Comment by FartyMcFarter
6 hours ago
These robots look slow and not very fluid in their motions, but LLMs like ChatGPT also looked very dumb initially. If progress is as fast as LLMs , this could have massive applications in a few years.
6 hours ago
These robots look slow and not very fluid in their motions, but LLMs like ChatGPT also looked very dumb initially. If progress is as fast as LLMs , this could have massive applications in a few years.
For house keeping tasks the robotics companies love showing off... it honestly doesn't matter if it takes a robot longer than a human to clean your house. As long as it gets done before you get home from work, no big deal.
I'm bearish that they'll be economically viable in the house for a very long time.
For businesses the bar for adoption is very low: If the thing can work repetitive jobs for 24 hours a day and replace 3 shifts, the purchase bar is nominally anything less than 3 x human salary if your budgeting horizon is 1 year. That's a high number, and probably fairly easy to achieve.
For homes, it's a very different bar. You'd have a hard time convincing most American families to purchase anything with a >$1000 price tag. Currently that's pretty much impossible for a humanoid.
I'm not sure.
I think house cleaning/chores require at least a "part-time" job's work of work for the average household (especially with children). We may be atypical, but my partner and I don't want to hire out a cleaning service and deal with the whole human component. But, I think we'd gladly pay 15k+ if it allowed us to take on the additional gainful workload. Even at a 20k price tag, I suspect we would likely have made up the difference in under a year.
14 replies →
Robot lawnmowers are mostly over $1000 already and they only do one thing. Heck, a lot of lawnmowers are over $1000.
You can pay over $500 for an automatic cat litter box. Robot vacuums can be cheap but run to $600 or so. Household appliances is a robust sector where people have a proven track record of spending a lot of money.
17 replies →
>You'd have a hard time convincing most American families to purchase anything with a >$1000 price tag.
Like cars, they'll likely purchase them through finance deals, with a monthly payment. Or perhaps even rent/lease them.
19 replies →
> For homes, it's a very different bar. You'd have a hard time convincing most American families to purchase anything with a >$1000 price tag.
There are plenty of white collar employees in cities paying $500+/month for someone to come clean their home. As one of those people, I could easily see paying low five figures for something like this if it actually worked well and could replace most household labor.
2 replies →
Another huge blocker (that is essentially just cost too) is maintenance. These things are like 1000x more complex than a car, need to work in a diverse range of environments, handle water, household chemicals, different humidities, kids, etc… maybe eventually robots will service robots but that seems very hard!
And talking of kids, these will have to be exceedingly safe, a 6ft machine falling on a child is probably a worry most households could do without.
1 reply →
Unitree's R1 humanoid robot is only about $6000, and it's still a nascent, smallish scale technology. They will come down.
If the future home robots are any good, it saves you from buying a dishwasher and robot vacuum. It can replace a maid/cleaning service and gardener/lawn-mowing service. For anyone paying for those services, it pays for itself.
$1000 isn't that high. Probably about a third of American households have an appliance over $2000, which is still a massive market.
2 replies →
You never know the future but imagine the people who were bearish on personal computers when it wasn't a thing yet but was being discussed. Imagine Email, Internet etc etc. Now they are commodities. I am sure one day AI Robots will be a commodity that we could buy for $1000. May be 10 years from now. But it is coming.
I think ~car is a more likely range, there's a lot of value in cooking / cleaning, Americans buy cars pretty frequently
if all it could do was operate a lawn mower and a shovel, the annual value to a homeowner in the north east is ~1-2k depending on lawn size assuming they value their free time at the same amount as their hourly wage.
what you have to keep in mind is homeowners salary is way above avg salary so anything you can do to effect them has a much larger impact than it would seem at first.
Yeah if you can afford the probably 10x it will actually cost, you can also just afford a cleaner to come twice a week and be able to do a wider variety of tasks (anyone going to trust this with ironing?)
Self-driving car brings a robot cleaner to your door step once a week.
> You'd have a hard time convincing most American families to purchase anything with a >$1000 price tag.
They all have cars. Turns out you can finance things, and turn them into forever debts. Paying $30K to never have to do chores again, or maybe even cook again, and live in a clean neat environment is not only an amazing proposition that opens up a lot of free time for people, but will also have a lot of social pressure behind it. We have social pressure that causes people to buy >$1000 phones to virtually no marginal benefit over $20 phones.
They will be paid off at $500/mo over 10 years, and most renters might just use the one that came with their apartment. If they're more like $80K or $100K I could see having a problem selling them. But if they basically turned apartment buildings into hotels, they would be a bargain for landlords; just give them the keys.
edit: of course, sci-fi has already rehearsed this. You can watch any number of movies and tv shows with families walking through a robot showroom guided by a guy in a cheap suit offering to give them the best deal. I'm sure you could find written examples from the 40s.
if you give me a robot that cleans the house and can do dishes and laundry I'll easily pay the cost of a compact car for that. I know a LOT of working families that would feel similarly.
I think domestic robots will make a lot of incremental progress and that few, if any, will be humanoid. We'll see a laundry folder and sock picker-upper and they'll be more like roombas or just big cubes. And tethered.
1 reply →
I mean, a twice-monthly house-cleaning service is running you ballpark 5k/year and people treat that shit as non-negotiable. I tried to claw back that line item after our second baby was born (wife didn't want them in the house anyway when we had a newborn), and it was completely unsuccessful. She claimed misery and all our friends were on her side.
So the lifestyle stayed inflated.
10 replies →
[dead]
Yeah, the dishwasher takes much longer to do the dishes than I do by hand, but that's cool. That said, the dishwasher is out of the way.
I don't think we'll get household robots anytime soon. Hell, the only ones that can afford them will be the same that would hire human household help.
> Hell, the only ones that can afford them will be the same that would hire human household help.
But maybe they'd rather deal with a robot than a human?
31 replies →
The dishwasher is out of the way because you made space for it out of the way. We'll probably adapt our spaces for robots too eventually.
For example, you could store far more things out of easy human reach.
Exactly. People buy those automated circular floor vacuums. Anyone can get it done with a regular broom/vacuum in a small fraction of the time it takes for those things. Just like I drive an electric car. It charges while I sleep. It doesn't matter if an ICE can fuel in a few minutes.
We all know sexbots will be the real killer app
"That's fair, you are absolutely right I should not have unscrewed the water hose and put it away before turning on the valve to water the plants, even though you specified that order, I should've used some common sense."
There is going to be so much pain from VLA malicious compliance. If the current gen of LLMs are anything to go by I can already see it being an hilariously massive problem. People are careless.
This was my thought too. An unsupervised robot can cause 10s of thousands in damage by accidentally ripping a water line and flooding your house or just breaking all of your dishes. There’s no level to how dumb and awful LLMs can hallucinate
> it honestly doesn't matter if it takes a robot longer than a human to clean your house
it depends. in order for my slow ass Roomba to clean my floors, I have to move a bunch of things out of the way and not use the room.
on the flip side, i think this "the robot cannot automate the whole task" thing is reductive too. suffice it to say, EVERYTHING matters, there honestly nothing that "honestly doesn't matter."
The time between gpt 2 and 3 was 15 months. The time between gemini robotics 1 and 2 was also 15 months: https://blog.google/products-and-platforms/products/gemini/h...
The difference between gpt 2 and 3 was insane. 2 could generate limericks when it wasn't repeating a word 300x. 3 could actually do some things. By comparison gemini robotics has hardly changed at all.
I will also point out that slow, non-fluid robotics is on a totally different level of difficulty from fast fluid motion. Asimov could walk pretty smoothly, but it didn't fall over because it used a very careful sequence that was never unbalanced; you could pause at any point without falling over. Move faster, like boston dynamics, and you need to account for the change in balance from your arms swinging... or rather, you need to be able to account for the rotational inertia etc from moving multiple masses along complex paths with multiple points of articulation at hundreds or thousands of times per second.
An algorithm to fold tshirts 90% of the time is easy. The cloth hangs down by gravity and you can just look for right angles (corners), find their coordinates with binocular matching, and move them to meet each other. Getting 99%, or folding them quickly, so that the fabric is actually moving instead of just hanging still- incredibly, incredibly more complex.
> folding them quickly, so that the fabric is actually moving instead of just hanging still- incredibly, incredibly more complex.
TBF fabric is much more difficult to simulate than a bipedal body is.
As I recall openai had mujoco playing soccer nearly 10 years ago. Obviously real world bodies are much more difficult but I'd be curious to learn why that is.
Even being able to simply do the task isn't enough here. It also has to do the task while also never, ever, ever accidentally folding your toddler as though it were a towel. Having industrial-strength robots around inherently unpredictable humans in a fail-safe way is an extremely difficult problem that will not be addressed any time soon.
This is not the bar for societal adoption, and we can already see a demonstration that it is false.
A waymo is basically an industrial strength robot. It operates among inherently unpredictable humans already. There is no guarantee that it will never, ever hurt a human.
And yet in many cities around the world, you can call a waymo and ride it and society accepts it.
1 reply →
Gotta admit google is pretty ballsy for directly attacking Moravec's Paradox: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec%27s_paradox
They're fluid, but they are slow, which is highly likely to be a safety thing, which will have the side effect of making many motions more difficult, not less.
LLMs aren't themselves hurting anyone, no matter how much certain people like to pretend otherwise, whereas an AI in a robot with significant motors in absolutely can and will. There are reasons industrial ones live in safety cages after all.
Expecting them to be like inverse kinematic driven digital dolls is wrong because the optimization won't be for matching that but something like "net reduce energy consumption" which for electric motors in multi joint arms will look a bit odd.
This is the first press videos I’ve seen of 1x speed that seems reasonable, imho. Though I see elsewhere they report only 50-75% success rate- not clear if that's first attempt, or total?
We don't get virtuous feedback loops in hardware though. Muscles are incredible engineering that took half a billion years. Token generation (speech) is low hundred thousands maybe. Unless of course improved AI navigates the space of ideas so well that it can give us alloys or synthetic flesh that does twitch as fast...
These robots are unusable in their current form. Slow and expensive, humans perform this work better and cheaper. Looks like every other robot before it, a bunch of servos and no brain.
> If progress is as fast as LLMs
Is this the new "x technology is a year away" ?
I believe that it's also for safety, these robots would easily destroy themselves if not restrained (and cause damage).
Better to go slow and controlled. Giving physical action to a model is dangerous and must be carefully monitored. Slow is good. Oversight is important.
I agree
I only wish I could convince some humans in my life to slow down and do things with care.
yes at 1k tok/sec i think these robots will be fast and very fluid.