Comment by GuB-42
2 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.
$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.
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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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.
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.
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.
>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.
> 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
The value is pretty clear. The problem is the pay off is uncertain.
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. :)
Vertical integration. Produce the chips, build data centers to run LLMs on the chips, and the robots to deliver the result to end users.