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canyon289 12 hours ago [-]
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.
Centigonal 10 hours ago [-]
Important question: how many engineers does it take to teach a robot how to screw in a light bulb?
slashdave 5 hours ago [-]
... we don't know, because this one can't?
nevir 9 hours ago [-]
...and how many people to label all of the examples?
KellyCriterion 9 hours ago [-]
...and do not forget Support, Maintenance and that you will need an forever Cloud-connection...
blubber 55 minutes ago [-]
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?
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.
dwohnitmok 44 minutes ago [-]
> 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.
- 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!
ACCount37 48 minutes ago [-]
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.
nl 5 hours ago [-]
This seems like a post by someone who hasn't really ingested the bitter lesson.
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.
qsera 15 minutes ago [-]
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?
jhanschoo 1 hours ago [-]
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.
AndrewKemendo 25 minutes ago [-]
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?
qsera 11 minutes ago [-]
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 ..
theptip 3 hours ago [-]
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.
ed_mercer 5 hours ago [-]
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?
kyrra 2 hours ago [-]
Have those leads that left said why they left? Could it just be money?
5 hours ago [-]
syntaxing 10 hours ago [-]
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?
staplor 11 hours ago [-]
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?
ceroxylon 10 hours ago [-]
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.
jauntywundrkind 12 hours ago [-]
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).
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.
drivebyhooting 9 hours ago [-]
How do I reliably apply? And is there a remote role?
lewismenelaws 12 hours ago [-]
Congrats! Awesome release! (can i have access)
canyon289 11 hours ago [-]
Join the waitlist! It's in the blogpost
tonyhart7 10 hours ago [-]
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.
icepush 8 hours ago [-]
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)
AndrewKemendo 12 hours ago [-]
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.
Razengan 10 hours ago [-]
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?
CaptWorld 10 hours ago [-]
Lol.. why do people ask employees this stuff as though they're the ones controlling big decisions?
sciencejerk 2 hours ago [-]
Because we're nearing the endgame...perfect total surveillance and control will be possible soon
Razengan 10 hours ago [-]
"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.
drusepth 9 hours ago [-]
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).
CaptWorld 8 hours ago [-]
Thank you.. this was what I meant.
Razengan 8 hours ago [-]
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
david-gpu 6 hours ago [-]
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?
Frannky 9 hours ago [-]
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?
xnx 13 hours ago [-]
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.
JeremyNT 12 hours ago [-]
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.
JumpCrisscross 11 hours ago [-]
> 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.)
titzer 9 hours ago [-]
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.
pants2 9 hours ago [-]
After all this time it's still a pain point just to pay them for a Gemini API key.
slashdave 4 hours ago [-]
Don't forget: resources
IanCal 11 hours ago [-]
> 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.
soulofmischief 10 hours ago [-]
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.
ChadNauseam 8 hours ago [-]
Yeah, something surprising to me was that I can't even add a custom MCP to gemini. It has tons of missing features.
BodyCulture 10 hours ago [-]
Everything would be perfect if only you were CEO of both companies!
IanCal 9 hours ago [-]
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.
annzabelle 3 hours ago [-]
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.
areoform 2 hours ago [-]
“I also see that I have two Microsoft Outlooks, and neither one of those are working if you want to remote in and check"
Cdr. Reid Wiseman to Mission Control, Artemis II, Earth-Moon Coast.
soulofmischief 9 hours ago [-]
What is the purpose of this comment?
lII1lIlI11ll 8 hours ago [-]
> 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".
egorthinks 13 hours ago [-]
Google DeepMind was at the forefront of AI, and they are currently developing new concepts while others chase benchmark percentages.
hexeater 13 hours ago [-]
And protein folding + Nobel Prize
tantalor 12 hours ago [-]
Google DeepMind disbands its Nobel-prize winning AlphaFold team
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
freakynit 12 hours ago [-]
And AlphaGo Zero .. probably the first real-world deployment of a self-improving system that beat humans.
BeetleB 9 hours ago [-]
> 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?
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.
AFF87 13 hours ago [-]
Baffles me how this is not that well known
jimbob45 40 minutes ago [-]
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.
ddfarmr 8 hours ago [-]
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.
ai-x 13 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
snek_case 13 hours ago [-]
The thing with drug discovery is that the bottleneck is not coming up with new molecules, etc. It's the multi-year, extremely expensive clinical trials that often don't even succeed. I doubt it will be a big moneymaker for Anthropic and OpenAI, because the best they can hope for is to sell a software product to pharma companies, but the pharma companies already have lots of scientists with a million promising molecules already in study they will never even make it to clinical trials.
In other words, can AI tech help? Probably, but I doubt it's going to be a major money maker, and it won't make a ton of money overnight. It's not like Claude Code where every programmer can begin using it instantly.
ai-x 12 hours ago [-]
If you had asked HN 3 years ago what would code-generating market would be, they would have used the exact same reasoning and given us the opinion "Why no one will pay for glorified auto-complete"
xboxnolifes 12 hours ago [-]
Thr pharma parallel to what tech is doing is replacing clinical trials with AI review. Im not so sure its the same thing.
Petersipoi 12 hours ago [-]
The idea that AI curing cancer, heart disease, aging (you get the idea) won't be a money maker because "clinical trials" is absurd. Of course it will be. Obviously it isn't the same thing as coding agents. But a lot of money makers aren't the same things as coding agents.
snek_case 12 hours ago [-]
In order to cure cancer with AI, you would need to give it complete control over the experimental pipeline, including probably direct robotic access to a web lab, which comes with its own set of risks. It's just not the same problem space as coding at all.
yellow_lead 13 hours ago [-]
OpenAI and Anthropic can't do either of those if they go bankrupt first.
ai-x 13 hours ago [-]
People are going to be surprised by how obscenely profitable both will be in a couple of years
elliotec 12 hours ago [-]
If that ends up being true, they should be very surprised.
We're looking at ~$725B combined hyperscaler capex in 2026 (on a path to $1.08T by 2028) against roughly $25B of AI service revenue in 2025 on $250B+ of infrastructure spend. By 2030, the global data center build-out will require $6.7 trillion in capital expenditure. If hyperscalers require a 25% return on AI-specific capex, the industry needs to generate ~$169B in AI-attributable revenue annually by end of 2028.
A flexible compute market plus three well-capitalized competitors plus Google's internal silicon means nobody gets to hold price. SpaceX's public offering is the best signal we have on this type of thing and it's down 15% from offer price.
It's incredibly unlikely that BOTH OpenAI and Anthropic will be "obscenely" profitable in the next few years. Also very unlikely that even one will be "obscenely" profitable in the next few years.
It is more likely (but still not very) that they both will be simply profitable (not obscenely).
The most probable scenario is that ONE will be somewhat profitable (probably Anthropic) and the other still burning.
ai-x 11 hours ago [-]
You know SpaceX is still publicly valued at $1.5T marketcap, right? (offering price has nothing to do with anything other than ego of founders/bankers).
Yes, I will wait for the correct valuation when all stocks enter the liquidity pool.
OpenAI/Anthropic obscenely profitable is an easy bet (for me)
0x3f 12 hours ago [-]
Seems unlikely. All three market leaders have roughly equivalent products, even ignoring the Chinese models. Google is better vertically integrated, as well. They'll end up competing on price, or worst case capacity rationing.
xnx 12 hours ago [-]
Tight competition and "obscenely profitable" rarely go hand-in-hand.
flextheruler 12 hours ago [-]
This essentially requires tripling the entire tech sector's share of the economy in a few years.
goatlover 11 hours ago [-]
Wasn't this also predicted a couple years ago?
12 hours ago [-]
andriy_koval 12 hours ago [-]
if open models get banned
da_grift_shift 13 hours ago [-]
I love this kind of optimized-for-Xitter drive-by market analysis. Very 2026.
ai-x 12 hours ago [-]
I love how HN ignores past execution results
bigyabai 12 hours ago [-]
I like how someone can ignore that DeepMind invented AlphaFold, while OpenAI and Anthropic have zero experience shipping AI protein folding.
This entire industry might be hopelessly tribalist, nowadays.
rbtprograms 12 hours ago [-]
the word delightful has lost all meaning to me
wslh 12 hours ago [-]
It's way too early to pick winners. This industry is still in the opening moves.
These robots look slow and not very fluid in their motions, but LLMs like ChatGPT also looked very dumb initially. If progress is as fast as LLMs , this could have massive applications in a few years.
pwython 14 hours ago [-]
For house keeping tasks the robotics companies love showing off... it honestly doesn't matter if it takes a robot longer than a human to clean your house. As long as it gets done before you get home from work, no big deal.
qurren 14 hours ago [-]
I'm bearish that they'll be economically viable in the house for a very long time.
For businesses the bar for adoption is very low: If the thing can work repetitive jobs for 24 hours a day and replace 3 shifts, the purchase bar is nominally anything less than 3 x human salary if your budgeting horizon is 1 year. That's a high number, and probably fairly easy to achieve.
For homes, it's a very different bar. You'd have a hard time convincing most American families to purchase anything with a >$1000 price tag. Currently that's pretty much impossible for a humanoid.
si1entstill 13 hours ago [-]
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.
qurren 13 hours ago [-]
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.
jfaat 12 hours ago [-]
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...
yorwba 7 hours ago [-]
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.
nsvd2 13 hours ago [-]
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.
aantix 12 hours ago [-]
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.
drusepth 12 hours ago [-]
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.
rendang 12 hours ago [-]
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
jader201 11 hours ago [-]
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.
nancyminusone 10 hours ago [-]
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.
jader201 8 hours ago [-]
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.
ACCount37 11 hours ago [-]
People in the US buy cars.
Can a household robot provide as much utility as a car? If "yes", the market gets pretty big.
cj 10 hours ago [-]
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.
scotty79 8 hours ago [-]
You'd have to pay me this much to let a human inside my house to do that.
cj 8 hours ago [-]
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.
MostlyStable 6 hours ago [-]
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.
sciencejerk 1 hours ago [-]
Toddlers should learn to pick up their own toys...? Unless we're grooming them for a life of pampered self-absorbed entitlement?
MostlyStable 2 minutes ago [-]
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.
stevep98 6 hours ago [-]
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.
qurren 11 hours ago [-]
Not really. The car is a non-negotiable, like food, unless you live in Boston/NYC/SF or something. The robot is not.
scotty79 7 hours ago [-]
People in Europe also buy cars, even though most of them doesn't really need to.
nancyminusone 10 hours ago [-]
You don't even "need" to clean your house (yes, yes, I know). You do need to drive to work.
didibus 8 hours ago [-]
> 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.
jameshart 13 hours ago [-]
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.
garbageman 13 hours ago [-]
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.
xnx 13 hours ago [-]
> We've had one for ~7 years and it's still going strong
Interested. Which one?
entropic 11 hours ago [-]
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.
Do you use it with multiple cats? I know they advertise it that way but I'm curious where the rubber meets the pavement.
entropic 8 hours ago [-]
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.
jvidalv 12 hours ago [-]
Also interested.
f6v 12 hours ago [-]
Yeah, I heard all it does is smear shit all over itself. Any good brands?
codegeek 12 hours ago [-]
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.
vladgur 12 hours ago [-]
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
codegeek 7 hours ago [-]
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 :)
memonkey 13 hours ago [-]
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.
mrexroad 12 hours ago [-]
> 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.
11 hours ago [-]
lowbloodsugar 13 hours ago [-]
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!
traes 12 hours ago [-]
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.
alnwlsn 10 hours ago [-]
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.
jameshart 9 hours ago [-]
A product doesn’t need to appeal to or reach the average American to be a viable product.
traes 9 hours ago [-]
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.
supern0va 11 hours ago [-]
> 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.
qurren 11 hours ago [-]
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.
supern0va 9 hours ago [-]
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.
heaney-555 14 hours ago [-]
>You'd have a hard time convincing most American families to purchase anything with a >$1000 price tag.
Like cars, they'll likely purchase them through finance deals, with a monthly payment. Or perhaps even rent/lease them.
qurren 13 hours ago [-]
Cars are an absolute necessity in the US unless you live in one of the small handful of cities that have viable public transit. Different thing altogether.
Robots aren't a necessity, and for a price tag in the tens of thousands, most people will just mop their own floors and do their own laundry.
micromacrofoot 12 hours ago [-]
$45k cars are not neccessary though, and that's the average american car loan today
bigfishrunning 12 hours ago [-]
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.
pessimizer 12 hours ago [-]
Why would it be different for a robot?
bigfishrunning 9 hours ago [-]
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%
drusepth 12 hours ago [-]
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.
micromacrofoot 12 hours ago [-]
Average monthly payment for both new and used cars is $500-$700
georgemcbay 13 hours ago [-]
> 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.
lovasoa 12 hours ago [-]
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.
mbil 13 hours ago [-]
Leasing seems like it could make sense given rapid upgrades in the technology. Why spend $15k on a home robot that will be obsoleted in the next few years?
garbageman 13 hours ago [-]
Leasing is out, but locked-in subscriptions are in!
kelvinjps10 13 hours ago [-]
At that point why not have a human cleaning service it will probably be cheaper
luckydata 13 hours ago [-]
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.
infinitezest 12 hours ago [-]
Suggesting that a robot is the more privacy friendly option is an interesting take.
Marha01 32 minutes ago [-]
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.
defrost 27 minutes ago [-]
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.
blacksmith_tb 12 hours ago [-]
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.
stirfish 12 hours ago [-]
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.
meowkit 13 hours ago [-]
Much easier to remotely brick a robot too I imagine
michaelmrose 13 hours ago [-]
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.
randomNumber7 13 hours ago [-]
If you have a robot doing household work you can spend more time at work /S
jaccola 13 hours ago [-]
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.
tartoran 9 hours ago [-]
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.
nearbuy 13 hours ago [-]
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.
monknomo 13 hours ago [-]
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
nearbuy 4 hours ago [-]
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?
imp0cat 24 minutes ago [-]
Mostly to save water and energy. I have a hard time believing the robot would be more efficient washing dishes by hand.
xnx 13 hours ago [-]
Have 2 dishwashers, and you never need to load or unload (as an extra step).
codegeek 12 hours ago [-]
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.
jonplackett 13 hours ago [-]
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?)
lanthissa 11 hours ago [-]
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.
f6v 13 hours ago [-]
Self-driving car brings a robot cleaner to your door step once a week.
pessimizer 12 hours ago [-]
> 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.
verdverm 8 hours ago [-]
I think ~car is a more likely range, there's a lot of value in cooking / cleaning, Americans buy cars pretty frequently
luckydata 13 hours ago [-]
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.
tootie 13 hours ago [-]
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.
kibwen 13 hours ago [-]
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.
neutronicus 14 hours ago [-]
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.
soperj 13 hours ago [-]
> 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.
infecto 12 hours ago [-]
$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).
rfrey 12 hours ago [-]
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.
neutronicus 12 hours ago [-]
2500 finished square feet in a MCOL east coast metro (Baltimore).
Wondering if you're closer to the southern border or something.
soperj 11 hours ago [-]
Southern border of Canada yeah.
pertymcpert 13 hours ago [-]
I have a 1300 sqft house, 3b2b. Costs me around $200 for a cleaning.
soperj 11 hours ago [-]
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?
drusepth 12 hours ago [-]
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.
neutronicus 12 hours ago [-]
Similar here for 2500 finished sq ft.
qurren 13 hours ago [-]
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.
Yeah, the dishwasher takes much longer to do the dishes than I do by hand, but that's cool. That said, the dishwasher is out of the way.
I don't think we'll get household robots anytime soon. Hell, the only ones that can afford them will be the same that would hire human household help.
FartyMcFarter 14 hours ago [-]
> Hell, the only ones that can afford them will be the same that would hire human household help.
But maybe they'd rather deal with a robot than a human?
RandomLensman 14 hours ago [-]
Honestly: why?
FartyMcFarter 14 hours ago [-]
I don't want a person I don't know very well in my space.
That aside: if I'm lucky enough to find a person who's good and reliable, they might move away, switch jobs etc.
It has all the headaches that come with hiring and managing someone, because, well, it is exactly that... If I don't want to be a manager at work (been there done that, happy to let others do it and get the raise that comes along with it), I sure as heck don't want to do it at home.
nozzlegear 13 hours ago [-]
Usually you hire a cleaning company who sends a person they've hired and vetted to clean, you don't have to deal with all of that stuff.
FartyMcFarter 13 hours ago [-]
Then I have to deal with whichever random person they decide to send. I can't be the only one who finds this annoying (even if I'm not in the majority).
RandomLensman 13 hours ago [-]
You'd need to manage the robot, too, I would think. In my experience, I rather manage people than machines.
margalabargala 13 hours ago [-]
Sure, but others have the opposite preference. Machines tend to be more predictable.
RandomLensman 13 hours ago [-]
I think machines are just unpredictable in different ways (for example, changes from software updates).
micromacrofoot 12 hours ago [-]
I prefer machines
kibwen 13 hours ago [-]
> 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.
seasox 14 hours ago [-]
Robots don‘t steal and don‘t want a raise.
RandomLensman 13 hours ago [-]
If there is a subscription in there somewhere, prices could change.
pertymcpert 13 hours ago [-]
It's ok, we get it you don't want one. I would happily pay $20k-$30k for one if it worked well. I know a lot of people who would.
RandomLensman 13 hours ago [-]
I might even get one as I like trying new tech if and when, but I have no issue with hiring humans either and humans so far "fail" very differently from machines (as in a lot of software). I find the latter far less predictable and controllable.
goatlover 11 hours ago [-]
They'll just spy on you along with the smart tv, phone and flock camera at the street corner.
iinnPP 14 hours ago [-]
The list of plausible answers is long enough as to question why you felt the need to include the word honestly, irony? One example: social anxiety.
RandomLensman 13 hours ago [-]
Not irony: why manage machines with all the issues that go with that instead of people?
Marha01 13 hours ago [-]
Tell me you are not an introvert without telling me...
I don't want a person I barely know regularly going all over my apartment. What if they discover... nevermind.
A robot, on the other hand? Hell yeah!
luckydata 13 hours ago [-]
you don't need to be an introvert to find that line of reasoning short sighted. I'm plenty extroverted and I still don't want to deal with people coming to my house to clean it. It's very invasive and they rarely do a good job. A robot that I can "train" to do exactly what I need and constantly works in the background would be a HUGE value add to my lifestyle.
RandomLensman 12 hours ago [-]
The difference might be that I don't believe in these "machine gods of cleaning" being the thing to arrive (looking at current consumer goods) and then the boundary for what to choose shifts a lot if one is willing to deal with humans. The latter also doesn't need to be so foreign, e.g., could be someone already working for a friend.
terio 14 hours ago [-]
Less liability?
tartoran 9 hours ago [-]
You think robots can't malfunction or be hacked to do some nefarious things in the household?
fidotron 13 hours ago [-]
Humans have emotions. Best avoided.
RajT88 12 hours ago [-]
It's been said that people who do not have a high EQ gravitate towards tech, because machines are easier to understand than people.
gretch 11 hours ago [-]
I feel like people who have high EQ should actually grasp the infinite depth and complexity of even the median human.
Just imagine, there’s a woman Alice who cleans your home once a month. On this particular day, she had a fight with her husband this morning on (something completely unrelated to you).
Do you expect her to check her emotions at the door when she enters your space? Or is she going to give really bad vibes while she is moving around your house?
fidotron 8 hours ago [-]
It's been said that people that say this are transparently trying to manipulate other people, which is why the others prefer to cut off all potential for tedious negotiations.
This is the same reason people prefer buying Tesla cars direct instead of having to make a deal at a dealership. If they all had high EQ maybe they'd prefer the dealership model after all.
RajT88 5 hours ago [-]
> It's been said that people that say this are transparently trying to manipulate other people
Tech does also attract grumpy people.
The reason this idea stuck in my memory when I read it - is that it resonated with me. To some extent I feel this way.
fidotron 5 hours ago [-]
> Tech does also attract grumpy people.
You have cause and effect wrong; it just makes people that have to deal with the people in and around the tech industry grumpy.
CamperBob2 13 hours ago [-]
With a robot housemaid, I wouldn't have to get dressed. :-P
More seriously:
- I wouldn't feel obligated to 'pre-clean' anything. Who wants to come across as a thoughtless/careless slob whose personal habits amount to borderline-abusive demands on the cleaning staff? Not me... and where does that line get drawn, anyway?
- I wouldn't worry about stuff being picked up and misplaced
- I have never had problems with maids stealing stuff, but I know others have
- Cleaning can be initiated or postponed as needed, with no dependencies on someone else's schedule
RandomLensman 13 hours ago [-]
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.
kibwen 13 hours ago [-]
> With a robot housemaid, I wouldn't have to get dressed. :-P
Well, as long as you don't mind the workers in the robot company's telemetrics department whacking it to your robot's video feed.
CamperBob2 12 hours ago [-]
They can jerk themselves silly, IDGAF. When the 'Black Mirror' screenwriters get involved, though, I'll require some back-end participation of the financial kind.
(I'm being facetious here: nothing that transmits data out of the house is going to be deployed to run household robots, at least not in my house. Even if I didn't care, I can't make that call on behalf of family members or guests. Then there's the obvious concern that the robotics company would sell the data to my homeowners' insurance company, health insurance company, and who knows who else.)
icepush 8 hours ago [-]
For the robot to function without teleoperation, sota is for it to be using a model that runs on chips about 5-10x the cost of what is being discussed here. How do you propose for that without transmission of data out of your house ?
CamperBob2 8 hours ago [-]
I've pretty much made my peace with the idea of spending on GPUs what I used to spend on sports cars.
That being said, by the time the kinematic hardware needed to build a robotic housekeeper is available for home use, I don't think the brainpower is going to be a problem. There's nothing in Ex Machina that couldn't run on a couple of RTX 6000s.
verdverm 8 hours ago [-]
"hey Rosie, the cat yakked on the rug again"
(real-time mess handling)
sagarm 13 hours ago [-]
The dishwasher is out of the way because you made space for it out of the way. We'll probably adapt our spaces for robots too eventually.
For example, you could store far more things out of easy human reach.
millerm 14 hours ago [-]
Exactly. People buy those automated circular floor vacuums. Anyone can get it done with a regular broom/vacuum in a small fraction of the time it takes for those things. Just like I drive an electric car. It charges while I sleep. It doesn't matter if an ICE can fuel in a few minutes.
Razengan 10 hours ago [-]
We all know sexbots will be the real killer app
moffkalast 13 hours ago [-]
"That's fair, you are absolutely right I should not have unscrewed the water hose and put it away before turning on the valve to water the plants, even though you specified that order, I should've used some common sense."
There is going to be so much pain from VLA malicious compliance. If the current gen of LLMs are anything to go by I can already see it being an hilariously massive problem. People are careless.
claaams 13 hours ago [-]
This was my thought too. An unsupervised robot can cause 10s of thousands in damage by accidentally ripping a water line and flooding your house or just breaking all of your dishes. There’s no level to how dumb and awful LLMs can hallucinate
doctorpangloss 14 hours ago [-]
> it honestly doesn't matter if it takes a robot longer than a human to clean your house
it depends. in order for my slow ass Roomba to clean my floors, I have to move a bunch of things out of the way and not use the room.
on the flip side, i think this "the robot cannot automate the whole task" thing is reductive too. suffice it to say, EVERYTHING matters, there honestly nothing that "honestly doesn't matter."
The difference between gpt 2 and 3 was insane. 2 could generate limericks when it wasn't repeating a word 300x. 3 could actually do some things. By comparison gemini robotics has hardly changed at all.
I will also point out that slow, non-fluid robotics is on a totally different level of difficulty from fast fluid motion. Asimov could walk pretty smoothly, but it didn't fall over because it used a very careful sequence that was never unbalanced; you could pause at any point without falling over. Move faster, like boston dynamics, and you need to account for the change in balance from your arms swinging... or rather, you need to be able to account for the rotational inertia etc from moving multiple masses along complex paths with multiple points of articulation at hundreds or thousands of times per second.
An algorithm to fold tshirts 90% of the time is easy. The cloth hangs down by gravity and you can just look for right angles (corners), find their coordinates with binocular matching, and move them to meet each other. Getting 99%, or folding them quickly, so that the fabric is actually moving instead of just hanging still- incredibly, incredibly more complex.
fc417fc802 13 hours ago [-]
> folding them quickly, so that the fabric is actually moving instead of just hanging still- incredibly, incredibly more complex.
TBF fabric is much more difficult to simulate than a bipedal body is.
As I recall openai had mujoco playing soccer nearly 10 years ago. Obviously real world bodies are much more difficult but I'd be curious to learn why that is.
kibwen 12 hours ago [-]
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.
gretch 9 hours ago [-]
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.
boelboel 9 hours ago [-]
Waymo will have existed for ~25 years by the time it'll be available in most US cities, that's a long while.
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.
mrinterweb 6 hours ago [-]
Look at robotics demonstrations on YouTube from one or two years ago, and compare that to where we are today. It seems reasonable to me that general purpose robotics may be able to outmaneuver your average human in a few years. At least one robot has surpassed what I could do https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xha2TJ_1C6Q
ghostly_s 10 hours ago [-]
This is the first press videos I’ve seen of 1x speed that seems reasonable, imho. Though I see elsewhere they report only 50-75% success rate- not clear if that's first attempt, or total?
ChaitanyaSai 14 hours ago [-]
We don't get virtuous feedback loops in hardware though. Muscles are incredible engineering that took half a billion years. Token generation (speech) is low hundred thousands maybe. Unless of course improved AI navigates the space of ideas so well that it can give us alloys or synthetic flesh that does twitch as fast...
bastardoperator 13 hours ago [-]
These robots are unusable in their current form. Slow and expensive, humans perform this work better and cheaper. Looks like every other robot before it, a bunch of servos and no brain.
mwt 13 hours ago [-]
> If progress is as fast as LLMs
Is this the new "x technology is a year away" ?
GaggiX 14 hours ago [-]
I believe that it's also for safety, these robots would easily destroy themselves if not restrained (and cause damage).
drbioart 13 hours ago [-]
Better to go slow and controlled. Giving physical action to a model is dangerous and must be carefully monitored. Slow is good. Oversight is important.
gretch 9 hours ago [-]
I agree
I only wish I could convince some humans in my life to slow down and do things with care.
cute_boi 14 hours ago [-]
yes at 1k tok/sec i think these robots will be fast and very fluid.
Geee 12 hours ago [-]
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.
krisoft 12 hours ago [-]
> 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.
Geee 11 hours ago [-]
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.
siekmanj 10 hours ago [-]
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.
devindotcom 11 hours ago [-]
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.
kridsdale1 10 hours ago [-]
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.
hermitShell 12 hours ago [-]
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.
novafunc 9 hours ago [-]
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.
Geee 11 hours ago [-]
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.
random3 12 hours ago [-]
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.
Geee 11 hours ago [-]
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.
AnodicElegy 12 hours ago [-]
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.
JumpCrisscross 11 hours ago [-]
> 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.
siekmanj 11 hours ago [-]
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.
Geee 7 hours ago [-]
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.
siekmanj 5 hours ago [-]
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.
Ciantic 11 hours ago [-]
Did you look at 1X's artificial tendon driven hands?
creaturemachine 11 hours ago [-]
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.
aabhay 14 hours ago [-]
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.
adityashankar 14 hours ago [-]
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)
dyauspitr 8 hours ago [-]
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.
p1esk 14 hours ago [-]
It’s still at GPT-1 level, but GPT-2 moment feels imminent.
tavavex 12 hours ago [-]
What signs point to an inevitable GPT-2 moment in this field?
p1esk 10 hours ago [-]
This blog post
probablyabot 6 hours ago [-]
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.
utopiah 14 hours ago [-]
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.
tamimio 13 hours ago [-]
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.
logankeenan 14 hours ago [-]
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.
dragonwriter 13 hours ago [-]
> 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.
wartywhoa23 11 hours ago [-]
> this is very good if capital is effectively democratized
Are there any indications to think it's possible in our world?
RandomLensman 14 hours ago [-]
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.
logankeenan 14 hours ago [-]
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.
ausbah 14 hours ago [-]
and this is good?
ToValueFunfetti 14 hours ago [-]
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.
andsoitis 14 hours ago [-]
If all goes well, imagine a world in which you work because you want to not because you have to.
georgemcbay 13 hours ago [-]
> 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
IAmGraydon 12 hours ago [-]
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.
mitthrowaway2 8 hours ago [-]
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.
alexashka 9 hours ago [-]
You are using 'basic' economics to predict the future with 'absolute' certainty?
Rhetorical.
wartywhoa23 11 hours ago [-]
They are not in denial, they're spreading PR narratives of AI corporations / VC hedge funds, no matter if willingly or out of naivety.
mmh0000 13 hours ago [-]
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.
Marha01 13 hours ago [-]
> 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.
wffurr 14 hours ago [-]
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.
PostOnce 1 hours ago [-]
Once upon a time, optimism was plausible.
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.
henpa 13 hours ago [-]
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.
sib 11 hours ago [-]
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.
wartywhoa23 11 hours ago [-]
Fucking hell, hiring a robot to care after an elderly parent.
Now that's some disturbing shit.
sib 6 hours ago [-]
"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?
overlords 8 hours ago [-]
have you ever bathed or changed diaper on old people?
fipar 8 hours ago [-]
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.
wartywhoa23 8 hours ago [-]
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.
philipkglass 7 hours ago [-]
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.
Petersipoi 12 hours ago [-]
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.
13 hours ago [-]
prima-facie 14 hours ago [-]
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?
heaney-555 14 hours ago [-]
>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.
prima-facie 13 hours ago [-]
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.
jonas21 8 hours ago [-]
Why is a Roomba or automated rubbish disposal system more "ethically right" than a humanoid robot?
prima-facie 8 hours ago [-]
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?
seydor 11 hours ago [-]
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
rstuart4133 8 hours ago [-]
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.
prima-facie 8 hours ago [-]
This is exactly my point, thank you.
xgulfie 14 hours ago [-]
> 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).
dr_blueberry 8 hours ago [-]
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.
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.
YuechenLi 13 hours ago [-]
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.
yhjc2692 12 hours ago [-]
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.
causal 3 hours ago [-]
Well they certainly don't intend to rent you one that works offline.
CardenB 13 hours ago [-]
AFAIK NVidia has a VLA running on their chips with 2B params at 10Hz. They’ve openly published a .5B model running at 10Hz
YuechenLi 12 hours ago [-]
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.
SparkyMcUnicorn 12 hours ago [-]
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.
CardenB 12 hours ago [-]
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?
baron816 13 hours ago [-]
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.
jameshart 13 hours ago [-]
The AI will need generalized robots to build the highly specialized ones.
margalabargala 13 hours ago [-]
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.
2 hours ago [-]
jameshart 9 hours ago [-]
If it can make any robot then it’s not very specialized.
margalabargala 7 hours ago [-]
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.
heaney-555 13 hours ago [-]
Why not both?
mlyle 13 hours ago [-]
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.
s08148692 13 hours ago [-]
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
chrsw 13 hours ago [-]
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.
micromacrofoot 12 hours ago [-]
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
baron816 13 hours ago [-]
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.
seydor 11 hours ago [-]
agriculture first (mining and manufacturing are already robotizing).
13 hours ago [-]
LarsDu88 14 hours ago [-]
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.
heaney-555 14 hours ago [-]
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.
LarsDu88 14 hours ago [-]
Where did you get this perf metric? I couldn't find it in the release
striking 14 hours ago [-]
Second chart (it's to the right of the first chart and clicking it to scroll is easier than otherwise)
LarsDu88 14 hours ago [-]
Wow screw lightbulb is lower than tie bag or close ziploc. Pretty surprising.
fernly 14 hours ago [-]
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.
greatony 1 hours ago [-]
nothing new, at least 12~18mo behind tesla, shame on Google
horacemorace 14 hours ago [-]
Fingers crossed this inspires a Chinese lab to release some weights so people can benefit.
Did qwen actually release those robotsuite weights? I can't seem to find them anywhere.
WarmWash 13 hours ago [-]
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.
snek_case 12 hours ago [-]
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.
dsign 13 hours ago [-]
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.
johnnyApplePRNG 13 hours ago [-]
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.
fnoef 11 hours ago [-]
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?
IanCal 11 hours ago [-]
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?
brendong 13 hours ago [-]
Is anyone building non-humanoid robots? Feels like humanoid is limiting the creativity of building a truly useful robot in today's age
Chabsff 13 hours ago [-]
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.
poilcn 12 hours ago [-]
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
gowld 13 hours ago [-]
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.
Chabsff 10 hours ago [-]
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.
numpad0 13 hours ago [-]
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.
nope1000 13 hours ago [-]
In the Xiaomi Model Demo, they have non-humanoid robots
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.
neuronexmachina 11 hours ago [-]
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.
Flere-Imsaho 10 hours ago [-]
Ah thankyou I missed that, good to hear.
tireonfire 11 hours ago [-]
I'm asked to prove I'm not a bot if I want to watch the top video with sound.
seydor 11 hours ago [-]
it s a trick question, they are actually looking for robots
egorthinks 13 hours ago [-]
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.
RandomLensman 14 hours ago [-]
> 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?
officialchicken 14 hours ago [-]
Also, "better" is doing a lot of lifting here, meaning it still fails regularly.
FartyMcFarter 14 hours ago [-]
Yes. That's a whole other level of difficulty to accomplish safely.
zuluonezero 7 hours ago [-]
That's the most expensive piece of toast ever made! I want one. Can in open the jar of jam yet?
caycep 8 hours ago [-]
There's one of this that is a language model; are the rest reinforcement learning models?
kaeland 14 hours ago [-]
Wow, what a time to be alive!
I-M-S 14 hours ago [-]
I would caution against enthusiasm. Anyone opposing those who end up controlling these robots won't be alive for long.
Cthulhu_ 14 hours ago [-]
These robots can't do combat, not effectively anyway, but that's already jumping three stages ahead, because first off, why would they?
13 hours ago [-]
esafak 11 hours ago [-]
Because every country wants cheap, expendable, tireless soldiers.
summarybot 12 hours ago [-]
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.
freakynit 12 hours ago [-]
What would be the hallucination equivalent of such robots?
wartywhoa23 11 hours ago [-]
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?"
yhjc2692 12 hours ago [-]
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
gradus_ad 14 hours ago [-]
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.
butlike 11 hours ago [-]
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?
antonyt 10 hours ago [-]
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.
10 hours ago [-]
aavci 14 hours ago [-]
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?
avdlinde 13 hours ago [-]
I always wonder why these robot forms don't have cameras and distance sensors on every single joint, processing costs I guess?
modeless 13 hours ago [-]
Cost, weight, durability. For cameras, bandwidth.
nphardon 13 hours ago [-]
> we are teaching robots intelligent whole-body control, fine dexterity, *and teamwork*...
That's the most Skynet thing ever.
criddell 13 hours ago [-]
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.
gowld 13 hours ago [-]
No one has any idea how to achieve something like this.
criddell 13 hours ago [-]
Are there any AI models that can be taught?
purplecats 10 hours ago [-]
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
ge96 10 hours ago [-]
Paint it yellow and ask why it is hiding a nuclear battery
walr000s 12 hours ago [-]
Robots that look humanoid are a marketing gimmick.
brap 12 hours ago [-]
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"
wiredbox 13 hours ago [-]
Didn’t we see Chinese robots doing kung fu??
henry2023 13 hours ago [-]
Yeah, but that doesn’t mean the west won’t try to catch up
defrim 14 hours ago [-]
We're getting closer
maelito 9 hours ago [-]
Still can't make a page scroll smoothly though.
secretsatan 8 hours ago [-]
Is this why chinese robots got banned?
krishna180 13 hours ago [-]
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.
SubiculumCode 14 hours ago [-]
Now they are coming for the plumbers.
lnsru 14 hours ago [-]
Still waiting for self driving car to bring me one robotic plumber to my construction site.
heaney-555 14 hours ago [-]
You won't be waiting more than 5-10 years.
xgulfie 13 hours ago [-]
Level 5 automomy has been "only five years away" for 15 years
heaney-555 13 hours ago [-]
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!
SubiculumCode 12 hours ago [-]
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.
_davide_ 14 hours ago [-]
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
jjice 14 hours ago [-]
What's the point of not releasing it? Let people play with it and get some experience with it for a price.
xchip 12 hours ago [-]
Video has too many cuts, similar to kungfu movies where the actor doesn't know how to fight.
lowbloodsugar 13 hours ago [-]
What does this mean for intrinsic, the moonshot they brought back into the fold in feb?
we'll be having sex with robots in the near future
weatherlite 12 hours ago [-]
Sounds like a lot of work I'd probably want my robot to have set with the other robot for me
DonnyV 10 hours ago [-]
Its almost like Google selling Boston Dynamics was a bad idea.
khanhnguyen8386 45 minutes ago [-]
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CapyToolkit 14 hours ago [-]
If it has intelligence of Gemini... well, good luck...
dev0p 14 hours ago [-]
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.
CapyToolkit 13 hours ago [-]
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.
uejfiweun 14 hours ago [-]
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.
dawnerd 14 hours ago [-]
That makes it sound like Waymo is copying Tesla when in fact Waymo has been in the works before Tesla even considered self driving.
FartyMcFarter 14 hours ago [-]
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.
xnx 14 hours ago [-]
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.
heaney-555 13 hours ago [-]
Tesla is the only company to have high-margin mass-market EVs.
xnx 12 hours ago [-]
True, but their margins only exist because of protectionist US laws (i.e. 100% tariff on Chinese competitors).
heaney-555 12 hours ago [-]
What does that have to do with margins?
xnx 11 hours ago [-]
Not many people would pay $62K for a Tesla Model Y if they could get a BYD Sealion for $37K.
heaney-555 9 hours ago [-]
Do you know what 'margins' means?
And even in markets where BYD Sealion is sold - including China - Tesla Model Y outsells it!
Rebuff5007 14 hours ago [-]
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).
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.
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.
- 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!
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.
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.
Has it been demonstrated? Or is it just that such things now get a lot of funding now, for no good reason?
What are you bearish about precisely?
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 ..
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
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.
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.
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?
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.
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
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?
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?
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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".
https://www.engadget.com/2225849/google-shuts-down-alphafold...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49098375
Isn't that Checkers right from the dawn of reinforcement learning?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TD-Gammon
In other words, can AI tech help? Probably, but I doubt it's going to be a major money maker, and it won't make a ton of money overnight. It's not like Claude Code where every programmer can begin using it instantly.
We're looking at ~$725B combined hyperscaler capex in 2026 (on a path to $1.08T by 2028) against roughly $25B of AI service revenue in 2025 on $250B+ of infrastructure spend. By 2030, the global data center build-out will require $6.7 trillion in capital expenditure. If hyperscalers require a 25% return on AI-specific capex, the industry needs to generate ~$169B in AI-attributable revenue annually by end of 2028.
A flexible compute market plus three well-capitalized competitors plus Google's internal silicon means nobody gets to hold price. SpaceX's public offering is the best signal we have on this type of thing and it's down 15% from offer price.
It's incredibly unlikely that BOTH OpenAI and Anthropic will be "obscenely" profitable in the next few years. Also very unlikely that even one will be "obscenely" profitable in the next few years.
It is more likely (but still not very) that they both will be simply profitable (not obscenely).
The most probable scenario is that ONE will be somewhat profitable (probably Anthropic) and the other still burning.
Yes, I will wait for the correct valuation when all stocks enter the liquidity pool.
OpenAI/Anthropic obscenely profitable is an easy bet (for me)
This entire industry might be hopelessly tribalist, nowadays.
For example, today, investors are celebrating Microsoft's Azure growth as evidence that its AI investments are paying off: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49110965>
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.
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.
Selling to businesses is much easier, 99% of businesses can afford 200K if it replaces 3 x 70K humans.
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.
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.
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.
Can a household robot provide as much utility as a car? If "yes", the market gets pretty big.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I kind of understand where the feeling comes from, but this also saddens me. What happened to our generation? We're scared of people.
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.
Interested. Which one?
Great machines!
https://www.litter-robot.com/
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
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.
Apparently prices on them have gone way up. The one he has now would cost something like $6K today.
> You'd have a hard time convincing most American families to purchase anything with a >$1000 price tag...
Which I am skeptical of.
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.
Part of the reason is upfront commitment is scary and risky for personal money, but not scary for a business.
As with most things, it'll cater to that demographic and then filter down.
Like cars, they'll likely purchase them through finance deals, with a monthly payment. Or perhaps even rent/lease them.
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.
increasing your spend by 25% is a smaller change then increasing your spend by infinity%
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.
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.
A human house cleaner by definition is a real human looking at your home every time.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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 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.
So the lifestyle stayed inflated.
How big is your house? When we had a cleaning lady it was $70 a go. Under $2000 for every second week.
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).
Wondering if you're closer to the southern border or something.
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.
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.
But maybe they'd rather deal with a robot than a human?
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.
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 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!
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?
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.
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.
You have cause and effect wrong; it just makes people that have to deal with the people in and around the tech industry grumpy.
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
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.
(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.)
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.
(real-time mess handling)
For example, you could store far more things out of easy human reach.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
Is this the new "x technology is a year away" ?
I only wish I could convince some humans in my life to slow down and do things with care.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
Are there any indications to think it's possible in our world?
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.
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
Rhetorical.
I am imagining a world somewhere between the movie Elysium and Oblivion.
Initially, sure. But the price will come down in time, just like with any other technology in history.
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.
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.I certainly don't judge you, but I wanted to offer my perspective.
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.
Could you sleep easily knowing that you have one in your house? What if you oppose the political views of its creators?
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.
1. Do we want to be governed by machines?
2. Do we want to relinquish our freedoms to the whims of corporations?
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
Human deliberate movement runs around 2-10 Hz I think.
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?
Seems to me you'd do better if you built the robots with robots that were specialized in building robots.
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.
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.
Presumably that company could use the Gemini Robotics product to eliminate the remote controller.
[1] https://www.tau-robotics.com/
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.
Nvidia also releases their Cosmos series models.
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.
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.
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?
For income - who knows?
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.
More realistically it seems that llms in several years could help dramatically decrease costs of automation and make it available for more industries
It's easier to redesign the work to be robot-friendly than to deploy a humanoid robot and have it actually work.
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.
Humanoid startup execs just don't talk about that.
https://robotics.xiaomi.com/xiaomi-robotics-1.html
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.
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?
"Dave, would you like to get the instructions on how to stitch that head back to the neck?"
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
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?
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.
That's the most Skynet thing ever.
It would be cool to have a robot that can be taught to drive the same way we might teach a teenager to drive.
* 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
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!
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QRyXV3csReA
But in a physical robot? Yeah, that thing is going to punch me in the face, eventually. Or worse.
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.
And even in markets where BYD Sealion is sold - including China - Tesla Model Y outsells it!
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).