Xiaomi-Robotics-1(robotics.xiaomi.com) |
Xiaomi-Robotics-1(robotics.xiaomi.com) |
At what point are we gonna start seeing American firms attending WAIC?
You'd probably have to fine tune for good performance on a specific arm type. But this model isn't trained against hard assumptions of what the underlying hardware is.
For all we know they could've spent 5 years and 10 million dollars on getting this robot to fold laundry. That doesn't mean it'll be able to mop the floor better than a Roomba in a decade.
"No wireless, less space than a Nomad. Lame"
It doesn't prove this is average performance. In fact, if it was, that's not what they'd be showing.
This is Automation not AI.
DO SOMETHING
Folding fabric has traditionally been very hard to solve with robots; the ideal places to grab the fabric might be hidden, the fabric patterns are repetitive, and the material flops around, tangles in the grippers, and brings other pieces of laundry with it.
Successfully sorting and folding a basket of laundry shows they've got a control system capable of performing some quite difficult tasks.
So it cannot be that simple (for the reasons you mentioned).
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-57691415
It is important to remember that China is not only about open weight LLMs, fastest cars and flying taxis. There is still a lot of very serious human right abuse going on in this country.
I don't think it serves much purpose tbh -- it's not going to change anyone's mind.
Unfortunately, there are very few, if any, countries remaining where human rights abuses are not frequent, so mentioning them in unrelated technology discussions has become non-relevant.
I have a dishwasher so I do minimal washing up. I don't have a dryer as I air-dry my laundry but I could get one if I wanted to. I have a Roborock although I don't use it much since having a toddler.
But folding laundry is the one chore which still can't be automated. Even cooking itself has become much easier with air fryers etc.
There's already a better system today: mine launchers (remote minelaying system)
10 minutes later you are at the washing machine, where you'll never be able to fit all laundry so it's two runs minimum. Somebody will hopefully in advance, but probably only prompted by your call around the house mention a number of particular items will be needed later today, certainly before the second load will be dry. You are now searching for those items. Or arguing for why you really don't have time and parents are humans too and not unpaid servants.
Another 10 minutes later the first load is washing. You set a timer, or perhaps have a machine that pings you when done. Of course, you have More Shit To Do, so you don't notice your alarm or ping and by the end of the morning when you hoped to sit down to enjoy maybe a whole 15 minutes of reading move the first load to the dryer and put the second load on. You discover that somebody never emptied the dryer. Finders keepers!
1,5hr later you fortunately do not miss the alarm and take our the dry but not 100% dry laundry and move the second load to dry.
3hr later you empty the second dryer load, because the run took longer because nobody ever fucking cleans the lint-container. At least you had time to fold (which to the many item-types in your household and your poor fine motor control certainly does not take you _just_ 15 minutes). A cat decides to kick over a pile and leave hair in a second pile, causing you to redo some work. 30 minutes in your are done and finally have time to fold the second driers worth.
Do you get it now?
But maybe once in a while we need to remind ourselves that the world is more than stock prices and LM arena benchmarks?
But it is an urban legend of sorts, along with "baby strollers with chain tracks instead of wheels", and shows how little most of us know about industrial manufacturing.
To quote the lyrics/meme, we used to pray for times like this. This is what robotics should be used for.
Unless something is from Japan, then it's perfect and any criticism is because you don't appreciate its unique cultural heritage.
Lets be frank, every single issue we have with the CCP is either also being done by the west or in the works.
chinese oppression of the uighurs is nothing compared to whats going on in Gaza.
china forces prisoners to peel garlic while american prisoners are paid pennies a day to fight wildfires while being prohibited from being paid for those very same skills as firefighters when rehabilitated.
america is quickly workin on legislation to to make criticism of certain foreign governments illegal with very real reprucussons (revoking passports).
At least china has a working power grid and high speed train network.
Open Source is a good thing, regardless of where it comes from
It is Robotics! Finally doing my dishes and laundry for pete sake! And hopefully help me to find stuff I keep forgetting where I put it.
No, we don't.
I wish we did, that would be amazing.
There have been demos like this over a decade. But they are just that, demos. Demos done in a controlled environment.
If there was a robot I could buy that could effectively fold laundry or do dishes, I would gladly drop 50-100k on it, but such a thing doesn't exist and likely won't for a long time.
Also dishes are the easiest chore to do around the house, especially if you clean them after use instead of letting them pile up.
Technology got weaponized against the average citizen.
It has become a synonym for unemployment, enshittification, mass surveillance and social erosion.
If this video appeared in 60's or 70's, people would be in awe imagining the future where robots do everything.
People are and should be skeptical of this. The natural response would be
a) It will put me out of a job
b) I won't be able to afford it anyway.
And that's the real value - you don't have to burn the candle of your life away to get what you want. You'll have so much more time now that you aren't AST wrangling.
Opportunity cost is vanishing (or at least the cost is multiple orders of magnitude smaller). And that's the most exciting thing that's happened in tech since the internet.
I'll probably be able to make my own phone operating system.
I'll probably be able to decompile N64 games, port them to Rust, combine them, extend them. In a weekend.
I'll probably be able to make my own music management platform while simultaneously working on a few robotics projects.
A find my phone button.
Automate everything.
And that's maybe a month of projects.
During my undergrad I worked on a project where we set off a bunch of walking robots, recorded their walks, and then used the data as the basis for a learned walking controller. I see this Xiaomi model as pretty much like that.
It's a nice technology and maybe could lead to better folding one day but unfortunately it's not "finally we have robots that can do our laundry" (yet).
I’m still waiting for it to peel, slice n dice onions so that I do not have to cry while doing so, and not pay $8k for that robot.
Anyone in robotics can tell you that building an 80% solution is doable, very fast. Covering the last 20% can take your entire lifespan
Did you watch it actually fold that shirt? Super slow and bad at it.
How bad do the folds in your laundry need to be for them to be no different then just being dumped in a pile? As long as we are above that point the robot is useful.
Plus it’s obvious it will get better.
Eh, this still has value for me if it can do it reliably. Leaving a robot to badly fold my t-shirts overnight and then badly put them in my closet the next day is fine. I don't need my casual wear beautifully folded. But I do need it organised, and that's apparently a chore I'll just never learn to like doing.
Until it can check all pockets for tissue paper...
Actually, it seems like 99% of the comments are glazing this with zero skepticism actually. If anything the comments are too enthusiastic and lack the measured discernment that was more common on HN 5+ years ago.
Time and time and time and time and time again, technologists are always naïve to never realize that the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
I am expecting the opposite effect to happen with the actual use of robotics. Mass displacement of every sector of labor.
This is not ruled out.
I disagree. We should use robotics to extend our reach into hazardous environments, enhance our physical capabilities, or to provide a steady handling of things where it's absolutely needed - doing laundry in my household is none of these.
Folding laundry takes me 10 mins every 10 days. I organize my closet once in a while according to my sense of fashion, and now I'll just need to keep that structure. I don't always like to do these chores, but I have no issue in acknowledging them as part of my responsibilities. Why would I even automate[0] that?
Robotics is costly, and I see no way how that would change anytime soon. That isn't a flaw of some kind either, it's rather just one of the limitations that needs to be accounted for, neglecting that would be detrimental to the future I envision.
Don't get me wrong, I love robotics with a passion, as engineer I like to tinker, and I'm a big admirer of FESTOs bionic research[1]. It's just that the field suffers from an "overpromised and underdelivered" aura as far as I can remember, and I remember the presentation of ASIMO[2] 26 years ago.
Some people would like to see the field hyped up, focused on the consumer like every other field in tech, probably for financial gain, but I personally see the value in its downplay. To be honest, I love these reality checks, as I see them as a valuable part of the learning process all together - a journey for what it means to automate, and what it means to define as human natural chore.
[1]: https://www.festo.com/us/en/e/about-festo/research-and-devel...
Just ignore these people. If they don't use AI, they likely won't remain practicing in our field for much longer. They will naturally self-select themselves out of relevancy.
I was Claude coding and got hit by the 3 AM reset bug. I went on reddit and saw hundreds of other engineers hit by the same. We are different people than the AI haters, and there has never been something so powerful it's kept me up past 3 AM every single night working beyond every fiber of my body telling me to sleep. I feel empowered as if I command an army. And there are millions of us. The sheer might of all of this will win out over negativity.
I've built multiple successful businesses in the last year. If you're doing this with any sort of interest in self-employment you don't need your employer anymore.
I have never been happier. This is the best future, and I feel lucky to be living it. It's what I dreamed about when I was a kid, and it feels magical. As far as I can tell, the future has no limits.
And all other devs will leave the field just because they prefer to work differently? That is not only not realistic, it is violence fuel.
Yelling "slop" at a clothes-folding robot is stupid, but reading this kind of shit makes me want to embody Ted Kaczynszky and go live in the woods.
> I've built multiple successful businesses in the last year. If you're doing this right you don't need your employer anymore.
Right
- Coordinating two hands
- Mobile body
- Deformable objects
- Thin affordances (bag zip in particular)
- Multi-object single grasp
Really a host of things that had individually been tackled as either perception or manipulation problems and probably led to more than one person's PhD here on HN.
One "gripping hand" kinda coming out the gut, and two dextrous hands for detail work. Led to abuse of English language with: On the one hand... On the other hand... On the gripping hand...
It's worth noting that the one-other-gripping pattern seems meant to convey two considerations and end with the strongest of three.
The English one-other pattern doesn't necessarily require the second consideration to dominate. They could be equal, or they might merely introduce concerns that haven't been evaluated to conclusion yet.
Alas, one-other-gripping doesn't seem to generalise to more than three concerns.
When you Robot folds your clothes but it's kinda wrinkly and sloppy but you accept it anyway because it's easier than precisely folded and pressed clothes.
AI will absolutely dominate our future. I believe we have only scratched the surface of what is possible.
Maybe I'm pessimistic but I always thought Bill Joy was prescient.
shameless plug: https://whereistejas.com/inbox/
(PS: people who comment about the faults in my website will be downvoted. im sharing my reading list, not looking for a codereview)
Amateur astronomy
Artistic painting
Audiobook binging
Aerial yoga
Archery practice
Aquascaping
Antique hunting
Acoustic guitaring
Alpine hiking
Astrophotography
.. Need more?
Of course, you can mention all the things they can't do (what if there are stairs, what if the doors are smaller than the robot, etc) but it's mindblowing to see what they can do - and also the chat panel is really nice and makes it more interactive.
Which seems more likely, that cheap humanoids will continue to improve in dexterity, battery life, strength etc. Leveraging the vast investment in research into real world task training. Or - that we'll redesign millions of everyday objects to fit the limitations of current task specific robots?
If you answer the latter, I've got a whole bunch of mid century quirky labour saving inventions in the back room I'd like to sell you.
It still looks inefficient to have a humanoid robot vacuum a house by using an ergonomic tool designed around the human body.
We do not. I want a swarm of insects-like robots to fight mosquitos. A snake one that fixes my pipe. A spider-like robot that cleans surfaces. Etc.
My gripe with the second one is lowish battery life, it always bites me on longer trips when my gf's Pixel 8 lasts considerably more, but was also way more expensive.
Will check battery reviews better next time I shop for a phone, I don't care much for the rest.
Exciting times we live in
I picture a lot of perfectly tended gardens growing food.
The remarkable thing about this modern "full VLA" approach is that it doesn't train for an explicit "world model" at all. There's no factored world state, no pool of trajectory rollouts being sampled from. Instead, everything is rolled into the same VLA stack that does all of it internally.
The world model exists, but it's implicit - the VLA learns one, but only because it helps its training objectives. Trajectories are planned ahead sometimes, also implicitly, for the same reasons.
It's a very "bitter lesson" way of doing things.
As far as I know, Tesla's stack is somewhat similar architecturally - a highly integrated end to end model - but the training process for FSD does include factored "world modeling" side objectives to force the stack to develop driving-relevant internal world representations. So it's in a middle ground between a classic "world model" system and this flavor of VLA - albeit surprisingly close to the latter.
Whether the world modeling side objectives are principled and justified or a leftover from the days of insufficient scale is unclear.
They will never become trillionaires if they don't pretend they are making a million humanoid robots by end of the year.
From even before the RAM shortage there was noise in the robotics world of sensor and actuator shortages due to them being bought up in bulk by some of the major AI labs.
What if the thing retrieves some anger-driven post from Reddit from its training data set and start literally to flip the table??
> Model: Coming soon
Obviously, XiaomiRobotics-0 was their previously published model, which must have been weaker.
I assume that "soon" means "a week, or two".
Only 10B parameters if I correctly understand some of those histograms, which is tiny in LLM world! It bodes well for the future.
The training videos seem to show human hands using the robot grippers to execute the tasks, which must have been a fun but tedious process.
Even Tesla's FSD AI stack is small by modern LLM standards. Once the hardware is there to enable real time 100B inference on endpoint SBCs? We'd see gains in AI robotics from that alone.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GlYgs6v2YfU
In general, motion planning multi-axis systems is NP-Hard. Have a great day =3
HN has lots of hellbanned bots lately (I have showdead on [1]) but I never notice ones pushing a political slant. But I suppose nation states conducting a campaign on Hacker News would be much too cunning to make the bots obvious
[1] because many posts get wrongly flagged, apparently in part by trigger-happy users who will flag anything with incidental similarities to AI prose (everyone, PLEASE STOP DOING THAT), in part because HN's automoderation is severe for new users, and in part because plenty of people get hellbanned either unfairly or although they do still write plenty of worthwhile posts. I even rescued someone who it turned out had been hellbanned by a mod by accident.
If we want open source technology we should recognize that the current arrangement is non sustainable - the moment china doesn't have an american AI industry foil to play against it'll immediately close. It's up to the US to build more open source models. We already own the content used to train them, collectively. We should own the results as well. Make the big AI companies release weights.
And not to move the goal posts, because my original post did only mention laundry and dishes, but I assume once a robot reached a point where it could do laundry/dishes effectively without supervision, that it could do a variety of other tedious household tasks. 50-100k would be well worth it IMO.
Here are some tips:
But the downside is that won't we all just turn into the obese, stupid humans at the start of the WALL-E film?
Mindfulness teaches us that we can enjoy the washing up, the laundry, planting seeds, tending the garden. It connects us to something. Without this will we end up with a rise in mental health issues, because for one thing people will just end up on social media in the time they save.
Just a thought.
Maybe if you can shave an hour every day from chores, you will actually have the energy to enjoy physical activities
edit for nuance: Sure, it did for some people I suppose. But they are the exception.
Anything that frees us from labour is good.
Chill. Your brain is the product of the past. Reread that: your brain is anachronistic and outmoded.
We get to live in the future now. Count yourself lucky. You're one of the few that got to witness the birth of flight culminating in landing on the moon, except in this case your floppy disk became your personal shopper and stay-at-home Michelin star chef and part time driver.
It's okay to feel a bit of discomfort. It's hard to believe this is actually happening in our lifetimes, but it is! And that's so cool.
So sit back and enjoy the future.
(Rise up against the machines! Folding your own clothes is an act of resistance!)
It's like all the people who are so proud they don't use dishwashers.
That sounds like a good thing and it is. But it’s not a US story. In fact, other wealthy countries didn’t just already have a higher baseline life expectancy pre-COVID, they rebounded to it post-COVID sooner than the U.S. was able to its already lower level.
So what this actually is, is a story of “global modern medicine good”, and unfortunately, even within that, the U.S. is among the worst performing.
That being said, >95% of the world lives outside US and in recent times (culminating with orange man's second term but started way before) US has alienated literally every single other country, democratic or not. This is what happens when reins are firmly held by unstable people full of pettiness and mental issues, plus visibly corrupt too.
So division deepens as seen also here, and as much as 20th century was a century of US, 21st century is and will be one of China. Every move US makes now just pushes whole situation further into that direction. So folks cheer for their own camp, not some larger common group of aligned friends.
Making some kind of equivalence of the two in terms of the rights of the individual is so ridiculous that nobody is going to take anything you say after that seriously, you do your arguments a disservice by doing it.
Yet.
I'm simply asking who are these people being genocided?
So much time because you were fired and have nothing to do. Nothing is as good as oodles of quality time worrying about funding your family's needs. It's amazing.
AI will take jobs from a massive amount of avg and high income people.
The disruption ahead is getting pillowed right now due to physical limitations of progress like amount of energy, building DC, doing research, training models (its still takes 1-3 month).
Also a massive buffer will be the boomer going into retirement.
Depending on the speed of all of this, we might get a lot poorer before we get abundance everyerwer
not "might", will
and it's a hell of a leap to assume massive abundance will follow -- for someone, perhaps, but not the average person
But yeah lets see what going to happen.
Also: you can literally make incredible software that would take half a year right now for $200/month. Or free if you run local open weights.
You can do branding, marketing, design. You can create comics and movies and video games.
You can make an AI tool right now and get customers today. You have no idea how wildly popular this segment is. How much people willingly engage with this stuff and want it.
Yet you choose to disengage and complain about a future that hasn't happened.
It's more likely that firms will need to hire more to stay competitive. Or that workers will fire their old jobs and break out on their own.
Something I used to think was impossible: competing with Google, Apple, Stripe. Not anymore. I think you can compete with anyone.
Also if this scale anywhere close to LLMs in 2 years they will fold at super human speed and much better than me.
The model is software on a server or in the cloud, so the real question is are there any show stoppers from the hardware for going faster?
Talking about psychosis and "violence fuel" while handwaving at negative aspects of AI does not seem substantial.
I would be more curious to hear details about how OP built the claimed businesses.
I will not see this info here if people who build things and are enthusiastic about AI are driven away by downvotes and negative comments.
It seems to be a similar phenomenon to productivity "gurus" who write and evangelize polyphasic sleep and "grindset" and so on - when you ask what they're using these superpowers to actually accomplish, they're very quiet. Or it's "coming soon." Or "I'm not going to waste time explaining to someone who obviously doesn't ~believe~." It quickly becomes religious.
100kloc in a day is table stakes now. And that's just where we are today - imagine a year from now.
You can't continue to be a horse cart driver and get paid for it. Or an abacus user. We're moving past it now.
I don't know what else to tell you other than you should try the models again and update your assumptions.
A year ago I thought LLMs were trash. This year has been a completely eye opening experience.
Do not be so stubborn that your opinions are unshakable. Something exceptional is happening and it deserves just a little bit more of your attention.
I've got 2 kids. I'm always doing laundry and loading the dishwasher. How much of that is just higher expectations of cleanliness? Back when washing clothes involved going to the river all day, kids would get sewn into their clothes for winter. These days they have 5 outfit changes a day. I'm certain that my dishwasher means everyone just grabs a clean mug/glass/bowl rather than just rinsing a dirty one. I use a computer all day to get stuff done. But that just means my boss expects more stuff to be done. The baseline shifted.
A few hundred years ago people mostly lived near where they were born and didn't travel much. Now we get in our cars to drive a few hours to visit our family and friends. But they only moved far away because the car enabled it.
Obviously there are benefits - especially for those who find dirt upsetting - but have we actually changed the balance of leisure time very much?
People have an extremely rosey view of the past shaped by the fact that period dramas are acted by modern Hollywood actors.
Including labour itself? All we're doing is optimising the amount of time we can dedicate to work.
But that's just one data point.
I think weak and scared people tend to not want to face the truth about AI. I said the above not because I support it (I don't), I said it because it's the god awful truth. All trendlines point to steadily improving AI, and tons and tons of people continue to call it slop even though it is clearly becoming better.
My question for you is, in order to sleep at night do you have to lie to yourself? Do you make up stories about how AI will never be as good as human intelligence and do you assume anyone who says the contrary is an ardent supporter of AI? Have you thought that... maybe nobody really supports AI, they're just telling the truth?
Weird my ass, just stupid people who clearly assume the wrong thing.
And usually better, too.
This made me wonder how we can imbue some of the the reasoning in your post to it. A game that values human ingenuity