| ▲ | GuB-42 7 hours ago |
| The title sounds to me like: I am going to spend $1000 in groceries and dance lessons. That is, two very different things lumped together. Memory chips are like groceries, essential commodity parts, a no-nonsense investment. Humanoid robots are like dance lessons, it is cool, it is sexy, and it may pay off in the future, but the value is much less certain. |
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| ▲ | timerol 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| $585B on new fabs, $357B on AI data centers, and $5.8B on humanoid robots. One of those numbers is not like the others |
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| ▲ | b112 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Androids (humanoid robots) will require loads of ram, and loads of model training under the current paradigm. So it sort of makes sense. At least, I see robots as the top of the pyramid. | | |
| ▲ | gavinsyancey 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Autonomous (non-teleoperated) humanoid robots that can do useful work in an unfamiliar environment do not exist. And nobody's close enough to making them to understand if they're possible with our current level of technology, let alone how. | | |
| ▲ | mkl 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Most initial work for them would be in familiar, well-controlled environments - replacing humans in existing factories. I think whether they'd be cost effective for that will remain unknown even after a few years in service though. | |
| ▲ | p1esk 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | We’re experiencing gpt-2 moment in robotics now. This means in about 2-3 years they will do useful work (cooking, repairs, cleaning, etc). | | |
| ▲ | ben_w 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | The extrapolation cannot be justified. It may be much longer or tomorrow. |
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| ▲ | b112 38 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | https://www.1x.tech/ | |
| ▲ | red75prime 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | If there's no unknown unknowns in the brain, it's most likely possible. As the universal approximation theorem and empirical results of scaling SGD+RL suggest. Whether it will be economically viable remains to be seen. The human cerebellum has a peculiar structure and 80% of the brain's neurons after all. | | |
| ▲ | xvilka 6 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | Real neurons are orders of magnitude more complex than their artificial pseudo-approximation (it is all based on the century-old understanding of how neurons work). You can think of _individual_ biological neuron as an analog of the small artificial neural network. You can see this simple visual explanation on YouTube[1]. So we aren't even close. It doesn't mean the AI is impossible, it just means people underestimate the "computing power" of real brains, as well as that AI, even the future one might be totally different in how it works from the natural intelligence. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hmtQPrH-gC4 | |
| ▲ | ben_w 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | The parameter count equivalent of a human brain is not yet known, but if it was one per synapse then a full human brain replica would need about 1.5e14. We also don't yet know how to be as efficient with training examples as any living creatures' brain, and we only partially make up for this by training on so many examples it would take you a million or so years to do the same, so we'd still stuggle with something proportionally smaller-brained such as a cat. That said, remote controlled androids are going to be economically disruptive, as they make every (unlicensed) job open to outsourcing from an office in a low wage country. |
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| ▲ | dyauspitr an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | We said the same thing about Waymo, that it was perpetually in the future. It took them less than a decade. The robots today are functionally capable, they don’t have the right fuzzy intelligence yet. It’s purely a data problem (lack of) and a lot of people are working on it. |
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| ▲ | Dylan16807 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | If you're running a massive model for logic you're probably better off not putting it in the robot. And it'll be a long time before there's enough robots to make up a significant share of usage. More basic movement control doesn't need loads of ram as far as I know. | | |
| ▲ | b112 30 minutes ago | parent [-] | | The same logic for why self-driving cars can't be cloud based, applies for robots. Something cannot be in the middle of a delicate operation and then "oops!", no network, it just stops. The larger the context window, the better with models. Having a few TB of RAM would be exceptionally helpful. All this just made me realise something however. Having your robot dormant and charging, is a bit of a waste. You could have robots dormant, but its compute in use to act as a compute node. If the distribution of robots is similar world-wide, we'd need a fraction of the datacenters we have now. Using such nodes for training purposes would be beyond advantageous. And the company which can slice up the work and having training done in batches would get the big bucks. And actually, with consumer facing products soon all laden with extra ram and gpu for local compute, that applies there too. Imagine leasing out idle time on your desktop or even laptop for cash. There may be a market here, especially with the cost of new datacenters. Any company able to securely package compute without risking data safety is going to make a mint. Anyone have any ideas? | | |
| ▲ | Dylan16807 9 minutes ago | parent [-] | | > The same logic for why self-driving cars can't be cloud based, applies for robots. Something cannot be in the middle of a delicate operation and then "oops!", no network, it just stops. I don't think you understood my post. The equivalent of self-driving is the movement control I was talking about. Self-driving cars don't have high level logic, except for route planning. Which often is offloaded to the cloud. An extra 30 milliseconds on understanding your speech is nothing. > Imagine leasing out idle time on your desktop or even laptop for cash. https://vast.ai/ |
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| ▲ | kijin 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | [dead] |
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| ▲ | Schiendelman 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Humanoid robots that can do manual labor are going to be make or break for wealthy economies in the next two decades. Aging populations need help, and most successful nations do not have enough young people to do half the work they need done. |
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| ▲ | HerbManic 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | This is the path that Japan tried to go down and it hasn't worked out yet, but we have also solved a lot more of the technical issues since they began. going to be interesting to see if we pull it off this time. | | |
| ▲ | missedthecue 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Humanoid robots barely progressed between 2000-2020. There have obviously been incremental improvements in things like dexterity, vision, self-balancing, and locomotion, but in terms of having a useful humanoid robot, Honda's ASIMO released in the year 2000 is not crazily behind what we had in 2020. So it's not surprise we haven't seen economic dividends yet in the real world. I think AI is what could make humanoids turn from parlor tricks to huge amounts of utility, but we're really going to have to see how it plays out in the next 5-10 years. | |
| ▲ | Schiendelman 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I think they mostly tried to go down this path before we had the transformer. With VLA models, or really now "Large Behavior Models", what's possible has changed dramatically. I've seen robot arms fold laundry now. Textile work is insanely hard, now it's just putting a lot of learned behavior together. | |
| ▲ | numpad0 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | The current humanoid hype don't have much substances or key technologies in it, and incumbent industrial robotics companies like FANUC are already in the process of rolling the techniques created for humanoids into their robots. I personally think this is going to be just series of incremental gains for big welding bots, and nursery equipment becoming mildly robotic, like Aperture Science wall panels, than humanoids walking into retirement homes and doing dishes in the future. | |
| ▲ | bitwize 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Sounds like "That's a bold strategy, Cotton, let's see if it pays off for 'em." |
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| ▲ | Barrin92 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | >Aging populations need help, They're pretty good at helping themselves. Close to where I used to live in Bavaria we had a pilot project of communal living for the elderly in a community of about a hundred people that included people with quite severe conditions such as dementia. Medical and care personell routinely checked in but they were largely self sufficient and did a remarkably job of taking care of themselves, maybe most importantly the were happy and quite dignified, something I cannot imagine is the case when your only contact is a humanoid robot. Of course in an age where every solution is yet another technology rethinking social life isn't very high up the list. | | |
| ▲ | red75prime 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | The "help" goes beyond taking care of themselves. What about food, clothing, infrastructure maintenance, and so on? An inverted population pyramid requires massive increase in the productivity of the economically active part of the population. | | |
| ▲ | mikem170 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | Or a regression in the standard of living. Ideally to a comfortable sweet spot for people. |
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| ▲ | 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | [deleted] |
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| ▲ | dist-epoch 4 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodity: > The wide availability of commodities typically leads to smaller profit margins and diminishes the importance of factors (such as brand name) other than price. I'm not aware of many commodities which have only 3 world-wide sellers. |
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| ▲ | summerlight 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| The title is kinda misleading. The actual wording is not specific about humanoid robots but "physical AI" which encompasses every machinery that can be potentially integrated with AI, especially focused on mass manufacturing for the Korean case. Basically this project is about all physical infrastructures to automate high tech manufacturing industry. |
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| ▲ | 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
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| ▲ | chaostheory 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > Humanoid robots are like dance lessons, it is cool, it is sexy, and it may pay off in the future, but the value is much less certain They need a solution to their plummeting birthrates which are officially worse than either China’s or Japan’s |
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| ▲ | fragmede 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| The value is pretty clear. The problem is the pay off is uncertain. |
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| ▲ | ekianjo 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| we will need humanoid robots since nobody makes kids anymore |
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| ▲ | taneq 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| I’d say it’s more like “on groceries and a fancy dinner”. Humanoid robots sure do need RAM, both in data centres for training and in the robots themselves. :) |
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| ▲ | kijin 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | Vertical integration. Produce the chips, build data centers to run LLMs on the chips, and the robots to deliver the result to end users. |
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