> That's not what I'm seeing. My mom always wanted Google to just answer questions, and now ChatGPT can. She uses it enough in her daily life that she bought a subscription.

Reminds me a lot of AskJeeves :)

I have a feeling that humanoid robots will have other, more intimate, tasks first. Our most primal drives seem to drive the advancement of technology.

Also, mowing the lawn on a very hot day is pretty bad for the grass.

We already have robot grass trimmers and they work pretty well. Why would you want a crude, inefficient, facsimile of a human push or power an inefficient form of mowing the lawn?

You're honestly comparing a computer that can poorly answer questions to a fully functioning robot that does chores?

> ”it’s surely cost competitive to just hire a human to do all those things.”

The cost of labour varies hugely in different parts of the world. The cost of hiring someone in Switzerland is on the order of 100X more expensive compared to Bangladesh, for example.

With many countries currently in an anti-immigration political mindset and with birth rates declining globally, labour costs are likely to continue to increase in the future.

But once a technology like general-purpose humanoid robotics exists, it’s costs are only likely to decrease over time.

A new car is what, $25-50K? Thats a one time cost.

How much do you think youd need to pay a maid every year to do your cooking, cleaning, laundry, dirty dishes etc? Coming once a day for 2 hours would be very expensive and still wouldnt be comparable to a robot that you own and is constantly deployed.

And at that point you’re probably comparing owning a robot to renting one.

> it’s surely cost competitive to just hire a human to do all those things.

Depends on the service life/performance/etc.

As a simple benchmark, I will propose 'Mowing the lawn with a push mower'. Let's wave hands and assume there is a setup on a truck where the mower can be parked and then lifted in.

If you're paying the people doing that lawn-mowing federal minimum wage, at 40 hours a week it's 15K/year.

After 3 years that's 45K, or a little under the current US median price of a new car.

IOW, if the robot costs 45-50K, but can make it through 4 years without expensive maintenance you are still 'saving costs'.

There's hand-waving on both sides of my equation; At least where I live even pushing a lawnmower gets you a bit more than minimum wage (although it is more seasonal,) and also I have no clue if when we say 'new car territory' we are talking median or an 80K EV.

Price aside, the more important factor is that we don’t have the repair infrastructure to make something like this worthwhile yet. For something as critical as a car, we have workshops, spare parts supply chains, and the skilled technicians to do the repairs. Conventional robots require a similar skill set, but you still won’t be able to rely on a local repair for something people would expect to be dependable, like aged care or home assistance.

Humans are messy to deal with. Say you're rich enough to afford a personal chef. Unless you're an inhuman monster, their problems become your problems as well. So if your chef is out because their mother is sick and needs someone to take care of her, you pay for a nurse for your chef's mom, so that you have your chef. A robot servant is still gonna need maintenance, sure, but it's a bit easier to be callous to a robot than a person.

maintenance cost of machines is largely driven by human labor cost

If you're paying cash/under the table, then maybe. But even then a twice a week household cleaning hire is going to cost upwards of $1500/mo unless you're being particularly exploitative. If you're not under the table, you're paying payroll taxes, probably paying for a payroll service, etc. so you're talking $2000+. At best you can maybe stay under $20k a year.

When you really look at the economics of it, a robot that never gets sick/doesn't require payroll/etc. makes a lot more sense.

LLMs already solved the "System 2" part of this, to borrow from Kahneman, it's the "System 1" part that's lagging behind here. Current Claude/Gemini/ChatGPT is more than enough to tell a robot what chores to do, what to do with a thing, how, where to put it, etc. but what's still missing is the ability to reliably translate those goals to movements of a robot in diverse and tight environment that is a typical house or apartment, with any kind of reliability and safety.

No, you're assuming that you need AGI to control a robot, when LLMs have already shown you don't need anything close to hold a conversation.

So why do you suddenly think you need it for controlling a body when animals do it with far less?

LLMs aren't the specific architecture you'd use, but it very much looks like a tractable engineering problem to go from a university research lab project that can manage to fold clothes as a demo that needs to be played at 8x speed, to a sellable consumer product. The timeline is gonna be off, so no one knows if it's gonna take 3 years or 30, but it's not going to take an unknown breakthrough in materials science and physics the same way that nuclear fusion looks like it will require.

> There is a surprisingly low threshold on what people are willing to pay for labor saving devices.

A lot of people gladly pay humans to launder their clothes, so the market is there. But the current iteration of wash/dry combo machines doesn’t solve the main issue. I don’t mind transferring my clothes from the washer to the dryer, because that takes 60 seconds. It’s folding and putting away the clothes that makes laundry a chore.

Getting to a cheap household helper robot requires building the expensive one. I don’t think Boston dynamics believes any reasonable consumer would buy their atlas robot, but by building it and scaling its production in industrial use cases they will learn things that make building a cheaper one much easier. And they will have built some factories to mass produce them. It’s not something that will be in everyone’s home next year, but sooner or later the robot hardware and robot intelligence will both be cheap enough to be accessible by average people (at least in the developed world)

> Eventually you have to wonder what their future prospects are.

Boston Dynamics is a defense contractor, their future prospects are designing and manufacturing war machines, the same thing they’ve always done.

The dog robots are meant to carry stuff/support combat troops.

The humanoid robots are designed to rescue injured soldiers and possibly other risky tasks.

They may have plans to commercialize these robots, but I’m not sure where the consumer/commercial market for robotic dogs is. Jobs that need machines to carry heavy stuff already have solutions and have had them for a long time, and they’re safe to operate as long as you’re not in a combat zone. I guess it would be nice to have a robot dog portage my packs and canoe for me in the BWCA but I’m not spending new car money for that.

I think it's more that Space X's valuation is ridiculous, and they need acquisitions that are ridiculous to pretend that the emperor is still wearing clothes.

When cursor is selling for $60B, then grok has to really be worth several times that, right?

Not just an IDE, look at the prospect, they’ll soon lead in farming, genetics, AGI and teleportation. Remember to price in the TAM of that!

> This was just ~10% of boston dynamics at that price. HN pro-tip: before commenting, read the articles not just the headlines.

I'm not sure if you're following your own advice...?

The ~10% just sold was bought for $325 million.

The total price they paid was $1.205 billion ($880 million in 2021, $325 million now).

The $1.1 billion figure in the HN headline is kind of just wrong and presumably based on what they considered to be Boston Dynamics' total valuation in 2021, but represents neither what they paid for the ~10% nor the actual total they paid over both transactions.

Still only 3b valuation, or 20x less than Cursor.

> "Could be in principle" and "could be in practice, under technical and economical considerations in play" are two very, very different beasts. > Everyone in the industry learned that the hard way.

The auto industry is notorious for making incredibly myopic choices to save money/make money in the near term versus long-term investments. The relationship between automakers and their suppliers/vendors is basically a century-plus of the automakers trying to (1) outsource anything they can for a quick buck, and (2) grind the supplier/vendor margins down to nothing. (This is part of why the newer Chinese automakers with much greater vertical integration are such a threat to the traditional automakers; vertical integration has a high up-front investment but the payoff in flexibility and speed is significant).

I have visited factories for work and my experience is the same. There is so much stuff that could easily be automated but is not because it is too expansive for too little value to make a custom one off machine. The big high volume things will be automated but these machines will have 90% success rate and lot's of stuff that needs to be done by hand. You can search for factory tours on youtube to get an idea. Here are two videos, an Amazon warehouse and a Tesla factory. the big heavy stuff is automated but lot's of work is still done by hand. https://www.youtube.com/shorts/-R6cBkza17k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=45slYC99uUg

> How long ago was your robotics experience?

This is over the last decade at one of the largest automakers in the world. Naturally there is significant variation between individual lines and plants; some are newer and more automated, some are older and much less automated. Are some cars being built on more automated lines? Yes. But a great many, probably the vast majority, are being built with fairly low assembly* automation.

* There is a significant split in automation between "body weld" stages and "assembly" stages. Body weld is very heavily automated basically everywhere (although there are some surprising exceptions in places), while assembly is much less automated.

I remember around 2018 Tesla was actually criticised for excessive automation because it purportedly was slower and more expensive than manual work.

automotive workers unions started around 1918 and became major political players in the 30s -- a fact that i'm sure is wholly unrelated to why there are so many un-automated tasks in that industry.

Also, a general purpose robot vs a custom purpose robot represent very different capital investment profile for the factories?

These industrial robots have much better dexterity than any human alive.

The point is, human shape plus general purpose intelligence is an amazing combination to resolve the “long tail”.

Without the intelligence part, the body is useless.

Perhaps Boston Dynamics has that part resolved now too.

And C) they don't always have to be at parity with human hands to be good enough because humans are flat out expensive. Humans need health accommodations, have sick days, vacation, and make mistakes too. The bar is much lower and the incentives are much higher than many people probably think.

Pretty much. It's a total paradigm shift from how industrial robots normally work. A pre-planned motion executed carefully and precisely vs open-ended "do this thing" powered by a very large bag of opaque neural network heuristics.

A robot that has to be carefully adapted and set up for the task vs a robot that you can point at a task and have it figure out how to do it. A robot that doesn't deviate vs a robot that absorbs all kinds of deviations.

It's a bet that The Bitter Lesson will win over Moravec's Paradox, in the end.

It's also worth noting that when e.g. inputs to a stage might have unpredictable defects or alignment, a robot arm utilizing neural networks for planning and analysis might still be the best way to handle that - without the extra degree of freedom of movement-relative-to-floor, planning can be done more rapidly, and movement can be executed more aggressively and quickly.

If I were Hyundai, I'd be looking at this as buying a significant amount of vision, dynamics, and integration systems expertise, not necessarily the dream of self-motive walking systems.

'Everyone over 30 knows this' is a prior assumption (it is not necessarily correct; and nothing is said about shame).

The comic strip is saying if above is true, then people still have to learn at some point so on average it would be around 10k people per day.

I think the math is this:

For people born in a given year: 4000000/365/30 = 365 people per day

but you have 30 sets of those people (those born this year, those born last year, those born two years ago, etc.) So 365 * 30 = 10950. 10k is easier to say for viral purposes.

I don't think that's what it's saying at all. It explicitly says we should not be negative towards people for not knowing things.

The math on the xkcd is just wrong tbh. In multiple ways.

Please. It's all fair use. Otherwise AI companies can't repackage and sell what's out there for free.

On a relevant note: https://www.theverge.com/news/674366/nick-clegg-uk-ai-artist...

There's a saying in Zen which I live by. "How you do something is how you do everything".

Start to be sloppy somewhere, you'll be sloppy everywhere. As we "learn and enable" to do things faster with less effort, the quality of the thing we (as in humans collectively) do decline.

AI, when used as the sole blunt instrument, accelerates this dramatically.

Because it's not being used to deliver better products, it's being used to flood the market with even more garbage

Is it really that surprising that no-one has invested the time and effort into figuring out the personal information of some tech employee-turned-founder? I bet no-one outside of tech even knows his name.

You have it backwards. Hyundai, KIA, etc will knock it down to 5yrs/60K for used car buyers.

Source: https://www.kbb.com/car-advice/car-warranty-guide/

Teslas new car warranty transfers as is to the new owner.

Source: https://www.tesla.com/sites/default/files/blog_attachments/m...

Their much hyped 10 year 100K mile power train warranty is only for the original purchaser. Once sold the warranty reverts to a more standard 5/60K term.

Who told you that? Unless you buy your Hyundai new, or CPO from a dealership, the powertrain warranty is 5/50.