$585B on new fabs, $357B on AI data centers, and $5.8B on humanoid robots. One of those numbers is not like the others

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.

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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.

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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.

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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 33 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

https://www.1x.tech/

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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.

	▲	ben_w 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		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.

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b112 24 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 3 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 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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