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
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.
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. :)