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.
These robots look slow and not very fluid in their motions, but LLMs like ChatGPT also looked very dumb initially. If progress is as fast as LLMs , this could have massive applications in a few years.
For house keeping tasks the robotics companies love showing off... it honestly doesn't matter if it takes a robot longer than a human to clean your house. As long as it gets done before you get home from work, no big deal.
I'm bearish that they'll be economically viable in the house for a very long time.
For businesses the bar for adoption is very low: If the thing can work repetitive jobs for 24 hours a day and replace 3 shifts, the purchase bar is nominally anything less than 3 x human salary if your budgeting horizon is 1 year. That's a high number, and probably fairly easy to achieve.
For homes, it's a very different bar. You'd have a hard time convincing most American families to purchase anything with a >$1000 price tag. Currently that's pretty much impossible for a humanoid.
I 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 afford 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%.
Selling to businesses is much easier, 99% of businesses can afford 200K if it replaces 3 x 70K humans.
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.
Robot lawnmowers are mostly over $1000 already and they only do one thing. Heck, a lot of lawnmowers are over $1000.
You can pay over $500 for an automatic cat litter box. Robot vacuums can be cheap but run to $600 or so. Household appliances is a robust sector where people have a proven track record of spending a lot of money.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
The vast majority which may be replaced would probably be better off burning down the factory rather than celebrate their upcoming domestic helper.
Unitree's R1 humanoid robot is only about $6000, and it's still a nascent, smallish scale technology. They will come down.
If the future home robots are any good, it saves you from buying a dishwasher and robot vacuum. It can replace a maid/cleaning service and gardener/lawn-mowing service. For anyone paying for those services, it pays for itself.
$1000 isn't that high. Probably about a third of American households have an appliance over $2000, which is still a massive market.
I doubt it'd save you from purchasing a dishwasher - those things are very efficient and not very expensive. Perhaps it'd save you from loading and unloading a dishwasher
I think domestic robots will make a lot of incremental progress and that fee, 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.
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.
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.
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.
I don't want a person I don't know very well in my space.
That aside: if I'm lucky enough to find a person who's good and reliable, they might move away, switch jobs etc.
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.
Then I have to deal with whichever random person they decide to send. I can't be the only one who finds this annoying (even if I'm not in the majority).
"That's fair, you are absolutely right I should not have unscrewed the water hose and put it away before turning on the valve to water the plants, even though you specified that order, I should've used some common sense."
There is going to be so much pain from VLA malicious compliance. If the current gen of LLMs are anything to go by I can already see it being an hilariously massive problem.
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.
> it honestly doesn't matter if it takes a robot longer than a human to clean your house
it depends. in order for my slow ass Roomba to clean my floors, I have to move a bunch of things out of the way and not use the room.
on the flip side, i think this "the robot cannot automate the whole task" thing is reductive too. suffice it to say, EVERYTHING matters, there honestly nothing that "honestly doesn't matter."
The difference between gpt 2 and 3 was insane. 2 could generate limericks when it wasn't repeating a word 300x. 3 could actually do some things. By comparison gemini robotics has hardly changed at all.
I will also point out that slow, non-fluid robotics is on a totally different level of difficulty from fast fluid motion. Asimov could walk pretty smoothly, but it didn't fall over because it used a very careful sequence that was never unbalanced; you could pause at any point without falling over. Move faster, like boston dynamics, and you need to account for the change in balance from your arms swinging... or rather, you need to be able to account for the rotational inertia etc from moving multiple masses along complex paths with multiple points of articulation at hundreds or thousands of times per second.
An algorithm to fold tshirts 90% of the time is easy. The cloth hangs down by gravity and you can just look for right angles (corners), find their coordinates with binocular matching, and move them to meet each other. Getting 99%, or folding them quickly, so that the fabric is actually moving instead of just hanging still- incredibly, incredibly more complex.
They're fluid, but they are slow, which is highly likely to be a safety thing, which will have the side effect of making many motions more difficult, not less.
LLMs aren't themselves hurting anyone, no matter how much certain people like to pretend otherwise, whereas an AI in a robot with significant motors in absolutely can and will. There are reasons industrial ones live in safety cages after all.
Expecting them to be like inverse kinematic driven digital dolls is wrong because the optimization won't be for matching that but something like "net reduce energy consumption" which for electric motors in multi joint arms will look a bit odd.
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...
Better to go slow and controlled. Giving physical action to a model is dangerous and must be carefully monitored. Slow is good. Oversight is important.
I 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.
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)
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
FWIW I do think https://rodneybrooks.com/why-todays-humanoids-wont-learn-dex... 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
I am imagining a world somewhere between the movie Elysium and Oblivion.
> If all goes well, imagine a world in which you work because you want to not because you have to.
And if all goes bad, imagine a world in which you and your family are homeless and starve to death.
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
It's good for capital holders. It does imply a further shift in the distribution of wealth though with all the attendant implications thereof.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
> Humanoids are just creepy and you can't really trust them.
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 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.
I hope humanoids will be ever present, it’s just that the scale of impact from specialized robots will be far greater. Humanoids will be our butlers, but the other robots will be creating a world of unimaginable abundance.
Big humanoid robots are expensive, the actuators still suck, and the control problems are hard. Their big advantage is that they can occupy human-shaped spaces, but struggle to do anything useful.
Not to say we won't get humanoid robots eventually, but I think there's probably some low hanging fruit for people to make some other kinds of solutions. Specialized robots for industrial environment, well-thought out appliances for the home.
It would be a bit surprising if the progression was Roomba -> humanoid robot.
We have Google, Figure, Tesla, Boston Dynamics, and literally dozens of Chinese companies building humanoid robots and making huge improvements in the tech. Not there yet by any means as a general-purpose home assistant, but I don't think it will be too surprising if at least one of them succeeds
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.
Presumably that company could use the Gemini Robotics product to eliminate the remote controller.
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.
Sure Tau is teleoperated, but teleoperating an agile movement like that is actually really hard and still involves AI to keep the robot balanced. And while it performs useful tasks it is simultaneously collecting the data to automate those tasks. Tau is a lot closer to real deployment than Google.
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.
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.
Humanoid startup execs just don't talk about that.
Humanoid robots can be dropped in wherever human labor is currently used.
That makes them extremely 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.
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.
> 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.
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?
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?
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
These robots look slow and not very fluid in their motions, but LLMs like ChatGPT also looked very dumb initially. If progress is as fast as LLMs , this could have massive applications in a few years.
For house keeping tasks the robotics companies love showing off... it honestly doesn't matter if it takes a robot longer than a human to clean your house. As long as it gets done before you get home from work, no big deal.
I'm bearish that they'll be economically viable in the house for a very long time.
For businesses the bar for adoption is very low: If the thing can work repetitive jobs for 24 hours a day and replace 3 shifts, the purchase bar is nominally anything less than 3 x human salary if your budgeting horizon is 1 year. That's a high number, and probably fairly easy to achieve.
For homes, it's a very different bar. You'd have a hard time convincing most American families to purchase anything with a >$1000 price tag. Currently that's pretty much impossible for a humanoid.
I'm not sure.
I think house cleaning/chores require at least a "part-time" job's work of work for the average household (especially with children). We may be atypical, but my partner and I don't want to hire out a cleaning service and deal with the whole human component. But, I think we'd gladly pay 15k+ if it allowed us to take on the additional gainful workload. Even at a 20k price tag, I suspect we would likely have made up the difference in under a year.
If you can even afford 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%.
Selling to businesses is much easier, 99% of businesses can afford 200K if it replaces 3 x 70K humans.
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.
Robot lawnmowers are mostly over $1000 already and they only do one thing. Heck, a lot of lawnmowers are over $1000.
You can pay over $500 for an automatic cat litter box. Robot vacuums can be cheap but run to $600 or so. Household appliances is a robust sector where people have a proven track record of spending a lot of money.
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.
> We've had one for ~7 years and it's still going strong
Interested. Which one?
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.
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!
>You'd have a hard time convincing most American families to purchase anything with a >$1000 price tag.
Like cars, they'll likely purchase them through finance deals, with a monthly payment. Or perhaps even rent/lease them.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
At that point why not have a human cleaning service it will probably be cheaper
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?
Leasing is out, but locked-in subscriptions are in!
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.
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.
The vast majority which may be replaced would probably be better off burning down the factory rather than celebrate their upcoming domestic helper.
If you have a robot doing household work you can spend more time at work /S
Unitree's R1 humanoid robot is only about $6000, and it's still a nascent, smallish scale technology. They will come down.
If the future home robots are any good, it saves you from buying a dishwasher and robot vacuum. It can replace a maid/cleaning service and gardener/lawn-mowing service. For anyone paying for those services, it pays for itself.
$1000 isn't that high. Probably about a third of American households have an appliance over $2000, which is still a massive market.
I doubt it'd save you from purchasing a dishwasher - those things are very efficient and not very expensive. Perhaps it'd save you from loading and unloading a dishwasher
Have 2 dishwashers, and you never need to load or unload (as an extra step).
I think domestic robots will make a lot of incremental progress and that fee, 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.
I mean, a twice-monthly house-cleaning service is running you ballpark 5k/year and people treat that shit as non-negotiable. I tried to claw back that line item after our second baby was born (wife didn't want them in the house anyway when we had a newborn), and it was completely unsuccessful. She claimed misery and all our friends were on her side.
So the lifestyle stayed inflated.
> ballpark 5k/year
How big is your house? When we had a cleaning lady it was $70 a go. Under $2000 for every second week.
Yes, but:
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.
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.
3. Consumers don't budget rationally. Businesses do.
Yeah, the dishwasher takes much longer to do the dishes than I do by hand, but that's cool. That said, the dishwasher is out of the way.
I don't think we'll get household robots anytime soon. Hell, the only ones that can afford them will be the same that would hire human household help.
> Hell, the only ones that can afford them will be the same that would hire human household help.
But maybe they'd rather deal with a robot than a human?
Honestly: why?
I don't want a person I don't know very well in my space.
That aside: if I'm lucky enough to find a person who's good and reliable, they might move away, switch jobs etc.
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.
Then I have to deal with whichever random person they decide to send. I can't be the only one who finds this annoying (even if I'm not in the majority).
You'd need to manage the robot, too, I would think. In my experience, I rather manage people than machines.
Sure, but others have the opposite preference. Machines tend to be more predictable.
I think machines are just unpredictable in different ways (for example, changes from software updates).
Robots don‘t steal and don‘t want a raise.
If there is a subscription in there somewhere, prices could change.
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.
Not irony: why manage machines with all the issues that go with that instead of people?
Tell me you are not an introvert without telling me...
I don't want a person I barely know regularly going all over my apartment. What if they discover... nevermind.
A robot, on the other hand? Hell yeah!
Less liability?
The dishwasher is out of the way because you made space for it out of the way. We'll probably adapt our spaces for robots too eventually.
For example, you could store far more things out of easy human reach.
"That's fair, you are absolutely right I should not have unscrewed the water hose and put it away before turning on the valve to water the plants, even though you specified that order, I should've used some common sense."
There is going to be so much pain from VLA malicious compliance. If the current gen of LLMs are anything to go by I can already see it being an hilariously massive problem.
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.
> it honestly doesn't matter if it takes a robot longer than a human to clean your house
it depends. in order for my slow ass Roomba to clean my floors, I have to move a bunch of things out of the way and not use the room.
on the flip side, i think this "the robot cannot automate the whole task" thing is reductive too. suffice it to say, EVERYTHING matters, there honestly nothing that "honestly doesn't matter."
The time between gpt 2 and 3 was 15 months. The time between gemini robotics 1 and 2 was also 15 months: https://blog.google/products-and-platforms/products/gemini/h...
The difference between gpt 2 and 3 was insane. 2 could generate limericks when it wasn't repeating a word 300x. 3 could actually do some things. By comparison gemini robotics has hardly changed at all.
I will also point out that slow, non-fluid robotics is on a totally different level of difficulty from fast fluid motion. Asimov could walk pretty smoothly, but it didn't fall over because it used a very careful sequence that was never unbalanced; you could pause at any point without falling over. Move faster, like boston dynamics, and you need to account for the change in balance from your arms swinging... or rather, you need to be able to account for the rotational inertia etc from moving multiple masses along complex paths with multiple points of articulation at hundreds or thousands of times per second.
An algorithm to fold tshirts 90% of the time is easy. The cloth hangs down by gravity and you can just look for right angles (corners), find their coordinates with binocular matching, and move them to meet each other. Getting 99%, or folding them quickly, so that the fabric is actually moving instead of just hanging still- incredibly, incredibly more complex.
Gotta admit google is pretty ballsy for directly attacking Moravec's Paradox: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec%27s_paradox
They're fluid, but they are slow, which is highly likely to be a safety thing, which will have the side effect of making many motions more difficult, not less.
LLMs aren't themselves hurting anyone, no matter how much certain people like to pretend otherwise, whereas an AI in a robot with significant motors in absolutely can and will. There are reasons industrial ones live in safety cages after all.
Expecting them to be like inverse kinematic driven digital dolls is wrong because the optimization won't be for matching that but something like "net reduce energy consumption" which for electric motors in multi joint arms will look a bit odd.
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...
> If progress is as fast as LLMs
Is this the new "x technology is a year away" ?
I believe that it's also for safety, these robots would easily destroy themselves if not restrained (and cause damage).
Better to go slow and controlled. Giving physical action to a model is dangerous and must be carefully monitored. Slow is good. Oversight is important.
yes at 1k tok/sec i think these robots will be fast and very fluid.
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.
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)
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
FWIW I do think https://rodneybrooks.com/why-todays-humanoids-wont-learn-dex... 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.
Robotics with AI is the real revolution.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
I am imagining a world somewhere between the movie Elysium and Oblivion.
> I suspect these things will be only available to the already-quite-wealthy.
Initially, sure. But the price will come down in time, just like with any other technology in history.
> If all goes well, imagine a world in which you work because you want to not because you have to.
And if all goes bad, imagine a world in which you and your family are homeless and starve to death.
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
It's good for capital holders. It does imply a further shift in the distribution of wealth though with all the attendant implications thereof.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
> Humanoids are just creepy and you can't really trust them.
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.
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.
What does this mean for intrinsic, the moonshot they brought back into the fold in feb?
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.
Why not both?
I hope humanoids will be ever present, it’s just that the scale of impact from specialized robots will be far greater. Humanoids will be our butlers, but the other robots will be creating a world of unimaginable abundance.
Big humanoid robots are expensive, the actuators still suck, and the control problems are hard. Their big advantage is that they can occupy human-shaped spaces, but struggle to do anything useful.
Not to say we won't get humanoid robots eventually, but I think there's probably some low hanging fruit for people to make some other kinds of solutions. Specialized robots for industrial environment, well-thought out appliances for the home.
It would be a bit surprising if the progression was Roomba -> humanoid robot.
We have Google, Figure, Tesla, Boston Dynamics, and literally dozens of Chinese companies building humanoid robots and making huge improvements in the tech. Not there yet by any means as a general-purpose home assistant, but I don't think it will be too surprising if at least one of them succeeds
It will take a while before humanoids become useful. You can speed it up with extreme amounts of investment but it still wouldn’t be soon.
The AI will need generalized robots to build the highly specialized ones.
Why would building specialized robots require generalized robots?
Seems to me you'd do better if you built the robots with robots that were specialized in building robots.
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.
Presumably that company could use the Gemini Robotics product to eliminate the remote controller.
[1] https://www.tau-robotics.com/
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.
Sure Tau is teleoperated, but teleoperating an agile movement like that is actually really hard and still involves AI to keep the robot balanced. And while it performs useful tasks it is simultaneously collecting the data to automate those tasks. Tau is a lot closer to real deployment than Google.
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. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kYkIdXwW2AE
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
Second chart (it's to the right of the first chart and clicking it to scroll is easier than otherwise)
Wow screw lightbulb is lower than tie bag or close ziploc. Pretty surprising.
Do these learn?
It would be cool to have a robot that can be taught to drive the same way we might teach a teenager to drive.
No one has any idea how to achieve something like this.
Fingers crossed this inspires a Chinese lab to release some weights so people can benefit.
They already do: https://qwen.ai/blog?id=qwen-robotsuite
Nvidia also releases their Cosmos series models.
Did qwen actually release those robotsuite weights? I can't seem to find them anywhere.
we'll be having sex with robots in the near future
Is anyone building non-humanoid robots? Feels like humanoid is limiting the creativity of building a truly useful robot in today's age
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.
Humanoid startup execs just don't talk about that.
Humanoid robots can be dropped in wherever human labor is currently used.
That makes them extremely 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.
That's the dream.
It's easier to redesign the work to be robot-friendly than to deploy a humanoid robot and have it actually work.
In the Xiaomi Model Demo, they have non-humanoid robots
https://robotics.xiaomi.com/xiaomi-robotics-1.html
Wow, what a time to be alive!
I would caution against enthusiasm. Anyone opposing those who end up controlling these robots won't be alive for long.
These robots can't do combat, not effectively anyway, but that's already jumping three stages ahead, because first off, why would they?
Why would they use expensive, untested, and fragile humanoid robots when $50 Alibaba drones are already really good at combat?
The argument isn't that the robots will kill you. It's that once the rich have capable human-like robots, they don't need poor humans anymore.
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.
> 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.
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.
Didn’t we see Chinese robots doing kung fu??
Yeah, but that doesn’t mean the west won’t try to catch up
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?
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
Deepbody
Now they are coming for the plumbers.
Still waiting for self driving car to bring me one robotic plumber to my construction site.
You won't be waiting more than 5-10 years.
Level 5 automomy has been "only five years away" for 15 years
You're probably thinking of Level 4. No one thought Level 5 was coming before 2050 until a few years ago.
And Level 4 is already here, scaling up, while we're seeing the first real signs of Level 5 (Tesla FSD Supervised).
The progress here is staggering - I'm not sure why you're so cynical!
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
What's the point of not releasing it? Let people play with it and get some experience with it for a price.
have you seen that NEO robot's hands, wild
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QRyXV3csReA
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.
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.
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.
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.
Bizarre oversimplification.
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).
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.