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Comment by amelius

5 days ago

> the fun and money is in the software

This could change if there are breakthroughs in AI, which is not unlikely in the coming few years. Any thoughts on that?

Mmmm true, but will not replace a good coder. The software team has been experimenting with AI. Is useful and can guide you to do a Proof of concept fast but if you want to start doing very specific custom stuff all crumbles down fast.

In the next years? Yeah I see resolving path planning without a doubt or reverse kinematics or object recognition, for example. AI will be another tool, one you have to learn to use it. But replacing a full software guy... I don't see it, to be honest. I see it more like in the novel Beyond the Blue Event Horizon. The first chapters explains AI as the AI agents that are being rolling out nowdays. But they will be more like what a junior engineer is to a senior, more than replacing a full team of engineers.

All we really need for the robotics AI revolution is to deploy many tens of thousands of well built, cheap, reliable robots sold at a profit that customers get tons of utility out of, get petabytes of data back from them while complying with data privacy regs, train a model on this data on a few thousand H200s, and then deploy that model back to the robots, repeating the cycle every few weeks. The rest will be easy.

AI trivializes coding: the complexity and scope of robot software will increase.

Robotics-oriented ML trivializes current robot design problems: demand for robotics engineers increases, the projects do cooler things but the day-to-day gets less interesting.

Both: this is probably just AGI right?