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I'm not sure why some comments here are so pessimistic. I was grinning ear to ear while seeing the video. You're telling me we've finally got robots that can do
by user_7832 2mo ago
I'm not sure why some comments here are so pessimistic. I was grinning ear to ear while seeing the video. You're telling me we've finally got robots that can do our laundry? And the model is at least as free as beer?
To quote the lyrics/meme, we used to pray for times like this. This is what robotics should be used for.
- echelon 2mo ago[flagged]
- onli 2mo agoWorking past your personal bedtime, part of an imaginary movement of millions might, ignoring the negative aspects of AI, empowered like commanding an army. This frankly sound psychotic, and it's exactly why uncontrolled AI usage is seen so critical by many. 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.
- echelon 2mo ago[flagged]
- onli 2mo agoIt is not a sign of productivity to create LOCs. Especially not 100k.
- echelon 2mo ago[flagged]
- spaqin 2mo agoit's fine it can run in circles all it wants, i just want a calm, stable life with purpose (no running an llm ain't it)
- mlrtime 2mo ago[flagged]
- owebmaster 2mo agoOne year ago LLMs weren't trash, in one year you'll find that they aren't miraculous either
- user43928 2mo agoYou will have to work long nights when you try to build a business of your own while continuing to work a regular job. 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.
- blanched 2mo agoThe frustrating part is that these posts will never post any details about the business, despite the fact that it would immediately invalidate most criticism. 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.
- witx 2mo agoAhah you AI bros can't stop talking about Claude and llm, and telling stories of how great it was that one time, even when they are not the topic at hand. > I've built multiple successful businesses in the last year. If you're doing this right you don't need your employer anymore. Right
- backlava12 2mo agoRolled my eyes at "I've built multiple successful businesses in the last year". This person is clearly in some sort of manic state.
- jpnc 2mo agoIt's always funny seeing people that write like this as if they are somehow exempt from the future we're seemingly rushing into. Bro, you prooompting yourself into unconsciousness is not going to make you not obsolete. Unless you're being sarcastic in which case poe's law.
- witx 2mo agoYes I think perhaps he's trolling and I fell for it
- andrepd 2mo ago> 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 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.
- mlrtime 2mo agoYou forgot the murderous psychopath part...
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- dnemmers 2mo agoThat last paragraph is particularly worrisome. I worry about other dilusions you have imbued.
- backlava12 2mo agoThis is not meant as an attack or to sound cruel but you are suffering from some degree of psychosis. Please look after yourself.
- chunkyslink 2mo agoI am of course impressed by the model and the robot. Great stuff, 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.
- echelon 2mo agoThis discourse reminds me of the handful of Christians who thought we needed Corn Flakes and uncomfortable clothing to stay chaste and that electricity made us stray from God. 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.
- Cthulhu_ 2mo agoProbably not, as the washing machine, dishwasher, car, computer, etc didn't cause that either. edit for nuance: Sure, it did for some people I suppose. But they are the exception.
- leoedin 2mo agoI often wonder if they just made us do more washing, use more cups, travel further in the same time and get more expectations from our boss though. 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?
- jldugger 2mo ago> You're telling me we've finally got robots that can do our laundry? Did you watch it actually fold that shirt? Super slow and bad at it.
- epolanski 2mo agoYou're missing the forest for the tree.
- JumpCrisscross 2mo ago> Super slow and bad at it 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.
- iot_devs 2mo agoAbsolutely! Also if this scale anywhere close to LLMs in 2 years they will fold at super human speed and much better than me.
- XorNot 2mo agoThe real question is whether a hardware platform today would be good enough. 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?
- fragmede 2mo agoPhysics. Right now the clothes folding is computationally limited, but assuming we get faster computers to get them folding faster, gravity and air resistance are still going to take their time.
- wojciii 2mo agoExactly. I will pay money for a robot to take laundry out of the washing machine and hang it to dry and then fold it and put it away or just sort it by size. This is a chore that my wife and I have to do several times every week.
- lp4v4n 2mo agoThe pessimism in the comments here is entirely the reflection of the times we're living in. 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.
- echelon 2mo agoThose of us who liked the open web and P2P and hacking on projects all the time are seeing these models as a way to rebuild the internet in a shape that pleases us. To build anything and everything we want. Sans opportunity cost. 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.
- Xalutiono 2mo agoRobots will take jobs from massive amount of low income people. 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
- dnemmers 2mo agoYep, this is a good read and feels like the correct take.
- 2mo ago
- GordonS 2mo agoThere tends to be a lot of low-key (and some not-so-low-key) anti-Chinese xenophobia on HN, so that's likely a big part of it too.
- coldtea 2mo agoNation wide NIH.
- sph 2mo agoMore like pro-US exceptionalism, and any announcement for products created outside of it (whether it's EU or China) is met with doubts and skepticism. Unless something is from Japan, then it's perfect and any criticism is because you don't appreciate its unique cultural heritage.
- mlrtime 2mo agoThere has not been a pro-US exceptionalism tone in any HN thread in awhile. Go to any thread recently and it's pretty anti-capitalism/anti-US.
- desterothx 2mo agoIn all open weight model discussions there is at least some anti-Chinese sentiment
- h8hawk 2mo agoThey are likely Effective Altruists highly attuned to AGI (With current LLM's) risks, fearing an LLM uprising and human extinction, which they regard as the world's most critical challenge.
- HPsquared 2mo agoIronic, given the effectiveness of the open weights models that are distributed altruistically.
- antfarm 2mo agoWe nearly destroyed our planet to get there. Technocrats here applaude the new technological achievements that make life a little easier (less boring?) for the top one percent while willfully ignoring the associated costs for everyone else. Manufacturing these at scale will only make things worse. We are approaching peak decadence ever faster.
- red-iron-pine 2mo agoWall-E tried to warn us
- fragmede 2mo agoThe top 1% already have humans to do things for them though.
- griffoa 2mo ago[dead]
- spaceman_2020 2mo agoEvery single thing that’s come out of China in the entire AI/Robotics space lately has been a massive net positive for the world Open Source is a good thing, regardless of where it comes from
- idiotsecant 2mo agoIt's also relevant that China isn't open sourcing results because that's something China will do forever on some philosophical grounds. They do it because it is currently in the best interests of the Chinese state (and the world, as it turns out, coincidentally) but as soon as that stops being true there is zero chance it'll continue to be open source.
- spaceman_2020 2mo agoSo I'm supposed to hate this because of what China MIGHT do in a future neither you nor I can predict?
- idiotsecant 2mo agoIs there someone saying you should hate something? 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.
- bad_haircut72 2mo agoYeah the US needs to step up with its Open AI research here, they should start some kind of "Open AI" collective to release models free to the world, do it all open like
- 21asdffdsa12 2mo agoReminds me of the american reprint market for books back in the colonial war area.
- rvz 2mo ago> I'm not sure why some comments here are so pessimistic. 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.
- poncho_romero 2mo agoMass displacement of every sector of labour. Dissent policed by Boston Dynamic's robodogs. You will own nothing and be happy.
- whilenot-dev 2mo ago> This is what robotics should be used for. 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. [0]: https://xkcd.com/1205/ https://xkcd.com/1205/ [1]: https://www.festo.com/us/en/e/about-festo/research-and-development/bionic-learning-network-id_31842 https://www.festo.com/us/en/e/about-festo/research-and-devel... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASIMO https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASIMO
- rocketvole 2mo agoYou could replace "robotics" with "AI" in what you wrote above, and it would sound like what people were saying about llms when they first came out. Not trying to glaze one way or another but historically this take is outdated.
- bob778 2mo agoSure but the robots that extend our capabilities often start by replicating our current capabilities, even if those are as simple as folding clothes. It provides a baseline for the next generation of robots that can do more.
- ksec 2mo agoI keeping saying this, the best AI / LLM coming out isn't another question / answer chatbot or automate my email and essay. 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.
- fragmede 2mo agoI have so many airtags because otherwise I'd lose all my shit.
- sexy_seedbox 2mo ago> we've finally got robots that can do our laundry? Until it can check all pockets for tissue paper...
- falsemyrmidon 2mo agoMy wife already doesn't do that
- ModernMech 2mo agoI saw robots doing this in tech demos 15 years ago. And even those robots weren't doing anything new. Like all AI models, this is just AI repackaging and rebranding of things that robots have already been programmed to do using more classical control methods. The idea to do everything via AI was of course thought of for a long time, but the conclusion has been we have faster and more reliable methods to do the same thing with less compute, and that's still true. 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).
- backlava12 2mo agoYeah exactly. I've been seeing demos like this for ages. I'm kinda shocked at the lack of skepticism in the comments here. The hackernews comment sections have changed a lot these past couple years...
- allisdust 2mo agoThis super interesting link showing things that were impossible even a couple of years back, sitting below the day old news about Kagi's me too browser tells everything about HN audiences. West will fall behind in robotics and mostly because of the wrong priorities of its VCs and developers.
- 21asdffdsa12 2mo agoBut can it goldplate oysters?
- RGamma 2mo agoThe outlook on this, as so often, depends on personal finances.
- whatever1 2mo agoDid you see any of the MSE numbers? around 50% success rates in the tasks. Anyone in robotics can tell you that building an 80% solution is doable, very fast. Covering the last 20% can take your entire lifespan
- mandeepj 2mo ago> You're telling me we've finally got robots that can do our laundry? 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.
- backlava12 2mo ago> You're telling me we've finally got robots that can do our laundry? 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.
- villish 2mo agoYou would honestly pay 50-100k on a robot that just folds laundry or does your dishes? In the US you can get a maid that cleans once a week for $150-250 and would do a much better job. By the time that cost would equal this robot, the robot would be obsolete, not to mention any maintenance costs. Also dishes are the easiest chore to do around the house, especially if you clean them after use instead of letting them pile up.
- backlava12 2mo agoI honestly think I would. I have a maid come every two weeks which is of course not often enough for dishes/laundry. A maid that only came weekly couldn't stay on top of dishes either but they could do laundry fine sure. I do a lot of cooking and I find constantly doing dishes and loading/unloading the dishwasher to be a huge never-ending pain. A device that costs 100k and would free of me that sisyphean task forever would be a godsend. Also you can have the robot work anytime whereas a maid is probably on a schedule. 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.
- abraxas 2mo agoWow, some people really dislike any inconvenience in your lives, don't you? What will you do pray tell with that extra time? I doubt it will be spent on loftier pursuits. In fact I'm quite certain that for the vast majority it won't be. Wall-E was a documentary - just shot in the past.
- backlava12 2mo ago> I'm not sure why some comments here are so pessimistic. 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.
- brewcejener 2mo agoThe singularity is literally here right now! Some people will never be happy! This is easily the most amazing thing I have seen in my life! These things will be taking care of and raising babies very soon!
- JSR_FDED 2mo agoMaybe it’s the music of the first video, and maybe because it’s late, but this made me quite emotional. On the one hand it’s like a child learning to interact with its environment. On the other hand it’s a requiem for yet another thing that used to be human.