| ▲ | mlmonkey 7 hours ago |
| I still think dumping BD was one of the biggest mistakes of Sundar's career. And that's saying something. |
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| ▲ | NitpickLawyer 7 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| There's got to be something wrong at the core of BD. They've been pawned off a bunch of times, and they still don't have products out the factory line like they should. I think the tech community has been impressed by their videos, but the fact that their most sold thing is a toy dog at a luxury car price point says a lot about the company. My personal take is that one of the reasons is their posture against ML. They've been very "GOFCT" and have only recently started to incorporate ML concepts. |
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| ▲ | generuso 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Marc Raibert was a student of Ivan Sutherland. Sutherland had a lot of pull at DARPA. This facilitated the unique prototyping work done at Boston Dynamics to get noticed and supported by DARPA. But as a flip side of this, Boston Dynamics developed certain idiosyncratic interests in getting the hydraulic valves just right, etc. Their machines required a lot of tender care, (expensive!) and were dangerous to be around. When Google acquired them, many things were mismatched. Andy Rubin, the VP at Google who advocated for BD, got fired for alleged sexual misconduct. This cast a shadow on the whole plan that he was trying to implement. DARPA finding did not sit well with Google's ethics. They pushed BD to stop getting grants from DARPA. Expensive and dangerous robots were not an ideal fit for AI experimentation. Google was buying cheap and much safer tabletop robots for that. All in all, there was no good fit, and after spending tons of money on it, Google have gotten rid of them. They did encourage BD to develop a cheaper, safer electric robot, and this became Spot Mini. | |
| ▲ | TuringNYC 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | >> There's got to be something wrong at the core of BD. They've been pawned off a bunch of times, Well...there is the uncanny similarity to the T-800 and and uneasy realization that the owner of BD could become Cyberdyne Systems IRL. Perhaps some companies like that notoriety but not sure if many want that. https://terminator.fandom.com/wiki/T-800 | |
| ▲ | calf 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | What is Gofct and does robotics industry generally just have had a slower adoption of ML because of the realtime domain requirements, I'm just curious and wondering aloud here. | | |
| ▲ | NitpickLawyer 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | Sorry, I wanted to make a pun for GOFAI (good old fashioned AI). CT stands for control theory. |
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| ▲ | sahila 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Per this sale, BD is worth $3.25B. Just recently, Google paid $2.7B for two years of Noam Shazeer through the Character.ai deal. This seems like a small correction if they wanted to reacquire and clearly the market isn't valuing BD all that high. Why do you think it's one of Sundar's biggest mistake? |
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| ▲ | mlmonkey 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Not capitalizing on LLMs until OpenAI came out with ChatGPT, and then suddenly everybody was running around like headless chickens is bigger. And then there was Fitbit. Motorola. and more recently, Noam and Character.AI. But imagine: robotics cred of BD combined with AI chops of GDM. It would have been something. Turns out, internally, GDM has robots they're training, experimenting on, etc even today. So why dump BD and lose that platform? | |
| ▲ | TheGrassyKnoll 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noam_Shazeer | | |
| ▲ | Iulioh 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | Can we go on a small tangent and wonder how we don't know when the guy was born? | | |
| ▲ | dag100 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | 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. | | |
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| ▲ | modeless 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Yeah. Google was too impatient and forced BD to productize prematurely (Spot, Handle), then dumped them when it didn't work out immediately. AI just wasn't ready yet. Imagine if Google had let BD focus on research until DeepMind was ready with the AI side of things. I think with the right joint research program they could have already been deploying humanoids today. |
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| ▲ | protonbob 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Wow I’m so glad that didn’t happen. | | |
| ▲ | modeless 35 minutes ago | parent [-] | | You'd rather we end up with Chinese humanoids? Because they're coming either way. |
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| ▲ | Iulioh 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Google dumping a project when it does not produce instant results? That seems out of character |
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| ▲ | 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
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| ▲ | gowld 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| 2017 was shortly before Google stopped being afraid of being pegged as an AI killbot company. |
