Join the discussion
Write your take first — we'll ask for email only when you're ready to publish.
- Hacker News
- 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.by dsign
- 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?
by prima-facie - 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).by jaccola
- > 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.
by xgulfie - 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.
by rstuart4133 - >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.
by heaney-555 - 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.
by YuechenLi - Well they certainly don't intend to rent you one that works offline.by causal
- AFAIK NVidia has a VLA running on their chips with 2B params at 10Hz. They’ve openly published a .5B model running at 10Hzby CardenB
- 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.
by yhjc2692 - 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.by baron816
- agriculture first (mining and manufacturing are already robotizing).by seydor
- Why not both?by heaney-555
- The AI will need generalized robots to build the highly specialized ones.by jameshart
- 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
by bluber84 - Seems like production ready is 2-5 years out though. Not a very long time
- 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.by henpa
- 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.by Petersipoi
- 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.by sib
- 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).
by dr_blueberry - 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.
by logankeenan - and this is good?by ausbah
- 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.
- > 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.
by dragonwriter - 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.
by Geee - Did you look at 1X's artificial tendon driven hands?by Ciantic
- Have you worked construction?
I'd rather have a guy with a crane than a grizzly.
by Gud - 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.
by siekmanj - > 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.
by igleria - 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.
by hermitShell