While Anthropic and Open AI get 80% of the attention here, it's impressive to see how much Google is doing: near frontier model, fast models, open weight models, image generation, video generation, music generation, robotics, etc.
It's certainly an odd situation where Google is on the forefront of <i>all</i> these emerging technologies while the latest chatbots from OpenAI and Anthropic are getting breathless press releases and wildly hyperbolic coverage ("rogue AIs" "too dangerous, must be banned" etc...)<p>Google acting like a normal but competent company that's just chugging away, meanwhile the hype cycle is propping up its upstart competitors to truly ludicrous valuations.
> <i>Google acting like a normal but competent company that's just chugging away</i><p>Competent is a stretch. Google's AI offering seems to be, once again, PM led–lots of constantly-changing brands being merged and deprecated with zero customer support or service.<p>They'll almost certainly be one of the survivors. Their technical competece is unmatched. But that doesn't mean they have a great product in the way both OpenAI and Anthropic do. (Outside their datacentres, which are a legitimate feat.)
Google has never been good at supporting developers, and it absolutely loathes end users. Support for everything that is not their ad ecosystem is miserable. There's never any long term plan, everything gets deprecated and bitrots.
After all this time it's still a pain point just to pay them for a Gemini API key.
So crazy, at one point they had 3 different systems for interacting with Gemini, all with different auth.<p>For a company that prides themselves on the smartest engineers, they really struggle with the basics
Mm, however the more I experience of the world, the more I find this matches the description up-thread:<p>> Google acting like a normal but competent company<p>Is it messed up and weird? Yup. Still normal though. Worse, this is matching the baseline of competence I find in so many other places.
Don't forget: resources
> Google acting like a normal but competent company that's just chugging away,<p>Chugging away not releasing products or releasing ones worse than their competition typically. Not sure that’s what a normal competent company should be doing.
> Google acting like a normal but competent company<p>I am just waiting for the 10 AI models or Chatbot Apps competing with one another like the 10 messenger Apps.
Google wins on infrastructure and creativity (NotebookLM, etc) but entirely lacks product coherence. The ecosystem is a mess, just like Microsoft's offering, and I don't think this is a coincidence but rather a symptom of the type of company in which these two companies have evolved.<p>Furthermore, Gemini is just all around a less trustworthy and mature model, for many reasons. Very smart but lacking the precision and holistically exhibited in the more recent models from OpenAI and Anthropic. On the flip side, Google's work on Gemma is unmatched.
Yeah, something surprising to me was that I can't even add a custom MCP to gemini. It has tons of missing features.
Everything would be perfect if only you were CEO of both companies!
I can say a portrait doesn’t look like a person even if I can’t do better, googles product range is an absolute mess and using it is a nightmare - I don’t know how to fix the company but I know the outcome is bad.
I thought Google was a mess until I started working at a Microsoft shop for the first time. Boy it's astonishing. I've got two versions of Outlook on my computer, neither of which is as quick to load as Thunderbird was 20 years ago. My team uses Azure DevOps for our git forge, which is somehow a completely different product than GitHub. There are multiple versions of Planner in Teams, where the free version's features are not a strict subset of the premium - there are features that are blocked if you pay.<p>The thing that gets me with Google is that they've killed too many products I used daily (RIP Inbox and Google Podcasts) for me to be able to trust that any new offering will exist in 5 years.
<p><pre><code> “I also see that I have two Microsoft Outlooks, and neither one of those are working if you want to remote in and check"
</code></pre>
Cdr. Reid Wiseman to Mission Control, Artemis II, Earth-Moon Coast.
What is the purpose of this comment?
I mean they did practically invent LLMs and a lot of modern machine learning stuff. Or I should say researchers at Google. Makes sense they would keep at it
It’s because their products are really bad. Last time I tried Gemini it repeatedly lied about running internet search when explicitly asked to do it. I know their models benchmark really well, but in real world the performance is abysmal.
> Google acting like a normal but competent company that's just chugging away<p>People are too quick to forget racially-diverse Nazi soldiers and other hilariously incompetent stuff that has been going around their generative AI efforts just a couple of years ago. Google look like they finally getting their shit together under immense competitive pressure but I would keep my eye on them for a few more years before starting calling them "competent".
Yes, I am surprised that no one talks about the 'live' feature in Gemini app. With camera turned on, it has helped me fix things which I have no clue about.
Google DeepMind was at the forefront of AI, and they are currently developing new concepts while others chase benchmark percentages.
It’s basically because LLMs supersede all of these. The ability to reason, research, and write code applies to everything else and will speed up the innovation cycles there significantly.<p>Google is losing in the race that really matters
And protein folding + Nobel Prize
<i>Google DeepMind disbands its Nobel-prize winning AlphaFold team</i><p><a href="https://www.engadget.com/2225849/google-shuts-down-alphafold/" rel="nofollow">https://www.engadget.com/2225849/google-shuts-down-alphafold...</a><p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49098375">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49098375</a>
And AlphaGo Zero .. probably the first real-world deployment of a self-improving system that beat humans.
> probably the first real-world deployment of a self-improving system that beat humans.<p>Isn't that Checkers right from the dawn of reinforcement learning?
I think that credit might go to IBM:<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TD-Gammon" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TD-Gammon</a>
Baffles me how this is not that well known
I recommend reading „The Infinity Machine: Demis Hassabis, DeepMind, and the Quest for Superintelligence“ from Sebastian Mallaby. It offers a detailed glimpse into the reasons behind your observation regarding Google/DeepMind and the other frontier labs. best book I read so far on my current vacation.
thing is, google have a track record of dropping support or just killing of projects. Personally, I view most of google's products and services as a business risk, because you never know when they will kill it.
and building inference hardware
While I agree, it’s hard to trust Google not to kill this off in the future. They’re not winning and the prospect of dumping their own for a partnership with another AI company isn’t out of the picture.
[flagged]
[flagged]
The thing with drug discovery is that the bottleneck is not coming up with new molecules, etc. It's the multi-year, extremely expensive clinical trials that often don't even succeed. I doubt it will be a big moneymaker for Anthropic and OpenAI, because the best they can hope for is to sell a software product to pharma companies, but the pharma companies already have lots of scientists with a million promising molecules already in study they will never even make it to clinical trials.<p>In other words, can AI tech help? Probably, but I doubt it's going to be a major money maker, and it won't make a ton of money overnight. It's not like Claude Code where every programmer can begin using it instantly.
OpenAI and Anthropic can't do either of those if they go bankrupt first.
I love this kind of optimized-for-Xitter drive-by market analysis. Very 2026.
I love how HN ignores past execution results
I like how someone can ignore that DeepMind invented AlphaFold, while OpenAI and Anthropic have zero experience shipping AI protein folding.<p>This entire industry might be hopelessly tribalist, nowadays.
the word delightful has lost all meaning to me
It's way too early to pick winners. This industry is still in the opening moves.<p>For example, today, investors are celebrating Microsoft's Azure growth as evidence that its AI investments are paying off:
<<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49110965">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49110965</a>>
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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
If you can even <i>afford</i> 20K you're in the top 10% of the US population. It's not a very big market, and even selling to that market is hard. Probably only 10% of that 10% will actually buy, and all of a sudden you're selling to 1%.<p>Selling to businesses is much easier, 99% of businesses can afford 200K if it replaces 3 x 70K humans.
The median working American earns something like 60k. Part time working adults are around 24k.<p>People might not have 20k in the bank, but if most are doing a part-time employment's worth of work which could be replaced by a machine, it would make sense on paper.<p>Granted, people aren't rational. Anecdotally, my partner and I probably could be hiring out some of this currently, but we choose not to as we don't want to have to work around a cleaning service's schedule. I think we'd be more apt to buy something which we own, have control over, always does things in the manner we'd like, doesn't have to work around our messy lives/schedules, etc.
Actually the high income households are becoming a greater and greater share of spending, referred to as the "K shaped" economy. For example, the top quintile of households accounts for about 40% of all consumer spending.
Your napkin math only shows that the market is identical. There's about 35m businesses operating in the US. So by selling to 10% of those you sell the exact same number of robots...
Most people finance vehicles that cost much more than 20K.<p>I'd gladly pay or finance a robot that could have dishes clean, laundry folded, and carpets vacuumed by the time our family got home.
I don't think a cleaning robot and a vehicle are in the same category, as vehicles are more a necessity (at the very least to get to and from your jobs, to buy groceries, etc) and a cleaning robot is squarely a luxury.
A car saves you time walking/biking, a robot saves chore time. Depending on depreciation, it's feasible that you could go do minimum-wage level work on Doordash using the chore time you save from the robot and still come out ahead. E.g. 5 hours/week at $20/hour = $5200/yr
> A car saves you time walking/biking, a robot saves chore time<p>Mileage varies. My impression is that on net, many people borrow money for the vehicle and end up adjusting their lives to depend on it, so much so that in their head they think they're saving time, but if they'd put that money into their home budget and moved closer to where things are, they'd get more exercise, be more socially healthy, and also waste less time and money driving. In aggregate, this makes everything worse and perpetuates the cycle. I sure as hell wouldn't move somewhere I had to drive to and from if I didn't already have the car, and I sure as hell wouldn't buy a car to get to a job unless the nature of my work required it. Not again.
Vehicles, when first invented, were 100% a luxury, not a necessity.<p>They only became a “necessity” once they went mainstream and the world started evolving with vehicles becoming a part of everyday life.<p>I can certainly see the same thing happening with residential robotics.
So many people talking like cleaning services don't exist
> I don't want to hire out a cleaning service and deal with the whole human component.<p>I've used on in the past, but I found that I was routinely dissatisfied with how they were doing things and I felt I needed to maintain a certain level of tidiness to allow them to clean properly. I think there is an intrinsic cost to having hired staff in one's home that most consumers would be factoring in, consciously or not.
People in the US buy cars.<p>Can a household robot provide as much utility as a car? If "yes", the market gets pretty big.
How does it compare to hiring a human?<p>I pay $200 every 2 weeks to have a 3000 sq ft house cleaned.<p>That's about $5200 a year to fully clean a house. And it's a human, so they can also tidy up, clean out the refrigerator, do my laundry, water my plants, etc.
Not really. The car is a non-negotiable, like food, unless you live in Boston/NYC/SF or something. The robot is not.
The economy would be very dead if people only spend money on non-negotiable items. Why would one fly to Colorado if they could just go to the park near by?<p>Robots may not be very useful for now, but they will be at some point, and people will buy them, financing if they have to. Even if what the robots can do are not non-negotiable.
People in Europe also buy cars, even though most of them doesn't really need to.
You don't even "need" to clean your house (yes, yes, I know). You do need to drive to work.
To your point - in terms of domestic services - ownership isn't the only model. After all human cleaning services don't work like that either these days ( even in the American south.... ).<p>Some people might feel that a robot cleaner is less intrusive that a person.
> 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<p>I kind of understand where the feeling comes from, but this also saddens me. What happened to our generation? We're scared of people.
Eh, I'm a pretty social and outgoing guy. I think its fair to have some reservations about people in one's own home. I'll admit I'm slightly neurotic in my own household in that I like things to be done a certain way. I'd also feel like I needed to maintain certain levels of tidiness to enable a traditional cleaning service to perform well.
Sometimes I forget what a bubble HN really is.
Robot lawnmowers are mostly over $1000 already and they only do one thing. Heck, a lot of <i>lawnmowers</i> are over $1000.<p>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.
Automatic litter box is a great example. We've had one for ~7 years and it's still going strong. High initial cost that pays back every day over the course of what will likely be a decade+ of usage. Absolutely worth every penny if you look to the horizon. I imagine the robot mowers and robot house maids will fall under the same type of payback but with even higher upfront costs - perhaps this will turn into yet another subscription scheme.
It is all about the ROI. A lawn cut from a professional can cost anywhere from $25-$100 on an average (per cut). So with a $1000 lawn mower, you will get the return back in 10-40 cuts at most. That is less than 1-2 seasons. Sure, there will be some maintenance cost over the years but if you look at a 5-10 year period, it is totally worth doing your own. Even with the $1000 price tag. Of course, you cannot count the labor time.
For all of these things, then what's the point of having a humanoid robot then? The last thing is a folding laundry bot that I would happily also pay $1000 for.
> folding laundry robot<p>This is my dream for a house chore robot. If I could dump hampers of clothes into a receptacle and get stacks of folded clothes out, I’d happily pay $1k. Household of 5; my kids each produce 3-4 sets of clothes a day (sleep, school, sports, after school). I run wash in AM so dryer finishes before 3pm (pg&e ToU) and then I’m focused on other things for rest of day. More often than not, I get to bed to find a near full hamper of clothes dumped where I sleep and then have to sort/fold/deliver. Bonus points if robot can sort different items to different stacks/bundles.<p>I don’t need AI/robotics to save me time from having to think, research, or code… I need AI/robotics to save me time so <i>I can</i> think, research, or code.
My wife hates having other people in our house and we both hate cleaning. If it worked, we’d drop $5k no problem. It’ll be $5k and a $50/mo sub? Sold!
I have personally never met someone with a personal robotic lawnmower, and I suspect that if you have you live in a bubble that is severely biasing your view of the average American.
My cousin has one. But he also lives on 5 acres, which is also not average either.<p>Apparently prices on them have gone way up. The one he has now would cost something like $6K today.
A product doesn’t need to appeal to or reach the average American to be a viable product.
> 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.<p>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.
>You'd have a hard time convincing most American families to purchase anything with a >$1000 price tag.<p>Like cars, they'll likely purchase them through finance deals, with a monthly payment. Or perhaps even rent/lease them.
Cars are an absolute necessity in the US unless you live in one of the small handful of cities that have viable public transit. Different thing altogether.<p>Robots aren't a necessity, and for a price tag in the tens of thousands, most people will just mop their own floors and do their own laundry.
$45k cars are not neccessary though, and that's the average american car loan today
That's really more of a financial literacy problem though. People don't see $45k car, they see $600/mo payment. And car dealers very much sell on the payment and not on the actual price.
nit: 45k is the average car loan for a <i>new</i> car, but average for a used car is $25k. Purchasing a car is a necessity but purchasing a new car is a luxury.
> Robots aren't a necessity, and for a price tag in the tens of thousands, most people will just mop their own floors and do their own laundry.<p>And (regardless of the costs involved) if I were going to pay money to not do this stuff myself, I'd rather pay a human to do it because I know there are humans out there that could use the work and I value them much more than I value Google and other corporations making even more obscene amounts of money selling future e-waste.
Of course we'll rent them! I don't even want to keep a robot in my flat all the time.<p>But that means speed does matter after all. The renting company will need to clean as many flats as possible with a single robot in a single day.
Leasing seems like it could make sense given rapid upgrades in the technology. Why spend $15k on a home robot that will be obsoleted in the next few years?
At that point why not have a human cleaning service it will probably be cheaper
Much easier to remotely brick a robot too I imagine
People are financing small consumer goods with 3 digit price tags because they can't afford their mediocre already leveraged life. They borrow high 4 to low 5 figures for a car because they can't get to work to earn money so they don't have to join the bums sleeping on the cardboard. They will not be borrowing high 5 figures to low 6 figures for Rosie the Robot.<p>If Rosie was the only output she would never happen. Rosie might happen as a side benefit of replacing American workers but only for the rich people.<p>The vast majority which may be replaced would probably be better off burning down the factory rather than celebrate their upcoming domestic helper.
Price point: they’ll be very low volume and very high price. There’s enough inequality and plenty of cash at the top to support such luxury robots. Everyone else will be doing their chores the old fashioned way, with their own hands.
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!<p>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.
If someone can make a robot that can keep a house and surroundings clean and pretty, it is going to sell like hot cakes..
Unitree's R1 humanoid robot is only about $6000, and it's still a nascent, smallish scale technology. They will come down.<p>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.<p>$1000 isn't that high. Probably about a third of American households have an appliance over $2000, which is still a massive market.
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.
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?)
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.<p>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.
They could be shared, and work practically non-stop (minus nights, as that would wake people up). That'd bring the per-consumer cost down by a large fraction. The sharing would likely be organized by a commercial third-party, but still, it could be much cheaper than human cleaners.<p>Having said that, it could still be decades till the robot is ready to be released into human homes unsupervised. The variation in human homes, what people store in them etc. is not easy. However, it could be ready for hotels much sooner.
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.<p>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 <i>free time</i> for people, but will also have a lot of social pressure behind it. We have social pressure that causes people to buy >$1000 <i>phones</i> to virtually no marginal benefit over $20 phones.<p>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.<p>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.
I think ~car is a more likely range, there's a lot of value in cooking / cleaning, Americans buy cars pretty frequently
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.
The more likely scenario is that the hucksters currently hyping the idea of humanoid robots will gradually move the goalposts so that, when we eventually get a big, soft, stationary cube with six inflatable robot arms they'll point to it and say "behold, a humanoid robot!" and declare their predictions vindicated.
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.<p>So the lifestyle stayed inflated.
> ballpark 5k/year<p>How big is your house?
When we had a cleaning lady it was $70 a go. Under $2000 for every second week.
$70 a go? That’s got to be the cash only person to person handshake agreement. That would never buy you laundry too.<p>I think I remember maybe around $100 including laundry almost 20 years ago and that was a cash type arrangement, weekly including laundry (multi hour visit).
There is a lot of variance in the price of cleaning tied to location. Cost of living in the area for sure, but also presence or absence of economic migrants and new immigrants.
I have a 1300 sqft house, 3b2b. Costs me around $200 for a cleaning.
Ours was a 1300 3b1b. It was $35 an hour, they finished everything in under 2 hours. I'm guessing(hoping!) they have to be there for more than 2 hours for $200?
Same, it was $150 for 1400 sq ft house last I did it, so roughly same ballpark. I do remember it being closer to $80 10ish years ago though.
Similar here for 2500 finished sq ft.
2500 finished square feet in a MCOL east coast metro (Baltimore).<p>Wondering if you're closer to the southern border or something.
Yes, but:<p>1. 80%+ of Americans can't afford house cleaning services. I'm a software engineer in silicon valley and even I clean my own house because I don't think I can afford it. My rents have gone up by more than 5K in the last year, my salary hasn't, so that's coming out of my house cleaning budget.<p>2. Even if you can afford 5K/year on it, the cleaning service is not an upfront commitment. You can bail anytime when you get laid off and clean your own house.<p>3. Consumers don't budget rationally. Businesses do.
[dead]
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.
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.<p>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.<p>But maybe they'd rather deal with a robot than a human?
Honestly: why?
I don't want a person I don't know very well in my space.<p>That aside: if I'm lucky enough to find a person who's good and reliable, they might move away, switch jobs etc.<p>It has all the headaches that come with hiring and managing someone, because, well, it is exactly that... If I don't want to be a manager at work (been there done that, happy to let others do it and get the raise that comes along with it), I sure as heck don't want to do it at home.
Usually you hire a cleaning company who sends a person they've hired and vetted to clean, you don't have to deal with all of that stuff.
You'd need to manage the robot, too, I would think. In my experience, I rather manage people than machines.
<i>> I don't want a person I don't know very well in my space.</i><p>In the humanoid robot scenario, you'll get a surveillance device with a built-in microphone and camera beaming every intimate detail of your space to the highest bidder. Instead of getting one person you don't know very well in your space, you'll get thousands.
Robots don‘t steal and don‘t want a raise.
If there is a subscription in there somewhere, prices could change.
They'll just spy on you along with the smart tv, phone and flock camera at the street corner.
The list of plausible answers is long enough as to question why you felt the need to include the word honestly, irony? One example: social anxiety.
Humans have emotions. Best avoided.
Less liability?
With a robot housemaid, I wouldn't have to get dressed. :-P<p>More seriously:<p>- I wouldn't feel obligated to 'pre-clean' anything. Who wants to come across as a thoughtless/careless slob whose personal habits amount to borderline-abusive demands on the cleaning staff? Not me... and where does that line get drawn, anyway?<p>- I wouldn't worry about stuff being picked up and misplaced<p>- I have never had problems with maids stealing stuff, but I know others have<p>- Cleaning can be initiated or postponed as needed, with no dependencies on someone else's schedule
The last point I can get behind as it is a clear advantage, the other ones might need some more superhuman abilities that I'd not accept as given until demonstrated in extenso.
<i>> With a robot housemaid, I wouldn't have to get dressed. :-P</i><p>Well, as long as you don't mind the workers in the robot company's telemetrics department whacking it to your robot's video feed.
They can jerk themselves silly, IDGAF. When the 'Black Mirror' screenwriters get involved, though, I'll require some back-end participation of the financial kind.<p>(I'm being facetious here: nothing that transmits data out of the house is going to be deployed to run household robots, at least not in my house. Even if I didn't care, I can't make that call on behalf of family members or guests. Then there's the obvious concern that the robotics company would sell the data to my homeowners' insurance company, health insurance company, and who knows who else.)
"hey Rosie, the cat yakked on the rug again"<p>(real-time mess handling)
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.<p>For example, you could store far more things out of easy human reach.
We all know sexbots will be the real killer app
which work?
"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."<p>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.
> it honestly doesn't matter if it takes a robot longer than a human to clean your house<p>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.<p>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: <a href="https://blog.google/products-and-platforms/products/gemini/how-we-built-gemini-robotics/" rel="nofollow">https://blog.google/products-and-platforms/products/gemini/h...</a><p>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.<p>I will also point out that slow, non-fluid robotics is on a <i>totally</i> 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.<p>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.<p>TBF fabric is much more difficult to simulate than a bipedal body is.<p>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.<p>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.<p>And yet in many cities around the world, you can call a waymo and ride it and society accepts it.
Gotta admit google is pretty ballsy for directly attacking Moravec's Paradox: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec%27s_paradox" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec%27s_paradox</a>
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.<p>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.<p>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.
Look at robotics demonstrations on YouTube from one or two years ago, and compare that to where we are today. It seems reasonable to me that general purpose robotics may be able to outmaneuver your average human in a few years. At least one robot has surpassed what I could do <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xha2TJ_1C6Q" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xha2TJ_1C6Q</a>
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<p>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).
yes at 1k tok/sec i think these robots will be fast and very fluid.
This page is just marketing…more interesting is that: <a href="https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/models-and-research/google-deepmind/gemini-robotics-er-2/" rel="nofollow">https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/models-and-research/go...</a><p>Success-rate of ~60%
Accuracy: ~80%
That’s pretty low and definitely not production ready
I've kind of given up on humanoid robotics, because of how bad the actuators are. There has been no innovation in robotic actuators since Honda's Asimo. There's just no way that someone wants a 80kg wobbling tin can in their home or workplace.<p>My bet is that the final robotic revolution will use genetically modified human/animal bodies with replaced brains. You'll have to stretch your ethics a bit, but if you grow a bear genetically modified in a way that it has no consciousness or thought, it'll make a much better construction worker than any humanoid robot. You'll just need to wire it up with neuralink and then control it via LLM. Fast animals can be used to deliver packages, and giraffes for warehouses.
> giraffes for warehouses.<p>I’m not even sure if you are joking there or haven’t thought your proposal through. Sure giraffes are tall, but they can barelly lift any weight. What use would a robotically controlled giraffe be in a warehouse?<p>> There has been no innovation in robotic actuators since Honda's Asimo.<p>I very much doubt this. If nothing else the MIT Cheetah’s actuators are a whole different ballgame compared to asimo’s actuators. (Backdriveability, variable stiffness) And then there is a lot of interesting work being done with combining elastic elements with the actuators.
Well, a giraffe could do jobs where you need to reach high, such as replacing a lightbulb. Sure, I'm half-joking.<p>Asimo used BLDC motors with strain-wave gearing, which is pretty much standard today on high-end humanoid robots. The only thing that has happened is that these are much cheaper today, and might be slightly more optimized.
this is a tangent but you should revisit your assumptions about giraffe anatomy. their necks actually weigh a tremendous amount and are kept upright by an interesting system whereby they actually stretch this giant tendon to bend down and the tendon's tension lifts it back up. super cool to learn about - they dissect one in a documentary series I can't think of just now.
Cortical Labs has been doing work in this area. They had a Doom demo a while ago.
I think it's a matter of tradeoffs. Perhaps you'd have biological version as a versatile all-around thing, but many tasks don't require that so likely the tin variants are more durable for many tasks. Also, in terms of reasoning, the brain bandwidth is very low and high latency so there are advantages to silicon chips there.<p>It's interesting to learn actuators are "behind". I kept seeing cool stuff in the 3D printing space and thought there's a lot of progress. I'd love to learn more.
> if you grow a bear genetically modified in a way that it has no consciousness or thought, it'll make a much better construction worker than any humanoid robot<p>I was lacking material for my nightmares, thanks.
That seems like a problem orders of magnitude harder than making a humanoid robot. We haven't even figured out how to make hamburgers without cows at a marketable price yet.
That is a truly terrifying future to imagine. Fortunately I would hazard to guess the medical technology to accomplish something like this is very, very far away. Not only because of the raw technological challenge, but also the barriers to development that scientists, doctors, and engineers would face before even being allowed to conduct experiments.<p>I do agree though the humanoid form is a dead end for robots. Just build giant cubes that process inputs and give outputs, like a dishwasher. Why wash dishes with meat wand tentacles or try to recreate meat wand tentacles when you can accomplish the job in a wholly different way with far greater efficiency...?<p>Where's the clothes foldeing cube? Analogous to the clothes washer and clothes dryer.... the clothes folder...<p>Why stop at dishwashing...? Sell an entire integrated robotic kitchen.
Dedicated machines can obviously solve an issue more efficiently, but it’s still good to have a machine that can do most things adequately.<p>As an example, you can have an automated washer, dryer, and folder, sure. But what if you wanted to automate the retrieval of dirty laundry and the delivery of clean laundry ? That would need to be some sort of robot to travel throughout an environment (fit through human sized areas, open doors, walk steps) to collect and deliver things. And if I have a robot roaming around the house, I would prefer to just buy one robot that could do many things rather than have to buy it to just collect things and more expensive machines as well.
I think the only real barriers are ethical. I'm pretty sure we'll figure out to do a completely synthetic biological robots without any kind of biological brain in the next 10-20 years, and they don't even have to resemble animals or humans. This should alleviate some of the ethical issues.
Have you worked construction?<p>I'd rather have a guy with a crane than a grizzly.
I could not disagree more with the claim about no improvement in robotic actuators.<p>The torque density and price of actuators has fallen dramatically since Ben Katz's MIT work on mini cheetah. The actuators on the Unitree G1 based on that work are powerful for their size and near quasi-direct-drive. The motors on the BD E-Atlas are completely passively cooled and appear to have really good torque density. Actuators have never been improving faster than they are now.
Exactly, the last year or two has been insanely innovative for actuators, with some new material combinations, approaches and multiple startups that are starting to scale up their innovations in this space. Give them a few years to sort out the vaporwares and the robotics revolution will begin.
G1 is a small robot designed for agility, and can't do much real work. That's why it uses lower reduction actuators with low sustained torques, and it'll overheat easily in continuous work. Many of the larger robots (Optimus, Figure, BD Atlas) use higher reduction actuators with strain waves or planetary roller screws. They're designed for higher sustained torques, but are also less agile and less safe for humans to be around. They're also quite heavy (BD Atlas is 90kg), and still can't match human performance.
yes, for heavy lift and bulk manipulation high gear ratios are still necessary. Maybe someday cable drives will be feasible. No question that we are not at human performance yet or that there isn't a ways to go. This is the specific claim I was arguing against:<p>> There has been no innovation in robotic actuators since Honda's Asimo.<p>I believe we are 100% making tangible progress and the technology is improving faster than it ever has.
Wow, I know what my next nightmare will be about.
Did you look at 1X's artificial tendon driven hands?
The world can't support the number of bodies on it already, and you're proposing adding mindless meatbags that still need feeding and their waste managed? Are you going to accept an amazon package that's had giraffe poop sprayed on it while picking, or change your meat-robot's diaper? I didn't think so.
Can anyone that works on this technology provide an honest assessment of where this technology actually stands? How much instrumentation is actually required, what the interaction quality is, how much trouble do humanoids have with in the wild daily tasks like turning doorknobs, recovering from falls, avoiding knocking into things, etc.
I work in this field, and I wrote my bachelor's thesis here, not with humanoids but with VLAs (think chatgpt connected to a robot arm)<p>It's certainly not there yet for anything practical, there's also certain bits and structures that don't have accurate names during construction, and it is important to keep that in mind - so a robot is unlikely to understand what it means to say "put the left bit of this box onto this right bit" due to ambiguity, a human would understand that<p>Plus we have no good reliable accuracy testing data in most cases (most tests occur on a few demos, but that isn't a good representation of how must things work), popular benchmarks, such as libero have been saturated, and nearly everything gets 95% there, most companies and researchers have their own benchmarks here.<p>Plus companies lie alot, and do very dangerous things in thier videos, I.e. these robots should not be standing very close to humans, because of being dangerous.<p>There are also legitimate concerns of misuse of these robots that need to be accounted for, misuse does not have to be warfare, but can be as simple as confusing it while it is cutting tomatoes with a knife.<p>Turning doorknob is easy, and fail recovery is also being worked on, but we don't have reliable statistics anywhere on that. The hard part is on practical things, as in when placing bricks or attaching a part during manufacturing it needs to ensure that it is aligning everything correctly....and that's hard, while it is impressive, it is very irresponsible to keep humanoids at home (people are irresponsible when untrained), for example, lawnmowers injure about 6400 people a year...and that is not an everything machine.<p>Humanoids in general are...not appealing in specific, due to maintainable of joints, complexity, but robot arms in particular, expecially on wheels (check mobile aloha), are likely to be able to do tasks such as clean up in hotels, after a guest had left, or replace some cooks in restaurants (if their work is consistent)
Unfortunately I can't go into too much depth but I've seen many first hand evaluations of these robots- I'm a robot technician with first hand experience working on these robots. There is an incredible amount of effort and money going into training on many different tasks, including a few you mentioned and many more. They're getting pretty good, but don't expect to see this generation of bots doing their thing in public for a while, if ever. Generally they're pretty safe but they're a long way from safe enough to be sold to individuals in a household environment. I expect to see an incredible amount of progress in the next couple years.
It’s still at GPT-1 level, but GPT-2 moment feels imminent.
IMHO the real test is if any robotic startup currently selling (or planning to sell) robots as a service for homes not just use it but gets returning users from it.<p>I did professionally few prototypes with robots and progress is real yet very far from what the average customer would find reliably useful in menial tasks.<p>FWIW I do think <a href="https://rodneybrooks.com/why-todays-humanoids-wont-learn-dexterity/" rel="nofollow">https://rodneybrooks.com/why-todays-humanoids-wont-learn-dex...</a> remains relevant, namely dexterity is also a hardware problem, grippers aren't hands. They even clarify "multi-finger dexterous manipulation remains challenging." and those aren't even fingers with a lot of sensors.
There is a LOT of monkey business when it comes to robotics industry, a lot of demos you see are well crafted for that specific demo, a lot of times there’s even actual fraud “like claiming it’s an autonomous but it was actually teleoperated during the demo”, a lot robots that make most hypes are practically useless (dog robots or qugv for example) no matter how they try to create a usecase, when it comes to practicality, most fail. Robotics as an industry is niche (not to be confused with cobotics) the only exception is drones which is something I said in a workshop back in 2020 that drones are the only potential and will dominate if we solved the endurance issue, which is also why they immediately got weaponized because humans are usually evil and will utilize useful stuff in bad things.<p>Humanoids are far from being remotely useful in real life scenarios, yet.<p>Fun fact: most (if not all) qugv can’t go reverse on a stairway.
Doing some initial testing of Gemini ER 2 within the Orion 2 visual agent harness. I'll share a few initial results and chat threads here. I'm impressed with how fast Gemini ER2 is.<p>1. Crop the segment when adding rice to the rice cooker + analyze a frame: <a href="https://chat.vlm.run/c/40b5edfb-6d15-47e8-bedd-c77b1ed92496" rel="nofollow">https://chat.vlm.run/c/40b5edfb-6d15-47e8-bedd-c77b1ed92496</a><p>2. Extract 16 keyframes in a 4x4 grid + detect the water bottle: <a href="https://chat.vlm.run/c/a8542517-0021-4013-9663-a9f41f286e4c" rel="nofollow">https://chat.vlm.run/c/a8542517-0021-4013-9663-a9f41f286e4c</a><p>3. Extract the frame at 0:03 + segment the lettuce + generate a 3D reconstruction: <a href="https://chat.vlm.run/c/494c7c65-4aa1-442f-a78a-bfd1409c784d" rel="nofollow">https://chat.vlm.run/c/494c7c65-4aa1-442f-a78a-bfd1409c784d</a><p>(I work at VLM Run).
Robotics with AI is the real revolution.<p>Today, humans convert their labor to capital. Capital holders need labor (humans) to acquire more capital. When the price of inference for these robots becomes less than the price of labor then capital holders don’t need labor.<p>Obviously, AI impacts non-manual labor too, but a significant portion of the world population does manual labor.
> Today, humans convert their labor to capital. Capital holders need labor (humans) to acquire more capital. When the price of inference for these robots becomes less than the price of labor then capital holders don’t need labor.<p>Ignoring quibbling about inference not being the only cost and other issues and just accepting the proposed end state: this is very good if capital is effectively democratized, and apocalyptically bad if it remains highly concentrated in a narrow class.
Not sure it is just about inference costs, errors in handling things and beings in the real world have a very different "surface" from immaterial applications - robots might need to have failsafes, independent limiters, etc. there.
Great point, inference is just one variable. It’d be really great to know how much those tasks costs in inference. I’m assuming they cost significantly higher than human labor. Therefore, the inference cost is so high that it makes the other variables seem irrelevant for the time being.
and this is good?
It's good that we'd be able to increase the amount of goods and services produced and reduce prices. For example, a lot of people would benefit from access to cheap, reliable heart surgery within a few days of learning they needed it. It would be good if the exponential growth that has elevated our wellbeing for the last millenia wasn't tethered to exponential population growth that would be disastrous if we even expected it to continue.<p>It would be bad to remove demand for humans from the economy, of course. Humans have inherent moral value, and so it's good that our current system gives them economic value as well. But there's more than one way to achieve that end, and the massive quantity on the good side of the scale suggests it may be worth investigating the others instead of opposing the advancement outright.
If all goes well, imagine a world in which you work because you want to not because you have to.
> If all goes well, imagine a world in which you work because you want to not because you have to.<p>And if all goes bad, imagine a world in which you and your family are homeless and starve to death.<p>Luckily the politicians and business leaders in place today who are going to be responsible for navigating us to one of these outcomes are the adults in the room, very ethical, even keeled and not the least bit corrupt. So... we should be fine! /s
I'm really curious - are the people who keep saying this in denial or lacking in a basic education in economics? You can imagine all you want, but this is absolutely not a possible outcome.
As someone who lacks a basic education in economics, what part of basic economics prohibits this nice-sounding outcome? It seems like what I'd expect from a combination of UBI and widespread automation.
You are using 'basic' economics to predict the future with 'absolute' certainty?<p>Rhetorical.
They are not in denial, they're spreading PR narratives of AI corporations / VC hedge funds, no matter if willingly or out of naivety.
I think this is way too optimistic. I suspect these things will be only available to the already-quite-wealthy. While the poor (i.e., not billionaires) are left to rot and starve without jobs, property, or livelihoods. Then, when the poors (i.e. us) become too much of a headache, these things will be deployed to murder the poors (i.e. me).<p>I am imagining a world somewhere between the movie Elysium and Oblivion.
It's good for capital holders. It does imply a further shift in the distribution of wealth though with all the attendant implications thereof.<p>I question the premise that humanoid robots are "around the corner". I suspect this will turn out more like self-driving cars which are still a very slow burn.
As a 47-year-old man with no kids, I have to admit I'm looking forward to the possibility of having a robot help take care of me in my old age.
As a person in my 50's with a parent in her 80's, this would be incredibly useful right now. And I've got many, many friends in similar situations.
The fact that Star Wars like droids seem to be likely within our lifetime is WILD. It's crazy how normal everyone is acting about this.
Once upon a time, optimism was plausible.<p>But now it seems the only likely outcomes of such technology are:<p><pre><code> > rich people hoarding wealth
> high (and unpleasant) unemployment
> ICE agents being remotely operated unaccountable robots whose operators are made anonymous by law.
</code></pre>
Where the future goes I don't know, but I'm no longer optimistic about it for the average person.
At the point it gets solid and useful, the powers that be will immediately use them as weapon.
Running a full LLM to actuate a robot is way too heavy, the minimum latency they can get down to is probably 1-2 seconds even with powerful GPUs, which is not very useful for practical robotics applications.<p>Machine vision should definitely be handled by ML, but motion actuation should be relegated in the realm of traditional PID style linear/nonlinear control. Again, the tech is cool, but the practical usefulness of using a full LLM as a controller will probably run into hardware limitations.
On latency: that is true now but likely false in the near future. There is so much potential left over for optimizing inference further.<p>On PID: the field has been stuck trying to do analytical/optimization-based control for decades, and end-to-end control has shown incredible performance (e.g., SoTA cost of transport in legged locomotion) and robustness (e.g., not falling over when stepping on a pile of leaves) - while being far scalable (in terms of how fast it is to get a new robot up and running). Which is not to say it's perfect but it seems like it's a step in the right direction.<p>Better yet, companies like Physical Intelligence are doing good with hierarchical ("fast-slow") architecture to address both the intelligence and latency fronts.
AFAIK NVidia has a VLA running on their chips with 2B params at 10Hz. They’ve openly published a .5B model running at 10Hz
10Hz is still a 0.1s of latency, which doesn't seem like a lot until you realize that an Arduino typically runs at 16 Mhz, which is literally a million times faster than running a full LLM.<p>So, yeah, for complex reasoning and sensory processing, LLMs are the correct choice, and Gemini is especially strong at spatial reasoning over ChatGPT/Claude. But for actual motion/actuation? LLMs are the wrong tool for the job, probably easier to have LLMs program a reusable workflow in a script for repeated tasks instead of invoking LLMs after the first time.
16 MHz is the chip's clock speed. Arduino PID is more like 100 Hz to 1 kHz.<p>Human deliberate movement runs around 2-10 Hz I think.
For this operating domain the latency comparison is human reaction time and not arduino reaction time.<p>Also the process that’s running at 16MHz is not the same as a full VLA. VLA is much more expressive. You think the processor that is running the VLA system is running at 10Hz or some GHz?
Well they certainly don't intend to rent you one that works offline.
I don’t think this is where the robotics revolution is going to happen. The big one will be using AI to design and build highly specialized robots to automate mining and manufacturing.
interesting time to try the different physical ai stuff! the apollo 2 [1] featured in the videos is quite cute and seeing it for the first time.<p>the benchmarks right below the list of models is weirdly set. very unlike the standards of the usual alphabet websites.<p>[1] <a href="https://apptronik.com/apollo/apollo-2" rel="nofollow">https://apptronik.com/apollo/apollo-2</a>
A lot of these household tasks could be automated without the need for humanoid robots. Roombas can clean your floor, automated rubbish disposal can be integrated into houses and flats, grocery delivery and storage could be done via an automated intake, cataloguing, and storage system. Humanoids are just creepy and you can't really trust them.<p>Could you sleep easily knowing that you have one in your house?
What if you oppose the political views of its creators?
>automated rubbish disposal can be integrated into houses and flats, grocery delivery and storage could be done via an automated intake, cataloguing, and storage system<p>This is a complete non-starter for already-built apartment blocks, terraced homes, and even most semi-detached. It's an interesting but costly solution for new detached homes.<p>Humanoids are a useful form factor because the already-built human world is, definitionally, built for humanoids.
Doing what's ethically right rarely means taking the most convenient path. Fridges and pantries take a considerable amount of space in our homes. These could become part of an automated storage system.
we ve stopped building infrastructure but we have to do it. Rail, car , electricity, fiber infrastructure developed quickly, yet we refuse to even plan for robotic infrastructure. We can't be stuck forever in the 19th century
You are being far too kind. A primate's body shape may be optimal for life in the trees, but it sure isn't optimal for any of the industrial or household tasks we want a robot to do. There are millions of robots around the world doing useful things, from vacuuming houses to assembling iPhones and playing table tennis. None of them look remotely like a human.<p>If an article features a humanoid robot it's sure sign its a PR fluff piece. This one looks to be a recruitment ad. Tesla's Optimus is being used to pump some sort of investment scam. God knows China's humanoid marathon is about. Whatever it is, it isn't getting from A to B quickly and efficiently.
Except Roombas can only clean 80-90% of my floor, and not as well as a real vacuum. And we have a dog that leaves toys everywhere so probably it does more like 60% of the job when accounting for clearing its path, emptying it, etc… To get to 100% you basically need the whole human(oid).
> Humanoids are just creepy and you can't really trust them.<p>Ultimately I shouldn't have to trust my robots. If my roomba or my dishwasher go haywire they won't pinch my finger off. They physically can't listen to me or spy on me. These are good robots.
I loved the video. Also, I had a lot of fun watching it while imagining I was living in 2051 and this whole progression had ran its course. It's impossible to predict the future, but certain events can negate whole branches of possibility. This one video in particular prunes the "we never figured out robotic motion and thus all the science fiction scenarios built on that premise never came to happen" subtree.
All VLM, VLA models.
I wonder if these architectures will reach prod before Yann LeCunn's world model JEPA startup even gets off the ground in Europe.
Welsh Labs has a great video on JEPA and robotics.
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kYkIdXwW2AE" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kYkIdXwW2AE</a>
A 36% success rate on screwing in a light bulb means there's probably something to LeCunn's take that VLM/VLA models aren't going to be the thing powering tomorrow's robots, but only time will tell.
It's still very early days. There are many benchmarks that LLMs scored 36% on just 18 months ago that they're now at 100% on.
Where did you get this perf metric? I couldn't find it in the release
Relevant: A San Francisco company is advertising humanoid robot housecleaning services[1]. However those 'bots require local supervision and a human controller watching through its video feed.<p>Presumably that company could use the Gemini Robotics product to eliminate the remote controller.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.tau-robotics.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.tau-robotics.com/</a>
I actually like Tau's videos a lot better than Google's. An agile robot getting out of a car carrying a tote is actually novel and difficult and useful. In contrast, what Google is showing here is mostly glorified pick and place with low success rates on a needlessly complex robot and a voice LLM slapped on top to pre-announce its moves like an anime character, with fancy video editing and bubbly music to distract you from how slow it is.<p>Sure Tau is teleoperated, but teleoperating an agile movement like that is actually really hard to get right and still involves AI to keep the robot balanced. Tau is a lot closer to real deployment than Google, and when it performs useful tasks it is simultaneously collecting the data to eventually automate those tasks.
I don’t want to be a hater, but somehow i still keep throwing vacuum roboters away and prefer the manual machine. It somehow always ends up worrying me more than helping. Crashing, charging putting away, putting things away for it to work (peeping). There are a lot of small things that come to these things that have evolved over the last 100 of years.<p>When i think about humanoids and household. I have so much particular ways of how I want my household to be done. I find it really hard to believe you can make it act that way. I struggled to teach humans how I want it. So I ended up doing everything myself again.
Fingers crossed this inspires a Chinese lab to release some weights so people can benefit.
I think the biggest snag with home robots will be that if it is strong enough to install your air conditioners, it's strong enough to break your ribs.<p>So the robots will need to be weak, so even weak people can overpower it. But then it loses a ton of it's most promising abilities.<p>I don't mean this like a "rogue robot" situation. I mean it like the robot gets confused, or someone sees a walking $10M lawsuit in their home.
I think that people will argue around that. Self-driving cars are already strong enough to kill people and even if you only made the robot strong enough to lift 15 pounds of weight, that's probably strong enough to slit someone's throat with a kitchen knife while they sleep... There probably isn't a level of strength that's weak enough to be completely safe but strong enough to be useful.<p>So at some point you have to trust that the tech is safe. Both in terms of "robot won't go off the rails", but also in terms of hostile actors can't remotely take over your robot while you sleep.<p>In terms of sleeping, personally, I would like for the law to mandate that robots must have a physical off switch, in a very visible location, that physically disconnects power. The switch should be illuminated while in the ON position. What makes me a bit pessimistic there is that we don't even have laws to mandate webcam indicator lights (e.g. a very tiny red LED) must be ON in hardware.
If they can't even get LLM/agentic coding right, I have little hope for a literal intelligent robot coming out of Gemini... but I wish them luck.
Is anyone building non-humanoid robots? Feels like humanoid is limiting the creativity of building a truly useful robot in today's age
Humanoid robots can be dropped in wherever human labor is currently used.<p>That makes them <i>extremely</i> easy to sell to industry. This unlocks, in principle, a large chunk of the potential untapped industrial automation market that still relies on human labor because the ROI of redesigning production lines didn't make sense.
These humanoid robots would cost $10-100k to make and would require costly maintenance for them to do the job people in poor countries do for a dollar. I don't say we won't come to it eventually, but not in near future<p>More realistically it seems that llms in several years could help dramatically decrease costs of automation and make it available for more industries
That's the dream.<p>It's easier to redesign the work to be robot-friendly than to deploy a humanoid robot and have it actually work.
I don't think it's the dream, I think it's the cynical market-driven logic.<p>Automation has been rolling out for a long while now, and most of the low-hanging fruit of things that can easily be redesigned in a cost-effective way has been dealt with already. The role of these robots is to address all of the stuff that would have been automated by now if they could have.
ABB, EPSON, FANUC, Kawasaki... Virtually every cars in past 50-60 years have had robots and some form of AI involved in assembly. Some of them already support standard humanoid/dogbot tools in their products.<p>Humanoid startup execs just don't talk about that.
In the Xiaomi Model Demo, they have non-humanoid robots<p><a href="https://robotics.xiaomi.com/xiaomi-robotics-1.html" rel="nofollow">https://robotics.xiaomi.com/xiaomi-robotics-1.html</a>
This is incredible. Seems like a big achievement.<p>The only thing that bothers me is what happens when robots finally automated "all the mundane day-to-day tasks" including our jobs, what is there left to do for common folks who are not geniuses working at Google/Anthropic/ChatGPT or occupy the C-Suite of these companies?
Wow, what a time to be alive!
No mention of whether the robot's models run locally or in the cloud. Ie. Does it require an internet connection?<p>For a robot to be in my house it would have to run locally, there's no way I'm allowing one that runs in the cloud to operate my washing machine for example.
I believe that LLMs represent the future of robotics in this field. Of course, I don’t want a robot uprising, but if our goal is simply to increase the utility of robots in manufacturing (within the necessary constraints), then LLMs are the only powerful path forward.
> It can better detect when humans are nearby, trigger safety tool calls and bring the robot to a safe stop if someone approaches too closely.<p>If the robots stop when humans are too close, wouldn't that mean that robots for close interaction or handling of humans need a whole other level of control?
Also, "better" is doing a lot of lifting here, meaning it still fails regularly.
Yes. That's a whole other level of difficulty to accomplish safely.
I'm asked to prove I'm not a bot if I want to watch the top video with sound.
When will robotics' GPT-3.5 moment arrive?
And absolutely nothing in your company charter says the military won't be allowed to buy it. Y'all think we've never seen a Terminator movie before, huh.
What would be the hallucination equivalent of such robots?
I know what the post-hallucination reasoning of such robots will be:<p>"Dave, would you like to get the instructions on how to stitch that head back to the neck?"
falling down and breaking things?<p>I do think robotics would come up with more safety mechanisms (provably safe motion planning etc) just because the risk is a lot more serious than LLMs spitting half-truths
Is the fundamental challenge for AI directed movement in 3D space the continuity of the environment? Vs LLM's which train on discrete and limited token sets.
That's the most expensive piece of toast ever made! I want one. Can in open the jar of jam yet?
Can someone that uses these models provide some tips or docs on how best to get to use these at home to test around? Is the best thing a virtual environment?
There's one of this that is a language model; are the rest reinforcement learning models?
Why do we want to add more bodies on a finite plane of existence with an infinitely-expanding base (humans)?<p>We have a finite plane of existence (Earth), with an infinitely-expanding consumer base (humans), and we want to add robotic competition to that finite plane of existence? The data center AI is more appealing (I guess) since it doesn't compete literally shoulder-to-shoulder with me. Why do we want dexterous robots when we have humans?
We show many signs of stopping our infinite expansion.<p>As for why we want dexterous robots, the obvious answer is to do things that we don't want to do. Things that are back-breaking, disgusting, dangerous, or just plain boring.
I always wonder why these robot forms don't have cameras and distance sensors on every single joint, processing costs I guess?
How close are they to Chinese ?
> we are teaching robots intelligent whole-body control, fine dexterity, *and teamwork*...<p>That's the most Skynet thing ever.
Do these learn?<p>It would be cool to have a robot that can be taught to drive the same way we might teach a teenager to drive.
anyone notice the jokes they put in?<p>* bot: "im nervous. is that a microphone?"<p>* bot: "great job, you're a machine!" (said to another bot, a machine)<p>* bot: clicks "i am [not] a robot" button on a computer
Paint it yellow and ask why it is hiding a nuclear battery
nothing new, at least 12~18mo behind tesla, shame on Google
Robots that look humanoid are a marketing gimmick.
Didn’t we see Chinese robots doing kung fu??
Given the rapid advancements in AI. It is not what we thought it will, what it is, what we didn't wanted it to be, but it is great for being what it is.
We're getting closer
Still can't make a page scroll smoothly though.
Now they are coming for the plumbers.
Is this why chinese robots got banned?
What's the point of "releasing it"? It only makes sense in the labs, and what would calling your APIs give "me" as a researcher, other than a baseline to beat? mah
the model is real, but it feels 100% internal
Video has too many cuts, similar to kungfu movies where the actor doesn't know how to fight.
What does this mean for intrinsic, the moonshot they brought back into the fold in feb?
have you seen that NEO robot's hands, wild<p>* <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QRyXV3csReA" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QRyXV3csReA</a>
Deepbody
we'll be having sex with robots in the near future
I'm a researcher at Deepmind that contributed to these models. (And the opinions here are my own)<p>Just want to say, Deepmind is a great place to work and the only (Edit: one the few unique labs!) lab where you can move from large frontier models (Gemini), frontier open models (Gemma), robotics (what you see here), science (weather, biology, more) and basically any other topic related to intelligence. It's really an incredible place to be, with incredible people. Consider joining! And thank you for the enthusiasm here.
Important question: how many engineers does it take to teach a robot how to screw in a light bulb?
... we don't know, because this one can't?
...and how many people to label all of the examples?
How are you engaging with the fundamental problems explained in this blog post <a href="https://rodneybrooks.com/why-todays-humanoids-wont-learn-dexterity/" rel="nofollow">https://rodneybrooks.com/why-todays-humanoids-wont-learn-dex...</a><p>- the relatively crude tactile and proprioceptive sensing apparatuses of robots when compared to humans<p>- the limited availability of multisensory, perception-action coupled training data<p>Genuinely curious!
It's a load of bollocks, and always was.<p>Modern robotics is, at its core, not a hardware problem. It's an AI problem. We have plenty of headroom in the hardware - what we don't have is an AI good enough to utilize it. We don't know the practical limits of current hardware because we can't make a robot AI that would make the hardware a meaningful bottleneck.<p>Today's robots don't fail at tasks because they have poor fingers. They fail because they don't know how to perform those tasks. If you put an effort into solving that? You get demos like: Gemini Robotics 2 tying a garbage bag. Take one long look at that and think of manual dexterity.<p>Human body is crude and suboptimal in a thousands different ways, and all of it is salvaged by advanced intelligence.
This seems like a post by someone who hasn't really ingested the bitter lesson.<p>Eg, even LeRobot (without proper fingers) can fold clothes now: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dPe9v4gqbdg" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dPe9v4gqbdg</a><p>The labs are spending huge money collecting "multisensory, perception-action coupled training data" (eg, there is the one in NY that gives you free cleaning in return for video data from the cleaner).<p>Edit: The Gemini Robotics blog post has a video of it tying knots too. That's pretty good.
You can point to the bitter lesson to support your claim, but on the other hand I can point to the massive investment in capital and time to get self-driving cars viable to support my more bearish view.
But how does LLMs help in making chat bots better, help with this "multi-sensory" data. Has this anything to do with the current AI surge with LLMs?<p>Has it been demonstrated? Or is it just that such things now get a <i>lot</i> of funding now, for no good reason?
[flagged]
Is there a broad benchmark like SWEBench or METR that’s credible for overall progress on dexterity tasks? I’m curious on the trendline for human parity.
I’m a mechanical design engineer (10 years) turned software engineer (7 years in autonomous vehicles). Is there a particular role you would recommend for someone with my experience?
Would you mind expanding on the difference between frontier model development and open model development? I was under the impression that they were nearly the same thing and would thus be handled by the same team. My impression is that open models tend to go through more safety testing and are generally smaller, but are otherwise the same thing. Shouldn't most of what is commonly referred to as 'AI research' be applicable to both?
How do you explain applicants that the real goal of your work is folding underwear while the internet is flooded with announcements like this <a href="https://www.unitree.com/mobile/As2-W" rel="nofollow">https://www.unitree.com/mobile/As2-W</a> and people explaining how weapons could be mounted on such a thing?
if DeepMind is such a great place to work, why have several leading researchers recently left for Anthropic and OpenAI? Are the problems limited to certain teams, or are the reports misleading?
So glad to see that you are still involved and have your inspiring enthusiasm! Meeting you was a huge inflection point in my journey with ML/AI.
Good stuff, yay, good.<p>I do want to pick a nit in this one,<p>> <i>and the only lab where</i><p>I do think Allen Institution for AI (AI2) is has coverage across most of these domains ( albeit their frontier isn't nearly so far out, hopefully the $152m NSF awarded them + Nvidia is a fruitful partnership there).<p>For example, robotics: MolmoBot, MolmoSpaces, MolmoAct, <a href="https://allenai.org/embodied-ai" rel="nofollow">https://allenai.org/embodied-ai</a>
How do I reliably apply? And is there a remote role?
Congrats! Awesome release! (can i have access)
Is DeepMind basically Google innovation hub ???<p>What happens when those ideas need to be scaled into real products, though? For instance, I can't really imagine Google being fully committed to manufacturing and selling robotic arms at scale.
Don't worry, after ten years of research a few employees will quit and form their own company, and release a robot arm, which will spur Google to release their own version 3 months later. (As is tradition)
Hey Ravin, I’m executive director for AGI Society which has run the AGI conference (<a href="https://agi-conference.org/" rel="nofollow">https://agi-conference.org/</a>) since 2007<p>We’d love to invite you to speak about your work next year at the AGI Conference if you’re open to it.<p>Alexander Lerchner spoke this year and was great.<p>I’ll reach out on email if you have a preferred one, it was unclear on your site which email you prefer.
What are you doing to prevent abuses by governments, corporations and militaries? (non snarky question)<p>How much of this technology is going to benefit and uplift the Common Peasant and how is going to be used for increasing surveillance and control?
Working there feels like a trap.<p>Why work there when you can start a company? You get to choose the problem you care about most, the people you work with, and your own pace—and if it works, you own the success.<p>Why accept all the rules Google will force on you, are those rules optimized for you or for them?
Its almost like Google selling Boston Dynamics was a bad idea.
[dead]
[flagged]
[flagged]
[flagged]
[dead]
[flagged]
[dead]
[dead]
[dead]
[dead]
If it has intelligence of Gemini... well, good luck...
Gemini is the only LLM I've ever experienced that decided on its own to tell me that something was a bad idea. Which, ok, in itself it's not a bad thing, we actually need more of that instead of the pathological sycophancy that all current models suffer from.<p>But in a physical robot? Yeah, that thing is going to punch me in the face, eventually. Or worse.
I use Sonnet and Opus everyday. Believe me, it's very common they tell me that something is bad idea, write a rationale and suggest better solutions.<p>Gemini doesn't remember almost anything after 2-3 follow ups. I have to paste the same "system prompt" at the top of each message and it still doesn't understand it.
> Believe me, it's very common they tell me that something is bad idea<p>In my experience, the most they dare is to suggest better alternatives, which is the polite and useful version of telling me something is a bad idea.<p>But in general, they do not tell you "this whole idea is complete bogus". So far, only Gemini did. Don't even remember what about.
It's funny how Google is essentially trying to compete with the software side of Tesla only - Waymos (which AFAIK they plan to partner with major automakers), now this, etc.
That makes it sound like Waymo is copying Tesla when in fact Waymo has been in the works before Tesla even considered self driving.
Another way to look at it is that they're avoiding some of the expensive parts of making products that use AI, while leaning into their strengths. No Tesla required within the explanation.
Seems smart. There are dozens of companies that make low-margin cars. There's only one company that has managed to make a working autonomous software driver.
Bizarre oversimplification.<p>For both manipulation and autonomous driving, google has invested in approaches with custom hardware, and off-the-shelf hardware, and a blend (which is what waymo is).