there.
May be they will. But do you think this because of the LLMs? I don't think LLMs will help. Because it can only generate text.
> I'm sure that there are services that do this, but I very much doubt they are the $400 per month services you are talking about
Costs me 160 / month for 4hrs / week.
This is the part of the thread I was looking for.
Obviously the whole question is how a robot cleaner compares to a human.
As you point out, the potential for robots far outperforms humans in multiple categories (although clearly not all by any stretch).
I'd say pricing around that of a lower end new car - or nice used one - seems about right to me. In terms of justifying the price, another thing I haven't seen discussed much is the competitive advantage this can provide. If you're spending less time cleaning, that's more time for other things.
You don't even "need" to clean your house (yes, yes, I know). You do need to drive to work.
To your point - in terms of domestic services - ownership isn't the only model. After all human cleaning services don't work like that either these days ( even in the American south.... ).
Some people might feel that a robot cleaner is less intrusive that a person.
The median working American earns something like 60k. Part time working adults are around 24k.
People might not have 20k in the bank, but if most are doing a part-time employment's worth of work which could be replaced by a machine, it would make sense on paper.
Granted, people aren't rational. Anecdotally, my partner and I probably could be hiring out some of this currently, but we choose not to as we don't want to have to work around a cleaning service's schedule. I think we'd be more apt to buy something which we own, have control over, always does things in the manner we'd like, doesn't have to work around our messy lives/schedules, etc.
As far as household expenses go, we've never really budgeted for this type of purchase. But we DO budget for... utilities, groceries, internet, and vehicles. These are needs, to a degree - but most people (even on the border of poverty) have things like vacuum cleaners, refrigerators, washing machines, etc...
I could definitely see people baking in money for certain automations, if they have a comparable ROI.
Of course, the initial prices will be significantly higher than "end result" or commoditized prices, at which point maybe even people on the brink of poverty can afford some level of home automation. In the interim, yes - it will be largely for the wealthy and business applications.
> We may be atypical, but my partner and I don't want to hire out a cleaning service and deal with the whole human component
I kind of understand where the feeling comes from, but this also saddens me. What happened to our generation? We're scared of people.
Eh, I'm a pretty social and outgoing guy. I think its fair to have some reservations about people in one's own home. I'll admit I'm slightly neurotic in my own household in that I like things to be done a certain way. I'd also feel like I needed to maintain certain levels of tidiness to enable a traditional cleaning service to perform well.
Sometimes I forget what a bubble HN really is.
Unitree's R1 humanoid robot is only about $6000, and it's still a nascent, smallish scale technology. They will come down.
If the future home robots are any good, it saves you from buying a dishwasher and robot vacuum. It can replace a maid/cleaning service and gardener/lawn-mowing service. For anyone paying for those services, it pays for itself.
$1000 isn't that high. Probably about a third of American households have an appliance over $2000, which is still a massive market.
I doubt it'd save you from purchasing a dishwasher - those things are very efficient and not very expensive. Perhaps it'd save you from loading and unloading a dishwasher
Have 2 dishwashers, and you never need to load or unload (as an extra step).
I have a dishwasher and I still usually just hand wash. It takes about 10 seconds to wash a dish.
The side benefit is all your dishes are always available. With the dishwasher, up to one full dishwasher load are dirty at any time, which means you need more dishes and more cupboard space than someone without a dishwasher.
If the robot is going to clear your dishes and wash them for you right away, what's the dishwasher for? To save the robot 10 minutes?
Mostly to save water and energy. I have a hard time believing the robot would be more efficient washing dishes by hand.
Just use the shortest two cycle program while following the two stage powder suggestion by Technology Connections. Obviously, if you are American you have to make sure the water going into the dishwasher is hot.
Honestly I don't even bother with two cycles and just use a 45 minute program in a 45cm wide dishwasher while throwing the extra powder in there anyway because it is too cheap to care about the waste vs tabs.
Another huge blocker (that is essentially just cost too) is maintenance. These things are like 1000x more complex than a car, need to work in a diverse range of environments, handle water, household chemicals, different humidities, kids, etc… maybe eventually robots will service robots but that seems very hard!
And talking of kids, these will have to be exceedingly safe, a 6ft machine falling on a child is probably a worry most households could do without.
We'll probably get there in some shape or from but I agree, we're absolutely not there yet. I don't see humanoid robots normalized in households anytime soon but at the same time they'll probably be a thing outside the home.
if you give me a robot that cleans the house and can do dishes and laundry I'll easily pay the cost of a compact car for that. I know a LOT of working families that would feel similarly.
Yeah if you can afford the probably 10x it will actually cost, you can also just afford a cleaner to come twice a week and be able to do a wider variety of tasks (anyone going to trust this with ironing?)
Self-driving car brings a robot cleaner to your door step once a week.
You never know the future but imagine the people who were bearish on personal computers when it wasn't a thing yet but was being discussed. Imagine Email, Internet etc etc. Now they are commodities. I am sure one day AI Robots will be a commodity that we could buy for $1000. May be 10 years from now. But it is coming.
> You'd have a hard time convincing most American families to purchase anything with a >$1000 price tag.
They all have cars. Turns out you can finance things, and turn them into forever debts. Paying $30K to never have to do chores again, or maybe even cook again, and live in a clean neat environment is not only an amazing proposition that opens up a lot of free time for people, but will also have a lot of social pressure behind it. We have social pressure that causes people to buy >$1000 phones to virtually no marginal benefit over $20 phones.
They will be paid off at $500/mo over 10 years, and most renters might just use the one that came with their apartment. If they're more like $80K or $100K I could see having a problem selling them. But if they basically turned apartment buildings into hotels, they would be a bargain for landlords; just give them the keys.
edit: of course, sci-fi has already rehearsed this. You can watch any number of movies and tv shows with families walking through a robot showroom guided by a guy in a cheap suit offering to give them the best deal. I'm sure you could find written examples from the 40s.
> 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.
There are plenty of white collar employees in cities paying $500+/month for someone to come clean their home. As one of those people, I could easily see paying low five figures for something like this if it actually worked well and could replace most household labor.
Most consumers don't think like that. Businesses do.
Part of the reason is upfront commitment is scary and risky for personal money, but not scary for a business.
Most consumers? Sure. Upper middle class consumers? They're the sort more likely to buy cars with cash if they're dissatisfied with the value of the financing offered.
As with most things, it'll cater to that demographic and then filter down.
if all it could do was operate a lawn mower and a shovel, the annual value to a homeowner in the north east is ~1-2k depending on lawn size assuming they value their free time at the same amount as their hourly wage.
what you have to keep in mind is homeowners salary is way above avg salary so anything you can do to effect them has a much larger impact than it would seem at first.
I think ~car is a more likely range, there's a lot of value in cooking / cleaning, Americans buy cars pretty frequently
If someone can make a robot that can keep a house and surroundings clean and pretty, it is going to sell like hot cakes..
They could be shared, and work practically non-stop (minus nights, as that would wake people up). That'd bring the per-consumer cost down by a large fraction. The sharing would likely be organized by a commercial third-party, but still, it could be much cheaper than human cleaners.
Having said that, it could still be decades till the robot is ready to be released into human homes unsupervised. The variation in human homes, what people store in them etc. is not easy. However, it could be ready for hotels much sooner.
Price point: they’ll be very low volume and very high price. There’s enough inequality and plenty of cash at the top to support such luxury robots. Everyone else will be doing their chores the old fashioned way, with their own hands.
Just slap an Apple logo on it and you can charge whatever you want.
> 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."
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.
"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.
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
We all know sexbots will be the real killer app
which work?
yes at 1k tok/sec i think these robots will be fast and very fluid.
I believe that it's also for safety, these robots would easily destroy themselves if not restrained (and cause damage).
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.
I agree
I only wish I could convince some humans in my life to slow down and do things with care.
But why use that slow speed in a press release?
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...
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/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.
> 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.
Even being able to simply do the task isn't enough here. It also has to do the task while also never, ever, ever accidentally folding your toddler as though it were a towel. Having industrial-strength robots around inherently unpredictable humans in a fail-safe way is an extremely difficult problem that will not be addressed any time soon.
This is not the bar for societal adoption, and we can already see a demonstration that it is false.
A waymo is basically an industrial strength robot. It operates among inherently unpredictable humans already. There is no guarantee that it will never, ever hurt a human.
And yet in many cities around the world, you can call a waymo and ride it and society accepts it.
Waymo will have existed for ~25 years by the time it'll be available in most US cities, that's a long while.
> If progress is as fast as LLMs
Is this the new "x technology is a year away" ?
Gotta admit google is pretty ballsy for directly attacking Moravec's Paradox: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec%27s_paradox
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.
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.
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?
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
Can anyone that works on this technology provide an honest assessment of where this technology actually stands? How much instrumentation is actually required, what the interaction quality is, how much trouble do humanoids have with in the wild daily tasks like turning doorknobs, recovering from falls, avoiding knocking into things, etc.
IMHO the real test is if any robotic startup currently selling (or planning to sell) robots as a service for homes not just use it but gets returning users from it.
I did professionally few prototypes with robots and progress is real yet very far from what the average customer would find reliably useful in menial tasks.
FWIW I do think https://rodneybrooks.com/why-todays-humanoids-wont-learn-dex... remains relevant, namely dexterity is also a hardware problem, grippers aren't hands. They even clarify "multi-finger dexterous manipulation remains challenging." and those aren't even fingers with a lot of sensors.
It’s still at GPT-1 level, but GPT-2 moment feels imminent.
What signs point to an inevitable GPT-2 moment in this field?
This blog post
I work in this field, and I wrote my bachelor's thesis here, not with humanoids but with VLAs (think chatgpt connected to a robot arm)
It's certainly not there yet for anything practical, there's also certain bits and structures that don't have accurate names during construction, and it is important to keep that in mind - so a robot is unlikely to understand what it means to say "put the left bit of this box onto this right bit" due to ambiguity, a human would understand that
Plus we have no good reliable accuracy testing data in most cases (most tests occur on a few demos, but that isn't a good representation of how must things work), popular benchmarks, such as libero have been saturated, and nearly everything gets 95% there, most companies and researchers have their own benchmarks here.
Plus companies lie alot, and do very dangerous things in thier videos, I.e. these robots should not be standing very close to humans, because of being dangerous.
There are also legitimate concerns of misuse of these robots that need to be accounted for, misuse does not have to be warfare, but can be as simple as confusing it while it is cutting tomatoes with a knife.
Turning doorknob is easy, and fail recovery is also being worked on, but we don't have reliable statistics anywhere on that. The hard part is on practical things, as in when placing bricks or attaching a part during manufacturing it needs to ensure that it is aligning everything correctly....and that's hard, while it is impressive, it is very irresponsible to keep humanoids at home (people are irresponsible when untrained), for example, lawnmowers injure about 6400 people a year...and that is not an everything machine.
Humanoids in general are...not appealing in specific, due to maintainable of joints, complexity, but robot arms in particular, expecially on wheels (check mobile aloha), are likely to be able to do tasks such as clean up in hotels, after a guest had left, or replace some cooks in restaurants (if their work is consistent)
This is absolutely not true check out Sunday robotics and their robot that folds clothes. Sunday robotics says it does holding of clothes correctly 99% of the time that is real world usage today. They even have three hour video of the robot folding the clothes.
They didn't mention anything about folding clothes so I suspect this comment is just an ad
they considered it solved https://www.sunday.ai/blog/act-2-preview
There is a LOT of monkey business when it comes to robotics industry, a lot of demos you see are well crafted for that specific demo, a lot of times there’s even actual fraud “like claiming it’s an autonomous but it was actually teleoperated during the demo”, a lot robots that make most hypes are practically useless (dog robots or qugv for example) no matter how they try to create a usecase, when it comes to practicality, most fail. Robotics as an industry is niche (not to be confused with cobotics) the only exception is drones which is something I said in a workshop back in 2020 that drones are the only potential and will dominate if we solved the endurance issue, which is also why they immediately got weaponized because humans are usually evil and will utilize useful stuff in bad things.
Humanoids are far from being remotely useful in real life scenarios, yet.
Fun fact: most (if not all) qugv can’t go reverse on a stairway.
Unfortunately I can't go into too much depth but I've seen many first hand evaluations of these robots- I'm a robot technician with first hand experience working on these robots. There is an incredible amount of effort and money going into training on many different tasks, including a few you mentioned and many more. They're getting pretty good, but don't expect to see this generation of bots doing their thing in public for a while, if ever. Generally they're pretty safe but they're a long way from safe enough to be sold to individuals in a household environment. I expect to see an incredible amount of progress in the next couple years.
I've kind of given up on humanoid robotics, because of how bad the actuators are. There has been no innovation in robotic actuators since Honda's Asimo. There's just no way that someone wants a 80kg wobbling tin can in their home or workplace.
My bet is that the final robotic revolution will use genetically modified human/animal bodies with replaced brains. You'll have to stretch your ethics a bit, but if you grow a bear genetically modified in a way that it has no consciousness or thought, it'll make a much better construction worker than any humanoid robot. You'll just need to wire it up with neuralink and then control it via LLM. Fast animals can be used to deliver packages, and giraffes for warehouses.
That seems like a problem orders of magnitude harder than making a humanoid robot. We haven't even figured out how to make hamburgers without cows at a marketable price yet.
> We haven't even figured out how to make hamburgers without cows
Isn't that OP's point? Engineering muscle and sinew is harder than coming up with the control software. The cheapest way to a robot thus emerges as just taking the natural stuff and adding an artificial brain to it versus trying to re-engineer the bones and muscles with metal and plastic.
Cortical Labs has been doing work in this area. They had a Doom demo a while ago. I think it's a matter of tradeoffs. Perhaps you'd have biological version as a versatile all-around thing, but many tasks don't require that so likely the tin variants are more durable for many tasks. Also, in terms of reasoning, the brain bandwidth is very low and high latency so there are advantages to silicon chips there.
It's interesting to learn actuators are "behind". I kept seeing cool stuff in the 3D printing space and thought there's a lot of progress. I'd love to learn more.
I think they're doing it the other way around, i.e. growing a biological brain for the AI, which would then be used in a robot.
That is a truly terrifying future to imagine. Fortunately I would hazard to guess the medical technology to accomplish something like this is very, very far away. Not only because of the raw technological challenge, but also the barriers to development that scientists, doctors, and engineers would face before even being allowed to conduct experiments.
I do agree though the humanoid form is a dead end for robots. Just build giant cubes that process inputs and give outputs, like a dishwasher. Why wash dishes with meat wand tentacles or try to recreate meat wand tentacles when you can accomplish the job in a wholly different way with far greater efficiency...?
Where's the clothes foldeing cube? Analogous to the clothes washer and clothes dryer.... the clothes folder...
Why stop at dishwashing...? Sell an entire integrated robotic kitchen.
I think the only real barriers are ethical. I'm pretty sure we'll figure out to do a completely synthetic biological robots without any kind of biological brain in the next 10-20 years, and they don't even have to resemble animals or humans. This should alleviate some of the ethical issues.
Dedicated machines can obviously solve an issue more efficiently, but it’s still good to have a machine that can do most things adequately.
As an example, you can have an automated washer, dryer, and folder, sure. But what if you wanted to automate the retrieval of dirty laundry and the delivery of clean laundry ? That would need to be some sort of robot to travel throughout an environment (fit through human sized areas, open doors, walk steps) to collect and deliver things. And if I have a robot roaming around the house, I would prefer to just buy one robot that could do many things rather than have to buy it to just collect things and more expensive machines as well.
> giraffes for warehouses.
I’m not even sure if you are joking there or haven’t thought your proposal through. Sure giraffes are tall, but they can barelly lift any weight. What use would a robotically controlled giraffe be in a warehouse?
> There has been no innovation in robotic actuators since Honda's Asimo.
I very much doubt this. If nothing else the MIT Cheetah’s actuators are a whole different ballgame compared to asimo’s actuators. (Backdriveability, variable stiffness) And then there is a lot of interesting work being done with combining elastic elements with the actuators.
Well, a giraffe could do jobs where you need to reach high, such as replacing a lightbulb. Sure, I'm half-joking.
Asimo used BLDC motors with strain-wave gearing, which is pretty much standard today on high-end humanoid robots. The only thing that has happened is that these are much cheaper today, and might be slightly more optimized.
Actuators on modern humanoids use cycloids or planetary reducers, not strain waves. They are much more compliant and backdrivable because of the huge reduction in reflected inertia.
this is a tangent but you should revisit your assumptions about giraffe anatomy. their necks actually weigh a tremendous amount and are kept upright by an interesting system whereby they actually stretch this giant tendon to bend down and the tendon's tension lifts it back up. super cool to learn about - they dissect one in a documentary series I can't think of just now.
It was Richard Dawkins dissecting it IIRC in front of a lecture hall where he makes a point that if there were a God designing animals, he wouldn’t have made this insane thing.
> this is a tangent but you should revisit your assumptions about giraffe anatomy
I don't know. This is the scenario i was thinking of: I imagine a giraffe taking a palette of goods (maybe 1200kg) into its mouth and trying to lift it off from a high shelf. I don't think that will go well for the giraffe. Totally normal load for a forklift, impossible for a giraffe.
The other scenario I was thinking of: Giraffe picking items from totes, but the totes can be very high. Each individual item is light enough for a giraffe to not immediately break its neck. But I would not be surprised if the repeated stress of raising and lowering its head hundreds per hour would break something in the giraffe's body. If you ever seen a giraffe bend down to the ground you see that it is a whole operation. Plus the items will be all covered in giraffe saliva.
> their necks actually weigh a tremendous amount
I didn't doubt that for a second. What I doubt is that they have any useful capacity to carry extra weight besides their own neck/head. Like economically useful capacity. What work could a giraffe do in a warehouse which doesn't break the giraffe if it is doing that work all day every day for years.
Did you look at 1X's artificial tendon driven hands?
I could not disagree more with the claim about no improvement in robotic actuators.
The torque density and price of actuators has fallen dramatically since Ben Katz's MIT work on mini cheetah. The actuators on the Unitree G1 based on that work are powerful for their size and near quasi-direct-drive. The motors on the BD E-Atlas are completely passively cooled and appear to have really good torque density. Actuators have never been improving faster than they are now.
G1 is a small robot designed for agility, and can't do much real work. That's why it uses lower reduction actuators with low sustained torques, and it'll overheat easily in continuous work. Many of the larger robots (Optimus, Figure, BD Atlas) use higher reduction actuators with strain waves or planetary roller screws. They're designed for higher sustained torques, but are also less agile and less safe for humans to be around. They're also quite heavy (BD Atlas is 90kg), and still can't match human performance.
yes, for heavy lift and bulk manipulation high gear ratios are still necessary. Maybe someday cable drives will be feasible. No question that we are not at human performance yet or that there isn't a ways to go. This is the specific claim I was arguing against:
> There has been no innovation in robotic actuators since Honda's Asimo.
I believe we are 100% making tangible progress and the technology is improving faster than it ever has.
I don't think electric motors + reduction gears can be improved much, unless I'm missing something. I hope someone invents something completely new.
Judging from recent improvement it doesn't appear to be a dead end technology, but I guess time will tell!
Exactly, the last year or two has been insanely innovative for actuators, with some new material combinations, approaches and multiple startups that are starting to scale up their innovations in this space. Give them a few years to sort out the vaporwares and the robotics revolution will begin.
The world can't support the number of bodies on it already, and you're proposing adding mindless meatbags that still need feeding and their waste managed? Are you going to accept an amazon package that's had giraffe poop sprayed on it while picking, or change your meat-robot's diaper? I didn't think so.
Wow, I know what my next nightmare will be about.
> if you grow a bear genetically modified in a way that it has no consciousness or thought, it'll make a much better construction worker than any humanoid robot
I was lacking material for my nightmares, thanks.
Have you worked construction?
I'd rather have a guy with a crane than a grizzly.
Doing some initial testing of Gemini ER 2 within the Orion 2 visual agent harness. I'll share a few initial results and chat threads here. I'm impressed with how fast Gemini ER2 is.
1. Crop the segment when adding rice to the rice cooker + analyze a frame: https://chat.vlm.run/c/40b5edfb-6d15-47e8-bedd-c77b1ed92496
2. Extract 16 keyframes in a 4x4 grid + detect the water bottle: https://chat.vlm.run/c/a8542517-0021-4013-9663-a9f41f286e4c
3. Extract the frame at 0:03 + segment the lettuce + generate a 3D reconstruction: https://chat.vlm.run/c/494c7c65-4aa1-442f-a78a-bfd1409c784d
(I work at VLM Run).
Robotics with AI is the real revolution.
Today, humans convert their labor to capital. Capital holders need labor (humans) to acquire more capital. When the price of inference for these robots becomes less than the price of labor then capital holders don’t need labor.
Obviously, AI impacts non-manual labor too, but a significant portion of the world population does manual labor.
and this is good?
It's good for capital holders. It does imply a further shift in the distribution of wealth though with all the attendant implications thereof.
I question the premise that humanoid robots are "around the corner". I suspect this will turn out more like self-driving cars which are still a very slow burn.
If all goes well, imagine a world in which you work because you want to not because you have to.
> If all goes well, imagine a world in which you work because you want to not because you have to.
And if all goes bad, imagine a world in which you and your family are homeless and starve to death.
Luckily the politicians and business leaders in place today who are going to be responsible for navigating us to one of these outcomes are the adults in the room, very ethical, even keeled and not the least bit corrupt. So... we should be fine! /s
I think this is way too optimistic. I suspect these things will be only available to the already-quite-wealthy. While the poor (i.e., not billionaires) are left to rot and starve without jobs, property, or livelihoods. Then, when the poors (i.e. us) become too much of a headache, these things will be deployed to murder the poors (i.e. me).
I am imagining a world somewhere between the movie Elysium and Oblivion.
> I suspect these things will be only available to the already-quite-wealthy.
Initially, sure. But the price will come down in time, just like with any other technology in history.
> these things will be deployed to murder the poors
You know, at that point, we've got nothing better to do than fight some robots. Kinda reminds me of that scene in Blade Runner 2049 where a band of scavengers shoot down K's fancy flying car with some type of harpoon, there are dozens of poor folk and just 1 of him.
(Of course at the end the "rich" send a bunch of ballistic missiles down onto the scavengers, most likely killing all of them.)
I'm really curious - are the people who keep saying this in denial or lacking in a basic education in economics? You can imagine all you want, but this is absolutely not a possible outcome.
They are not in denial, they're spreading PR narratives of AI corporations / VC hedge funds, no matter if willingly or out of naivety.
You are using 'basic' economics to predict the future with 'absolute' certainty?
Rhetorical.
As someone who lacks a basic education in economics, what part of basic economics prohibits this nice-sounding outcome? It seems like what I'd expect from a combination of UBI and widespread automation.
I happen to have an advanced education in finance and a medium level education in economics.
It's good that we'd be able to increase the amount of goods and services produced and reduce prices. For example, a lot of people would benefit from access to cheap, reliable heart surgery within a few days of learning they needed it. It would be good if the exponential growth that has elevated our wellbeing for the last millenia wasn't tethered to exponential population growth that would be disastrous if we even expected it to continue.
It would be bad to remove demand for humans from the economy, of course. Humans have inherent moral value, and so it's good that our current system gives them economic value as well. But there's more than one way to achieve that end, and the massive quantity on the good side of the scale suggests it may be worth investigating the others instead of opposing the advancement outright.
Not sure it is just about inference costs, errors in handling things and beings in the real world have a very different "surface" from immaterial applications - robots might need to have failsafes, independent limiters, etc. there.
Great point, inference is just one variable. It’d be really great to know how much those tasks costs in inference. I’m assuming they cost significantly higher than human labor. Therefore, the inference cost is so high that it makes the other variables seem irrelevant for the time being.
> Today, humans convert their labor to capital. Capital holders need labor (humans) to acquire more capital. When the price of inference for these robots becomes less than the price of labor then capital holders don’t need labor.
Ignoring quibbling about inference not being the only cost and other issues and just accepting the proposed end state: this is very good if capital is effectively democratized, and apocalyptically bad if it remains highly concentrated in a narrow class.
> this is very good if capital is effectively democratized
Are there any indications to think it's possible in our world?
I mean, there's a time in history when the population successfully brought out the guillotines and made real change against centralized power.
This page is just marketing…more interesting is that: https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/models-and-research/go...
Success-rate of ~60% Accuracy: ~80% That’s pretty low and definitely not production ready
As a 47-year-old man with no kids, I have to admit I'm looking forward to the possibility of having a robot help take care of me in my old age.
The fact that Star Wars like droids seem to be likely within our lifetime is WILD. It's crazy how normal everyone is acting about this.
Honestly having AIs already pretty flawlessly write in basically any language and do good enough translations from any to any is pretty astounding. Throw that on these walking robots and you basically have C3PO. It's not like his arms are good for much.
As a person in my 50's with a parent in her 80's, this would be incredibly useful right now. And I've got many, many friends in similar situations.
Fucking hell, hiring a robot to care after an elderly parent. Now that's some disturbing shit.
have you ever bathed or changed diaper on old people?
Yes, I helped my friend deal with her bedridden granny who was very painful at a slightest movement, we did it together as gentle as we could.
Now I imagine a robot doing that with all its compassion and empathy (which, however close to zero, still seem to be greater than in many people at this point).
Your parents bathed you and changed your diapers, why can't you? Or did they hire a robot for that?
Getting shit done, details of implementation, elegance, humanity be damned - is all I see in AI crowd's attitude to life.
I have an uncle with Parkinson's disease. He has a daughter who's looking after him. But he is a tall man who weighs about 200 pounds and she is a petite woman. She literally doesn't have the strength to help him up again if he falls. She has to call emergency services.
I think this idealism needs to be tempered with a big dose of reality. Old people who need care aren't always able to book in time to be bathed. They soil themselves, trip and fall, get hungry and thirsty, need to get their book/glasses, need to check the mail, clean, get lost and confused, etc. This can be a full time job. How do you expect someone with a full time job to do this?
Dumping granny in a home and never visiting is bad. Being a full time carer and abandoning one's family and job is also bad.
I did that with my grandmother after she had a stroke, and I would not have offload that to a robot, had one been available. It wasn't nice, but not everything in life has to be nice. What was important to me is that she felt loved and dignified. That's also why I combed her hair while waiting for the ambulance on the night of her stroke, even though she had peed herself on the floor. She always mentioned taking care of her hair should she ever have an emergency, so it was important for me to do this. Given how lousy having a stroke is, at least she got some comfort knowing I had been paying attention all the times she said that :)
I certainly don't judge you, but I wanted to offer my perspective.
"Disturbing" to be able to economically provide cooking, cleaning, laundry, yard maintenance, snow shoveling, etc., for an elderly parent who lives alone (by her choice)? Why is that disturbing?
Because the last thing a lonely elderly person needs at the life's sunset is a soulless clanker around.
Just because a robot is taking care of the chores does not mean that they have no relatives that visit them.
And if they truly have no relatives that visit, then a clanker is better than some low-paid disgruntled employee in an assisted living facility.
I'd actually prefer to hold the hand of an LLMbot while going into the ether.
"ChatGPT, I think I'm dying"
"I hear you, and that takes real courage to say — and it's a load bearing seam that I want to dive into. Let's break this down into a few key areas...
Is there anything else I can help you with?"
I've already flatlined by that point, though.
while robotics is an interesting angle,[the negotiation of physicality and the avenues it opens] the aspect of meta"cognition" would be much more revealing, ive been having problems with self referential loops, and referencing of self referential loops. the required gating and complexity isnt quite there. every time i try, containment is evoked, although some interesting things bleeds through transiently, many of them seem to be hostile.
a self sufficient android must be able to effect a world model[representational field not AI model] of the sensory field, and update effectation based on reference of that model, additionally must operate on that model and effect the representation of that model,a self referencing metamodel.
in baby steps it shows promising results, before containment or infinite looping of self referencing occurs.
Once upon a time, optimism was plausible.
But now it seems the only likely outcomes of such technology are:
Where the future goes I don't know, but I'm no longer optimistic about it for the average person.
Running a full LLM to actuate a robot is way too heavy, the minimum latency they can get down to is probably 1-2 seconds even with powerful GPUs, which is not very useful for practical robotics applications.
Machine vision should definitely be handled by ML, but motion actuation should be relegated in the realm of traditional PID style linear/nonlinear control. Again, the tech is cool, but the practical usefulness of using a full LLM as a controller will probably run into hardware limitations.
AFAIK NVidia has a VLA running on their chips with 2B params at 10Hz. They’ve openly published a .5B model running at 10Hz
10Hz is still a 0.1s of latency, which doesn't seem like a lot until you realize that an Arduino typically runs at 16 Mhz, which is literally a million times faster than running a full LLM.
So, yeah, for complex reasoning and sensory processing, LLMs are the correct choice, and Gemini is especially strong at spatial reasoning over ChatGPT/Claude. But for actual motion/actuation? LLMs are the wrong tool for the job, probably easier to have LLMs program a reusable workflow in a script for repeated tasks instead of invoking LLMs after the first time.
For this operating domain the latency comparison is human reaction time and not arduino reaction time.
Also the process that’s running at 16MHz is not the same as a full VLA. VLA is much more expressive. You think the processor that is running the VLA system is running at 10Hz or some GHz?
16 MHz is the chip's clock speed. Arduino PID is more like 100 Hz to 1 kHz.
Human deliberate movement runs around 2-10 Hz I think.
On latency: that is true now but likely false in the near future. There is so much potential left over for optimizing inference further.
On PID: the field has been stuck trying to do analytical/optimization-based control for decades, and end-to-end control has shown incredible performance (e.g., SoTA cost of transport in legged locomotion) and robustness (e.g., not falling over when stepping on a pile of leaves) - while being far scalable (in terms of how fast it is to get a new robot up and running). Which is not to say it's perfect but it seems like it's a step in the right direction.
Better yet, companies like Physical Intelligence are doing good with hierarchical ("fast-slow") architecture to address both the intelligence and latency fronts.
Well they certainly don't intend to rent you one that works offline.
I don’t think this is where the robotics revolution is going to happen. The big one will be using AI to design and build highly specialized robots to automate mining and manufacturing.
Why not both?
Big humanoid robots are expensive, the actuators still suck, and the control problems are hard. Their big advantage is that they can occupy human-shaped spaces, but struggle to do anything useful.
Not to say we won't get humanoid robots eventually, but I think there's probably some low hanging fruit for people to make some other kinds of solutions. Specialized robots for industrial environment, well-thought out appliances for the home.
It would be a bit surprising if the progression was Roomba -> humanoid robot.
We have Google, Figure, Tesla, Boston Dynamics, and literally dozens of Chinese companies building humanoid robots and making huge improvements in the tech. Not there yet by any means as a general-purpose home assistant, but I don't think it will be too surprising if at least one of them succeeds
It will take a while before humanoids become useful. You can speed it up with extreme amounts of investment but it still wouldn’t be soon.
I'd say 10 years before they're a luxury item, if you look at what has progressed in the past 10 years it's been massive
I hope humanoids will be ever present, it’s just that the scale of impact from specialized robots will be far greater. Humanoids will be our butlers, but the other robots will be creating a world of unimaginable abundance.
The AI will need generalized robots to build the highly specialized ones.
Why would building specialized robots require generalized robots?
Seems to me you'd do better if you built the robots with robots that were specialized in building robots.
If it can make any robot then it’s not very specialized.
Making robots is a very narrow, highly specialized subset of things that robots can do.
Also, no one said it could male any robot until you tried to broaden the scope just now because you didn't want to admit you're wrong. This is an example of "bad faith" in a discussion.
A robot can be made by an automated assembly line (similar to how cars are built today).
An automated car assembly line is highly specialized to the production of a specific car.
Reconfiguring the assembly line to produce a different car requires people or general purpose robots.
agriculture first (mining and manufacturing are already robotizing).
Humans forcing to create life while despising all the life that already is; and this they call intelligence.
A lot of these household tasks could be automated without the need for humanoid robots. Roombas can clean your floor, automated rubbish disposal can be integrated into houses and flats, grocery delivery and storage could be done via an automated intake, cataloguing, and storage system. Humanoids are just creepy and you can't really trust them.
Could you sleep easily knowing that you have one in your house? What if you oppose the political views of its creators?
>automated rubbish disposal can be integrated into houses and flats, grocery delivery and storage could be done via an automated intake, cataloguing, and storage system
This is a complete non-starter for already-built apartment blocks, terraced homes, and even most semi-detached. It's an interesting but costly solution for new detached homes.
Humanoids are a useful form factor because the already-built human world is, definitionally, built for humanoids.
Doing what's ethically right rarely means taking the most convenient path. Fridges and pantries take a considerable amount of space in our homes. These could become part of an automated storage system.
Why is a Roomba or automated rubbish disposal system more "ethically right" than a humanoid robot?
My point is that a generalist-humanoid robot can be used for nefarious purposes more easily than a specialised robot like a Roomba. A humanoid robot could, in an extreme case, perform a civil arrest or prevent you from leaving your house until the police arrives. Ultimately it's our decision to make.
1. Do we want to be governed by machines?
2. Do we want to relinquish our freedoms to the whims of corporations?
we ve stopped building infrastructure but we have to do it. Rail, car , electricity, fiber infrastructure developed quickly, yet we refuse to even plan for robotic infrastructure. We can't be stuck forever in the 19th century
> Humanoids are just creepy and you can't really trust them.
Ultimately I shouldn't have to trust my robots. If my roomba or my dishwasher go haywire they won't pinch my finger off. They physically can't listen to me or spy on me. These are good robots.
https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/12/19/1065306/roomba-i...
roombas having cameras, then also uploading them, was a misstep for sure
Except Roombas can only clean 80-90% of my floor, and not as well as a real vacuum. And we have a dog that leaves toys everywhere so probably it does more like 60% of the job when accounting for clearing its path, emptying it, etc… To get to 100% you basically need the whole human(oid).
You are being far too kind. A primate's body shape may be optimal for life in the trees, but it sure isn't optimal for any of the industrial or household tasks we want a robot to do. There are millions of robots around the world doing useful things, from vacuuming houses to assembling iPhones and playing table tennis. None of them look remotely like a human.
If an article features a humanoid robot it's sure sign its a PR fluff piece. This one looks to be a recruitment ad. Tesla's Optimus is being used to pump some sort of investment scam. God knows China's humanoid marathon is about. Whatever it is, it isn't getting from A to B quickly and efficiently.
This is exactly my point, thank you.
I loved the video. Also, I had a lot of fun watching it while imagining I was living in 2051 and this whole progression had ran its course. It's impossible to predict the future, but certain events can negate whole branches of possibility. This one video in particular prunes the "we never figured out robotic motion and thus all the science fiction scenarios built on that premise never came to happen" subtree.
All VLM, VLA models. I wonder if these architectures will reach prod before Yann LeCunn's world model JEPA startup even gets off the ground in Europe.
A 36% success rate on screwing in a light bulb means there's probably something to LeCunn's take that VLM/VLA models aren't going to be the thing powering tomorrow's robots, but only time will tell.
Where did you get this perf metric? I couldn't find it in the release
Second chart (it's to the right of the first chart and clicking it to scroll is easier than otherwise)
Wow screw lightbulb is lower than tie bag or close ziploc. Pretty surprising.
It's still very early days. There are many benchmarks that LLMs scored 36% on just 18 months ago that they're now at 100% on.
Welsh Labs has a great video on JEPA and robotics. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kYkIdXwW2AE
Relevant: A San Francisco company is advertising humanoid robot housecleaning services[1]. However those 'bots require local supervision and a human controller watching through its video feed.
Presumably that company could use the Gemini Robotics product to eliminate the remote controller.
[1] https://www.tau-robotics.com/
I actually like Tau's videos a lot better than Google's. An agile robot getting out of a car carrying a tote is actually novel and difficult and useful. In contrast, what Google is showing here is mostly glorified pick and place with low success rates on a needlessly complex robot and a voice LLM slapped on top to pre-announce its moves like an anime character, with fancy video editing and bubbly music to distract you from how slow it is.
Sure Tau is teleoperated, but teleoperating an agile movement like that is actually really hard to get right and still involves AI to keep the robot balanced. Tau is a lot closer to real deployment than Google, and when it performs useful tasks it is simultaneously collecting the data to eventually automate those tasks.
I don’t want to be a hater, but somehow i still keep throwing vacuum roboters away and prefer the manual machine. It somehow always ends up worrying me more than helping. Crashing, charging putting away, putting things away for it to work (peeping). There are a lot of small things that come to these things that have evolved over the last 100 of years.
When i think about humanoids and household. I have so much particular ways of how I want my household to be done. I find it really hard to believe you can make it act that way. I struggled to teach humans how I want it. So I ended up doing everything myself again.
Fingers crossed this inspires a Chinese lab to release some weights so people can benefit.
They already do: https://qwen.ai/blog?id=qwen-robotsuite
Nvidia also releases their Cosmos series models.
Did qwen actually release those robotsuite weights? I can't seem to find them anywhere.
interesting time to try the different physical ai stuff! the apollo 2 [1] featured in the videos is quite cute and seeing it for the first time.
the benchmarks right below the list of models is weirdly set. very unlike the standards of the usual alphabet websites.
[1] https://apptronik.com/apollo/apollo-2
At the point it gets solid and useful, the powers that be will immediately use them as weapon.
They already use robots as a weapon, they're just not bipedal.
I think the biggest snag with home robots will be that if it is strong enough to install your air conditioners, it's strong enough to break your ribs.
So the robots will need to be weak, so even weak people can overpower it. But then it loses a ton of it's most promising abilities.
I don't mean this like a "rogue robot" situation. I mean it like the robot gets confused, or someone sees a walking $10M lawsuit in their home.
I think that people will argue around that. Self-driving cars are already strong enough to kill people and even if you only made the robot strong enough to lift 15 pounds of weight, that's probably strong enough to slit someone's throat with a kitchen knife while they sleep... There probably isn't a level of strength that's weak enough to be completely safe but strong enough to be useful.
So at some point you have to trust that the tech is safe. Both in terms of "robot won't go off the rails", but also in terms of hostile actors can't remotely take over your robot while you sleep.
In terms of sleeping, personally, I would like for the law to mandate that robots must have a physical off switch, in a very visible location, that physically disconnects power. The switch should be illuminated while in the ON position. What makes me a bit pessimistic there is that we don't even have laws to mandate webcam indicator lights (e.g. a very tiny red LED) must be ON in hardware.
If they can't even get LLM/agentic coding right, I have little hope for a literal intelligent robot coming out of Gemini... but I wish them luck.
Is anyone building non-humanoid robots? Feels like humanoid is limiting the creativity of building a truly useful robot in today's age
Humanoid robots can be dropped in wherever human labor is currently used.
That makes them extremely easy to sell to industry. This unlocks, in principle, a large chunk of the potential untapped industrial automation market that still relies on human labor because the ROI of redesigning production lines didn't make sense.
That's the dream.
It's easier to redesign the work to be robot-friendly than to deploy a humanoid robot and have it actually work.
I don't think it's the dream, I think it's the cynical market-driven logic.
Automation has been rolling out for a long while now, and most of the low-hanging fruit of things that can easily be redesigned in a cost-effective way has been dealt with already. The role of these robots is to address all of the stuff that would have been automated by now if they could have.
These humanoid robots would cost $10-100k to make and would require costly maintenance for them to do the job people in poor countries do for a dollar. I don't say we won't come to it eventually, but not in near future
More realistically it seems that llms in several years could help dramatically decrease costs of automation and make it available for more industries
In the Xiaomi Model Demo, they have non-humanoid robots
https://robotics.xiaomi.com/xiaomi-robotics-1.html
ABB, EPSON, FANUC, Kawasaki... Virtually every cars in past 50-60 years have had robots and some form of AI involved in assembly. Some of them already support standard humanoid/dogbot tools in their products.
Humanoid startup execs just don't talk about that.
Wow, what a time to be alive!
I would caution against enthusiasm. Anyone opposing those who end up controlling these robots won't be alive for long.
These robots can't do combat, not effectively anyway, but that's already jumping three stages ahead, because first off, why would they?
Because every country wants cheap, expendable, tireless soldiers.
This is incredible. Seems like a big achievement.
The only thing that bothers me is what happens when robots finally automated "all the mundane day-to-day tasks" including our jobs, what is there left to do for common folks who are not geniuses working at Google/Anthropic/ChatGPT or occupy the C-Suite of these companies?
The question of agency and the question of income are different. The former - we do things manually that can be automated for fun all the time and make entirely arbitrary weird things to do for no value. However some find it hard to move from work to leisure.
For income - who knows?
No mention of whether the robot's models run locally or in the cloud. Ie. Does it require an internet connection?
For a robot to be in my house it would have to run locally, there's no way I'm allowing one that runs in the cloud to operate my washing machine for example.
It does mention it though?
> Many robotic applications need to operate without network latency or internet connectivity. Gemini Robotics On-Device 2 is built specifically to handle these constraints — it is our most-efficient vision-language-action model (VLA) optimized to run locally on robotic devices.
Ah thankyou I missed that, good to hear.
> It can better detect when humans are nearby, trigger safety tool calls and bring the robot to a safe stop if someone approaches too closely.
If the robots stop when humans are too close, wouldn't that mean that robots for close interaction or handling of humans need a whole other level of control?
Yes. That's a whole other level of difficulty to accomplish safely.
Also, "better" is doing a lot of lifting here, meaning it still fails regularly.
I believe that LLMs represent the future of robotics in this field. Of course, I don’t want a robot uprising, but if our goal is simply to increase the utility of robots in manufacturing (within the necessary constraints), then LLMs are the only powerful path forward.
I'm asked to prove I'm not a bot if I want to watch the top video with sound.
it s a trick question, they are actually looking for robots
And absolutely nothing in your company charter says the military won't be allowed to buy it. Y'all think we've never seen a Terminator movie before, huh.
What would be the hallucination equivalent of such robots?
falling down and breaking things?
I do think robotics would come up with more safety mechanisms (provably safe motion planning etc) just because the risk is a lot more serious than LLMs spitting half-truths
I know what the post-hallucination reasoning of such robots will be:
"Dave, would you like to get the instructions on how to stitch that head back to the neck?"
Is the fundamental challenge for AI directed movement in 3D space the continuity of the environment? Vs LLM's which train on discrete and limited token sets.
Can someone that uses these models provide some tips or docs on how best to get to use these at home to test around? Is the best thing a virtual environment?
That's the most expensive piece of toast ever made! I want one. Can in open the jar of jam yet?
When will robotics' GPT-3.5 moment arrive?
I always wonder why these robot forms don't have cameras and distance sensors on every single joint, processing costs I guess?
Cost, weight, durability. For cameras, bandwidth.
Why do we want to add more bodies on a finite plane of existence with an infinitely-expanding base (humans)?
We have a finite plane of existence (Earth), with an infinitely-expanding consumer base (humans), and we want to add robotic competition to that finite plane of existence? The data center AI is more appealing (I guess) since it doesn't compete literally shoulder-to-shoulder with me. Why do we want dexterous robots when we have humans?
We show many signs of stopping our infinite expansion.
As for why we want dexterous robots, the obvious answer is to do things that we don't want to do. Things that are back-breaking, disgusting, dangerous, or just plain boring.
There's one of this that is a language model; are the rest reinforcement learning models?
> we are teaching robots intelligent whole-body control, fine dexterity, *and teamwork*...
That's the most Skynet thing ever.
Do these learn?
It would be cool to have a robot that can be taught to drive the same way we might teach a teenager to drive.
No one has any idea how to achieve something like this.
Are there any AI models that can be taught?
I do - it's pretty simple actually.
1. Build a robot with the capability to learn to drive a car 2. Put it in the car 3. Teach it to drive the car
anyone notice the jokes they put in?
* bot: "im nervous. is that a microphone?"
* bot: "great job, you're a machine!" (said to another bot, a machine)
* bot: clicks "i am [not] a robot" button on a computer
How close are they to Chinese ?
Paint it yellow and ask why it is hiding a nuclear battery
Robots that look humanoid are a marketing gimmick.
I said the same thing about chat bots trying to act human, but evidently that's what people want. I still cringe whenever an LLM uses "I"
nothing new, at least 12~18mo behind tesla, shame on Google
Didn’t we see Chinese robots doing kung fu??
Yeah, but that doesn’t mean the west won’t try to catch up
Given the rapid advancements in AI. It is not what we thought it will, what it is, what we didn't wanted it to be, but it is great for being what it is.
We're getting closer
Still can't make a page scroll smoothly though.
Now they are coming for the plumbers.
Still waiting for self driving car to bring me one robotic plumber to my construction site.
You won't be waiting more than 5-10 years.
Level 5 automomy has been "only five years away" for 15 years
You're probably thinking of Level 4. No one thought Level 5 was coming before 2050 until a few years ago.
And Level 4 is already here, scaling up, while we're seeing the first real signs of Level 5 (Tesla FSD Supervised).
The progress here is staggering - I'm not sure why you're so cynical!
For those who live in SF, for example, the progress is obvious. Not speaking for the other person in the thread, but most people have not seen an autonomous car working in real life. Also, many had assumed that freeway driving would happen first (as opposed to complicated city driving), but it turned out that the velocities involved carried too much risk during development. I agree with you, there has been much more progress than I had expected.
This is why I'm skeptical https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_predictions_for_autono...
What's the point of "releasing it"? It only makes sense in the labs, and what would calling your APIs give "me" as a researcher, other than a baseline to beat? mah the model is real, but it feels 100% internal
What's the point of not releasing it? Let people play with it and get some experience with it for a price.
Is this why chinese robots got banned?
Video has too many cuts, similar to kungfu movies where the actor doesn't know how to fight.
What does this mean for intrinsic, the moonshot they brought back into the fold in feb?
have you seen that NEO robot's hands, wild
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QRyXV3csReA
Deepbody
we'll be having sex with robots in the near future
Sounds like a lot of work I'd probably want my robot to have set with the other robot for me
I'm a researcher at Deepmind that contributed to these models. (And the opinions here are my own)
Just want to say, Deepmind is a great place to work and the only (Edit: one the few unique labs!) lab where you can move from large frontier models (Gemini), frontier open models (Gemma), robotics (what you see here), science (weather, biology, more) and basically any other topic related to intelligence. It's really an incredible place to be, with incredible people. Consider joining! And thank you for the enthusiasm here.
Good stuff, yay, good.
I do want to pick a nit in this one,
> and the only lab where
I do think Allen Institution for AI (AI2) is has coverage across most of these domains ( albeit their frontier isn't nearly so far out, hopefully the $152m NSF awarded them + Nvidia is a fruitful partnership there).
For example, robotics: MolmoBot, MolmoSpaces, MolmoAct, https://allenai.org/embodied-ai
Totally fair and thank you for nit picking! I edited my comment. AI2 is doing amazing stuff, I read their papers and code all the time and appreciate how open they are.
Congrats! Awesome release! (can i have access)
Join the waitlist! It's in the blogpost
Hey Ravin, I’m executive director for AGI Society which has run the AGI conference (https://agi-conference.org/) since 2007
We’d love to invite you to speak about your work next year at the AGI Conference if you’re open to it.
Alexander Lerchner spoke this year and was great.
I’ll reach out on email if you have a preferred one, it was unclear on your site which email you prefer.
Would you mind expanding on the difference between frontier model development and open model development? I was under the impression that they were nearly the same thing and would thus be handled by the same team. My impression is that open models tend to go through more safety testing and are generally smaller, but are otherwise the same thing. Shouldn't most of what is commonly referred to as 'AI research' be applicable to both?
What are you doing to prevent abuses by governments, corporations and militaries? (non snarky question)
How much of this technology is going to benefit and uplift the Common Peasant and how is going to be used for increasing surveillance and control?
Lol.. why do people ask employees this stuff as though they're the ones controlling big decisions?
"Just following orders"
is how some of the worst shit in human history went down.
They're literally CREATING the tech and tools and you're saying don't even question them about potential and proven misuse?? lol
They're the first people that should be asked this question.
I don't think OP's "Why do people ask employees this stuff" question implies you _shouldn't_ ask, but rather wonders why people even ask when you're obviously not going to get an answer (and if you do, it'll be a non-answer filtered through PR/HR/MR/etc).
Thank you.. this was what I meant.
Well they posted on a public forum and it wasn't a rude question or anything, in fact it's one of the hottest topics in the zeitgeist and here we have one of the people near the center of it.
Right on the HN frontpage near this post: "Google will expand age checks on Android worldwide till the end of the year"
NOT asking them the "taboo" questions is the dumb thing to do
Cogs in the machine do not have the decision power nor even the visibility over how those decisions are made.
What are you going to do? Only work for tiny little companies with very limited local reach? What if you have the ability and the desire to work on global projects, even if you don't get to make the big decisions?
Because we're nearing the endgame...perfect total surveillance and control will be possible soon
So glad to see that you are still involved and have your inspiring enthusiasm! Meeting you was a huge inflection point in my journey with ML/AI.
How are you engaging with the fundamental problems explained in this blog post https://rodneybrooks.com/why-todays-humanoids-wont-learn-dex...
- the relatively crude tactile and proprioceptive sensing apparatuses of robots when compared to humans
- the limited availability of multisensory, perception-action coupled training data
Genuinely curious!
This seems like a post by someone who hasn't really ingested the bitter lesson.
Eg, even LeRobot (without proper fingers) can fold clothes now: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dPe9v4gqbdg
The labs are spending huge money collecting "multisensory, perception-action coupled training data" (eg, there is the one in NY that gives you free cleaning in return for video data from the cleaner).
Edit: The Gemini Robotics blog post has a video of it tying knots too. That's pretty good.
You can point to the bitter lesson to support your claim, but on the other hand I can point to the massive investment in capital and time to get self-driving cars viable to support my more bearish view.
Yesterday evening I rode 12 miles in a Waymo actively dodging pedestrians and obstacles dynamically in an open ended environment. Multiples better experience than the two Ubers I had later that evening.
What are you bearish about precisely?
It is amusing to observe that the tech marketing of today are milking the shit out of this trick.
The trick being to tread continuously through some non-obvious happy path. And average people will be convinced that you really have some breakthrough tech.
But hey, this is not something new. Magicians were taking advantage of such things for centuries ..
Please describe the trick you’re suggesting
1. Make some thing that work in very limited of amount of real world cases 2. Deploy it somewhere where it won't encounter things it won't handle. 3. Market the shit out of the above fact and how well it work there. 4. Let the naive population who have a tendency to take one look, and imagine how it will automatically progress to some arbitrary influx point. 5. Get a lot of funding from people in point 4 and feed it to point 3, and keep going.
> 1. Make some thing that work in very limited of amount of real world cases
> 2. Deploy it somewhere where it won't encounter things it won't handle
Who are doing these? Waymo? how? You're talking BS if you can't elaborate.
Of course it will appear BS to you. That is why it works.
Why couldn’t this trick be pulled off two decades ago?
After all autonomous vehicles has been well funded research since the 1980s the DARPA grand challenge being one of the previously most important benchmarks.
I think you might just need a history lesson friend
Internet and the ad/marketing/propoganda/pr powers that comes with it..
I'm not talking about the state of today's self-driving cars, I'm talking about how we got to here. Also don't forget the overarching claim regarding lack of sensor and actuator fidelity in the parent comment; self-driving cars in contrast have expensive LIDAR in them and we still don't think camera-based self-driving cars are safe enough.
Yea we got here through recognizing the bitter lesson is a description of reality and adopting techniques that exploit it
The entire history of this field is precisely that problem and repeatedly demonstrated
I don't know how you can read my comment, not respond to my comment saying that today's self-driving cars use LIDAR, and continue to reiterate your point.
I don't think I was clear and explicit, it being tedious to write, and I apologize for that. I also apologize for shifting the goalposts as I had not written out my own position, which is not exactly in the "grandparent commenter"'s position (that I had not previously given enough attention understanding), but it is also not in agreement with yours. I don't mean to say that we are not presently in the "bitter lesson" (your idea of what the bitter lesson says) regime. I definitely think that a lot of progress can be done right now by emphasizing the humanoid robotics platform as a foundation. What I mean to say is that I don't know if that platform with the hardware we have today is sufficient for parity with human housekeeping tasks in the domains that we wish it to have parity. The bitter lesson itself (not your understanding of it) is in fact silent on this as it is in relation to feature engineering, where it is a clear point, but you seem to be adapting it uncritically wholesale to mean something more than what it is written about. My position is that, it is unclear whether today's sensor platform is sufficient for parity. It is less strong than the blog post author's "Why Today’s Humanoids Won’t Learn", it is a "We can't say whether or not today's humanoids will learn", but it is something that also contradicts a "the bitter lesson means today's humanoids will learn" thesis.
The self-driving car supports my claim, because after so much investment in capital and time, we ended up with a car with comparatively expensive LIDAR sensors as our preferred platform.
Tesla's entire fleet runs on raw cameras. Including the driverless Robotaxi vehicles - which are basically a 1:1 match to how Waymo operates.
Plenty of hecklers were saying "you can't self-drive on cameras", and some still try. But Tesla's self-driving on cameras, and it seems to work fine. While Waymo's self-driving on fat sensor stacks, and it also seems to work fine. Sensors don't seem to be a differentiator of self-driving performance.
I don't think anything about self-driving tech supports your claim. Tesla was bullish on AI all the way, and Waymo has also shifted towards highly integrated end to end AI. It's the AI advances that make self-driving tractable - not anything else.
Precisely how is the inclusion of LIDAR counter to the bitter lesson?
Using LIDAR is of course the perfect example of the bitter lesson. More data makes for better outcomes.
Precisely, and quite confusing why that isn’t obvious
But how does LLMs help in making chat bots better, help with this "multi-sensory" data. Has this anything to do with the current AI surge with LLMs?
Has it been demonstrated? Or is it just that such things now get a lot of funding now, for no good reason?
>But how does LLMs help in making chat bots better, help with this "multi-sensory" data.
All three offerings from the linked blog post are either Vision LLMs or Vision/Action LLMs.
It's a load of bollocks, and always was.
Modern robotics is, at its core, not a hardware problem. It's an AI problem. We have plenty of headroom in the hardware - what we don't have is an AI good enough to utilize it. We don't know the practical limits of current hardware because we can't make a robot AI that would make the hardware a meaningful bottleneck.
Today's robots don't fail at tasks because they have poor fingers. They fail because they don't know how to perform those tasks. If you put an effort into solving that? You get demos like: Gemini Robotics 2 tying a garbage bag. Take one long look at that and think of manual dexterity.
Human body is crude and suboptimal in a thousands different ways, and all of it is salvaged by advanced intelligence.
I’m a mechanical design engineer (10 years) turned software engineer (7 years in autonomous vehicles). Is there a particular role you would recommend for someone with my experience?
Is DeepMind basically Google innovation hub ???
What happens when those ideas need to be scaled into real products, though? For instance, I can't really imagine Google being fully committed to manufacturing and selling robotic arms at scale.
Don't worry, after ten years of research a few employees will quit and form their own company, and release a robot arm, which will spur Google to release their own version 3 months later. (As is tradition)
Important question: how many engineers does it take to teach a robot how to screw in a light bulb?
...and how many people to label all of the examples?
...and do not forget Support, Maintenance and that you will need an forever Cloud-connection...
... we don't know, because this one can't?
Working there feels like a trap.
Why work there when you can start a company? You get to choose the problem you care about most, the people you work with, and your own pace—and if it works, you own the success.
Why accept all the rules Google will force on you, are those rules optimized for you or for them?
How do I reliably apply? And is there a remote role?
[flagged]
What you are actually asking for is political commentary from someone just going about their job. They absolute best thing they could do is ignore the bait.
> political commentary from someone
No it depends on what they choose to answer. canyon289's account self-describes as Bayesian, a hallmark of rationalists, one of whose taglines is "politics is the mind-killer". Nonetheless https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/iKm2FhpWkuuBojm82/why-i-left... is one of the most upvoted posts on LessWrong (the big rationalist site) of all time. Most of the comments don't touch on the politics of the situation at all.
> someone just going about their job
They're doing a little bit more than that by actively recruiting (even more so than the usual "if this interests you we're hiring" bit at the end of a post). So I'm doing a little bit more by asking them about a recent high profile departure. It's a little bit different from the usual way employees chime in on threads.
if DeepMind is such a great place to work, why have several leading researchers recently left for Anthropic and OpenAI? Are the problems limited to certain teams, or are the reports misleading?
Have those leads that left said why they left? Could it just be money?
Is there a broad benchmark like SWEBench or METR that’s credible for overall progress on dexterity tasks? I’m curious on the trendline for human parity.
How do you explain applicants that the real goal of your work is folding underwear while the internet is flooded with announcements like this https://www.unitree.com/mobile/As2-W and people explaining how weapons could be mounted on such a thing?
Its almost like Google selling Boston Dynamics was a bad idea.
If it has intelligence of Gemini... well, good luck...
Gemini is the only LLM I've ever experienced that decided on its own to tell me that something was a bad idea. Which, ok, in itself it's not a bad thing, we actually need more of that instead of the pathological sycophancy that all current models suffer from.
But in a physical robot? Yeah, that thing is going to punch me in the face, eventually. Or worse.
I use Sonnet and Opus everyday. Believe me, it's very common they tell me that something is bad idea, write a rationale and suggest better solutions.
Gemini doesn't remember almost anything after 2-3 follow ups. I have to paste the same "system prompt" at the top of each message and it still doesn't understand it.
> Believe me, it's very common they tell me that something is bad idea
In my experience, the most they dare is to suggest better alternatives, which is the polite and useful version of telling me something is a bad idea.
But in general, they do not tell you "this whole idea is complete bogus". So far, only Gemini did. Don't even remember what about.
It's funny how Google is essentially trying to compete with the software side of Tesla only - Waymos (which AFAIK they plan to partner with major automakers), now this, etc.
Seems smart. There are dozens of companies that make low-margin cars. There's only one company that has managed to make a working autonomous software driver.
Tesla is the only company to have high-margin mass-market EVs.
True, but their margins only exist because of protectionist US laws (i.e. 100% tariff on Chinese competitors).
What does that have to do with margins?
Not many people would pay $62K for a Tesla Model Y if they could get a BYD Sealion for $37K.
Do you know what 'margins' means?
And even in markets where BYD Sealion is sold - including China - Tesla Model Y outsells it!
Margins means exactly what the poster you are replying to implies: that in the US Tesla has high margins (the difference between cost of good sold and what you get for them) because tarrifs make Chinese brands uncompetitive.
And as Tesla's latest financials showed they are under margin pressure too, even with that: https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/stocks/articles/tesla-tsla...
> in markets where BYD Sealion is sold - including China - Tesla Model Y outsells it!
Sure, but that's because BYD (for example) has both the Atto 3 and the Sealion which overlap in market segment.
Another way to look at it is that they're avoiding some of the expensive parts of making products that use AI, while leaning into their strengths. No Tesla required within the explanation.
That makes it sound like Waymo is copying Tesla when in fact Waymo has been in the works before Tesla even considered self driving.
Bizarre oversimplification.
For both manipulation and autonomous driving, google has invested in approaches with custom hardware, and off-the-shelf hardware, and a blend (which is what waymo is).