Warning: AI slop articles ahead.

nice

This is a bit disappointing, isn't it? Boston Dynamics had the coolest robots and everybody was marveling how they would take over the world eventually. Turns out the market isn't gigantic and the use cases are limited, at least for now.

However, let's hope they will keep on doing cool stuff under their new owner.

Paper money vs cash

…who have quite conveniently already stolen and trained on all the copyrighted images. Thanks AI!

What seems to be the problem here? Why is it offensive that someone didnt spend more time hand selecting a picture for the article?

Are you sure? The warranty is on the car, not the owner. Almost all manufacturers (except Tesla) transfer automatically and are based on mileage.

Sorry, I wanted to make a pun for GOFAI (good old fashioned AI). CT stands for control theory.

> If you show revenue, people will ask 'HOW MUCH?' and it will never be enough. The company that was the 100xer, the 1000xer is suddenly the 2x dog. But if you have NO revenue, you can say you're pre-revenue! You're a potential pure play... It's not about how much you earn, it's about how much you're worth. And who is worth the most? Companies that lose money!

Being less cynical, I do think it’s fair to say that they just didn’t quite find PMF; they aren’t good enough for factory work, Spot is niche, and Atlas is too scary for in-home.

The robot butler business model just hasn’t been tested in the same way AFAIK.

*actual robot demos

Of the important life-lessons to have before one turns 18; "don't ever be the third or fourth owner of a Hyundai" is right up there with not eating the yellow snow.

There's no shame in being broke, of course-it is merely a catastrophe. The fourth owner of a '11 Sonata is gonna have a different outlook than the fourth owner of a '73 Mercedes 600 Pullman.

Yeah, now they don’t need that department.

In context, not being able to juggle car engines.

Can we go on a small tangent and wonder how we don't know when the guy was born?

"Could be in principle" and "could be in practice, under technical and economical considerations in play" are two very, very different beasts.

Everyone in the industry learned that the hard way.

At a certain point, the tasks that remain stop being "dexterity" problems and start being "AI" problems. That is: a robot could do the task - if you either spent big $$$ on redesigning the entire task around the robot's intellectual limitations (uneconomical), or if you had an incredibly advanced AI capable of problem solving driving that robot (impossible with 00s AI).

The "universal robot" bet is the "incredibly advanced AI capable of problem solving" bet. That in 2020s, AI is finally capable. The body only has to be "good enough to make most tasks possible".

How long ago was your robotics experience?

An Amazon warehouse or Tesla factory tour would likely change your mind.

I had to do both of these in the last year and not a lot of humans around…

> Not that it has much to do with why automation fails to penetrate certain tasks. The reason why "long tail" tasks are often beyond automation is: piss poor ROI, calculated correctly.

I actually don't think any of the big automakers have ever really, in-depth considered the ROI of "traditional" assembly automation (i.e. anything SoTA pre-2020), with experts in all parts of the process in same room. It's easy to assume that these companies must make careful measured decisions based on evidence, but in practice big decisions are made by small groups within the C-suite, often pretty divorced from the reality on the ground.

For example, many of the big asian automakers seem to have completely ignored the well-understood effects of their demographic crises (i.e. significantly aging population) on the future of their workforce (i.e. they are having trouble retaining and hiring new workers as the older generation retires) and this totally changes the economics of automation! Now they are all having to play catch-up, having realized that they must automate, at whatever the cost, because the issue is not "robots must be cheaper than human labor" it is "we might not be able to afford human labor at all".

According to this widely cited comic strip, if you are over 30 and didn't know it, you should be ashamed.

Some MBAs probably calculated that it saves more money than they would lose by pissing off used car buyers. And they want people to buy new cars.

Ford doesn't even make the top 5 - and however "low-tech" you think these companies are is the point, the overwhelming majority of new cars are being built by those "low-tech" automakers. The problem is not the limits of current technology (or even of the state of the art 10 years ago), it is the lack of vision and will within these companies to invest in using it.

> I can’t imagine this would bring much actual experience with this new generation of robotics.

Luckily for you, my job has always been within the robotics research side of the company, so I am very much aware of the strengths and weaknesses of the current technology.

What an unnecessary comment dismissing the expertise of an actual expert - what’s your robotic experience to dismiss him so contemptuously?

This gives me vibes of "... but they're dinosaurs" that pervades Tesla-type discussions. I've watched several extensive discussions here with some Tesla fans breathlessly announce "really cool", "futuristic" "new thinking" functionality or features for their cars that "the dinosaurs just aren't even considering"... except to their initial skepticism, disbelief, actually, the dinosaurs often do have those things (examples including "adaptive blind spot", where triggering of those alerts is highly dependent on speed differentials, so if the vehicle is more rapidly approaching you, the alert fires earlier, dynamic traffic sign recognition - my car doesn't just recognize school zones, but can see when they are active if they have flashing lights, and, based on equipment installation, will actually count down to when my intersection light will turn green, or road mapping radar, where it actually scans the road surface ahead, avoiding potholes when safe, and adjusting ride height dynamically, not just 'press a button or choose a mode to raise or lower').

Indeed, Ford. Leaving aside the "old school" six axis robots that have been around for decades, Ford absolutely uses UR10s collaborating with humans to sand the entire car body in about 30 seconds, and to fit shock absorbers. They're also used at the engine plants. They also use the Symbio platform for transmission assembly, and fully autonomous forklift robots throughout their Tennessee plant.

Pretty different tasks, environments, outcomes, metrics, goals, and other things in a warehouse vs. a factory… really have no clue how this is supposed to be relevant. Why not mention farms or libraries?

$325M for 9.65% implies a valuation of around $3.4 billion, so it's more like 18x.

Regardless, Boston Dynamics has been burning cash for 35 years and all they have to show for it are some fancy demos and trial deployments. Eventually you have to wonder what their future prospects are.

I was trying to think about the why with Cursor, and the only thing that makes sense to me is they wanted experts in making harnesses so that they can pivot that expertise towards building harnesses intended for autonomous agents to use instead of humans. There's no world where a 60 billion IDE makes sense.

Because it is.

The average (and above-average?) investor really does not understand tech.

This was just ~10% of boston dynamics at that price. HN pro-tip: before commenting, read the articles not just the headlines.

A) the idea is that these robots do have dexterity capabilities a lot closer to human hands

B) there’s a long tail of individual tasks it’s uneconomical to build purpose-built robots for each individual task. But it’s economical to have 1 robot that can do all of them.

These robots operate on completely different principles.

One can lift insane weights, has insane torque, and absurd precision, and can do the same movement millions of times with virtually no deviation. You program these with an exact movement plan, just like you would programm a CnC with a tool path. They are basically cnc machines.

The other one is a inacurate, unstable, dynamic system controlled by neural networks and heuristics. It has massive deviation over each run, but that means that the programming must be able to account for it. Which makes it suitable to operate on problems that are messy, unrepeatable and human-shaped.

Well, humans obviously do those jobs, so a clearly a general purpose robot (in this case, a biorobot) has been found to do the job better. Don't overthink it.

Because it is general purpose. We did not have the ability to create a single robot form which could do all of these minor, finicky, and opened ended tasks. Now that seems within reach. The nice property of humanoid robots is that the world is already made for human form, and so if you're trying to replace people naturally this is what you'd want.

>> how can a general purpose robot perform them better

Better than what? It seems that as long as they perform the tasks "better" (cheaper / faster / lower-error) than the humans that are currently performing them, that is an improvement for the factory owner.

It's not a "general purpose" robot, it is a "human replacement" robot, with similar skills and shortcomings to a human. Humans are not general purpose.

All you need to do is look at a recent video of car manufacturing process, and watch what the humans are doing.

> AI in its current form has limited usefulness for most people.

That's not what I'm seeing. My mom always wanted Google to just answer questions, and now ChatGPT can. She uses it enough in her daily life that she bought a subscription.

Yes, she knows it hallucinates and you have to double check everything, but so far she finds a ton of use for it even with those caveats.

Now, I agree that a personal servant robot would get a ton of business. Even at new-car prices, it's still cheaper than a human caretaker/maid/butler/etc. And the maid usually doesn't also mow the lawn on a hot day, while a robot would potentially do all kinds of different things without complaint.

> robot maid that could clean, wash and fold the laundry, do the dishes, etc. would be huge. I think a lot of people would pay new-car money for something like that.

Once you take maintenance of a machine with price-parity to a new car into consideration, it’s surely cost competitive to just hire a human to do all those things.

The price needs to fall drastically below new-car territory before it’s competitive with manual human labour.

> Not something I would pay for to use outside of work

You wouldn't but apparently your employer would.

I don't disagree with you on robotics, though. For an empire like softbank, not buying an "insurance against the rise of robotics" also seems like a mistake to me.

That being said, they may expect robotics to rise through self-driving cars (hence their investment in Wayve).

I would be more worried about the Chinese owning this market (like they did with robovacs) and not leaving much for Korea/USA outside of the defense market. We are still 5 years away from a general purpose functional household robot, but the rate of advances, even if they slow down substantially, will get us there.

> But a household robot that could clean, wash and fold the laundry, do the dishes, maybe even be a chauffeur... that would be huge.

Except they can't. I get it, merging advanced AI with robotics has made huge leaps in the past few years, but building a truly autonomous laundry robot is an incredibly difficult problem that still feels many years away. And I've seen all the "folding robots" over the past few years, and they are still miles away from being useful in your average home (they only "fold" if pieces are handed to them one-by-one, or the more advanced ones that can pick out clothes from a pile look like they were folded by a 3 year old).

Also, consider that all-in-one washer/dryer combos have existed for a while, but they are still a teeny percentage of washer sales because they're expensive and require more maintenance. There is a surprisingly low threshold on what people are willing to pay for labor saving devices.

Well, that assumes that if you just keep throwing more data and compute at large language models you'll end up with something akin to AGI to control those robots. Which is far from guaranteed.

Is there any sign beyond flashy demos that humanoid robots will be functionally feasible though (before we even get to economically feasible)?

I know there's tons of activity on humanoid teleoperation data collection, and motion model training, but it hasn't seemed to bear out much of anything.

Like.... AI would be great if I could put it into a magical semi-corporeal familiar but I'm just not seeing a path to those either.

> ”maybe even be a chauffeur”

Cars will be able to safely drive themselves autonomously well before there is a humanoid robot capable of safely driving non-autonomous cars.

There are machines that already do those things. And if you’re rich enough to afford and maintain these humanoid robots, you would probably just hire staff already.

The only way I could see these AI robots take off is if on top of all those things, it could also perform sexual favors and develop personalities for people to bond with. Robosexuals would buy these primarily for those features and then household duties as nice plausible deniability.

All of finance is trading money for time. $1 million today vs $100,000 for the next ten years. Softbank needs the money today vs later.

Now how about a household robot that does all those things and is controlled by an Elon Musk company or by some other completely benevolent techno oligarch?

$1k/month in an HCOL like here in Seattle doesn't give you much:

> In Seattle, hiring a house cleaner typically costs $150 to $500+ per visit, with most recurring standard cleanings for an average-sized home landing between $180 and $300. If you pay by the hour, rates generally range from $45 to $65 per hour for self-employed independent cleaners and $75 to $125 per hour for professional cleaning companies.

Even in high cost of living coastal Southern California these numbers are insane unless you have a $10mil house with 10,000sqft

Those are all tech that almost everyone owns. Makes sense that mass production would reduce costs and then the cost reductions would go towards zero. For new technology that hasn't been mass produced, it's a completely different story.

The computer of 10 years ago is still a lot cheaper than a modern model. Deflation stops basically only if hardware advancement stops.

EVs are a great example: they keep getting cheaper for what they provide, even if the price stays the same. 200 miles of range 5 years ago is now 400+ miles of range today. Compared to ICEs, where advancement has stalled for the last 20 years, which seem like a worse deal every year.