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This is a recent essay on robotic workers that does not mention Figure’s 24+ hour livestream of a robot doing package management on a live assembly line. The r

This is a recent essay on robotic workers that does not mention Figure’s 24+ hour livestream of a robot doing package management on a live assembly line. The real reason it’s hard to assess where we’re at with industrial robots is that some of the people who’ve gone hardest at it are secretive, and also believe in power law scaling. So, the first 1,000 robots will only be used to build the next robot factory, which also will be used to build the next really big robot factory. When we see humanoid robots actually out in the wild for sale at retail, they are going to come very very quickly, at scale. Figure and Boston Dynamics sold out next year’s production runs almost instantly sometime last year; I think it’s just incredibly hard to overestimate the impact humanoid robots are going to have on the global economy.

throwitaway222 14d ago
There still seems to be questions around if that was faked. (scorch me if I'm wrong I last looked at this a month ago)
- tokai 14d ago
  Questions? It's clear it was faked. The robot kept pushing its non-existent vr googles back up.
  - vessenes 14d ago
    Ooh interesting. Got a link? I guess you’d want to find out f that’s a weird motion tic falling out of rl training or the much simpler explanation. I thought figure was publicly clear the robots were operating autonomously.
gjsman-1000 14d ago
> So, the first 1,000 robots will only be used to build the next robot factory, which also will be used to build the next really big robot factory. When we see humanoid robots actually out in the wild for sale at retail, they are going to come very very quickly, at scale. This is one of the dumbest ideas I've read here. Seriously; do you honestly believe, that we will be able to linearly scale all of the materials that go into robots? You can't have a factory without motors, aluminum, steel, copper, quality control, CNC manufacturing, precision bearings, ball screws, harmonic drives, semiconductors, batteries, and skilled people to design, install, and maintain all of it. Every one of those is its own supply chain with its own bottleneck, and almost all of them are already constrained and at risk. If anything, I would bet you $500 we will not be able to jump to the robotics age because we don't have enough skilled humans on this earth, due to the excitement about not training them because of their imminent replacement. That's before geopolitics - do you think China, if we actually built working humanoid robots, wouldn't immediately claim all supply for themselves and lock down the supply chain? Of course they would, it would be stupid not to. In the event of a working humanoid robot, every single dependency needs to be onshore, or it's not scaling.
- DiggyJohnson 14d ago
  You could have made the same point without starting with the insult.
  - gjsman-1000 14d ago
    The original commentator works at a private equity fund, admits he has lost $1B twice, and yet any blue-collar laborer has a better grasp of the material world. The insult is earned.
    - deleted 14d ago
      [deleted]
    - vessenes 14d ago
      If you tour SpaceX’s hawthorn factory they will tell you: “raw materials come in, rockets go out.” Spacex manufacturing had a mix of robots and humans manufacturing together on the floor the last time I was there, like six years ago. But it was definitely deeply vertically integrated manufacturing. Similarly BYD in china has plants over an acre in size that run lights out with one human worker. My understanding is these are also vertically integrated, taking inspiration from Tesla and SpaceX. I’m happy to learn more about the material world from people at any walk of life; right now we have humans building robots out of raw materials and robots building robots out of raw materials already in the world. My prediction is that humanoid robots building robots will scale rapidly in the next two years; please give me the bear case though, I’m genuinely interested.
- MisterTea 14d ago
  > You can't have a factory without motors, ... This might hold true if the nation building the robots did not have a well established manufacturing base. However, I can see this working in China who has a strong manufacturing base where they can rapidly source all of theses components. It would make for a great experiment but you need working robots first. And that is where I think this idea falls short -- there are no capable robots to accomplish this self-replicating task.
troupo 14d ago
> When we see humanoid robots actually out in the wild for sale at retail, they are going to come very very quickly, at scale. Building factories and other robots is trivial. Just go and watch videos of any modern factory. What's nigh impossible is doing complex interactions requiring finesse, "human touch", and at speed. Even if you build a million robot-building robots, not a single one of them will be able to fold clothes, for example.
- dawnerd 14d ago
  Re: folding clothes, there’s machines that can do that already at the industrial scale.
  - troupo 14d ago
    But probably not when those clothes come out if the dryer, or (in the retail) when someone just throws a shirt on a shelf
- vessenes 14d ago
  Weave robotics (no affiliation) claims they are folding over 1,000 lbs of laundry a week in homes right now: https://www.weaverobotics.com https://www.weaverobotics.com. I have no idea how well these work.
  - troupo 13d ago
    It's strange that there are no videos on the site of their robots doing what they claim they are doing (or they are not playing on mobile safari?) And existin videos elsewhere don't inspire confidence: https://www.reddit.com/r/robotics/comments/1reacvq/weave_robotics_isaac_0_a_stationary_laundry/ https://www.reddit.com/r/robotics/comments/1reacvq/weave_rob... (though it is impressive in a way)
DennisP 14d ago
It was a team of robots. One has battery for three or four hours. I don't think it really addresses the article's concerns about long-horizon tasks or complex object manipulation. The objects were just bags and boxes, the manipulations were very simple, and each task was a few seconds long.
- vessenes 14d ago
  I guess the VLA proposal is that frontier models will keep extending the planning and action horizon and that the action models will keep improving simultaneously leading to a moment when they suddenly get useful. This seems likely to me, but I’m not a robot guy. We have certainly seen this 10x in value with 2-5x increase in context and horizon dynamic play out at least three times since 2019 with llms, and with self driving cars; having watched it I’m inclined to believe it can occur again.

throwitaway222 14d ago

There still seems to be questions around if that was faked. (scorch me if I'm wrong I last looked at this a month ago)

tokai 14d ago
Questions? It's clear it was faked. The robot kept pushing its non-existent vr googles back up.
- vessenes 14d ago
  Ooh interesting. Got a link? I guess you’d want to find out f that’s a weird motion tic falling out of rl training or the much simpler explanation. I thought figure was publicly clear the robots were operating autonomously.

gjsman-1000 14d ago

> So, the first 1,000 robots will only be used to build the next robot factory, which also will be used to build the next really big robot factory. When we see humanoid robots actually out in the wild for sale at retail, they are going to come very very quickly, at scale. This is one of the dumbest ideas I've read here. Seriously; do you honestly believe, that we will be able to linearly scale all of the materials that go into robots? You can't have a factory without motors, aluminum, steel, copper, quality control, CNC manufacturing, precision bearings, ball screws, harmonic drives, semiconductors, batteries, and skilled people to design, install, and maintain all of it. Every one of those is its own supply chain with its own bottleneck, and almost all of them are already constrained and at risk. If anything, I would bet you $500 we will not be able to jump to the robotics age because we don't have enough skilled humans on this earth, due to the excitement about not training them because of their imminent replacement. That's before geopolitics - do you think China, if we actually built working humanoid robots, wouldn't immediately claim all supply for themselves and lock down the supply chain? Of course they would, it would be stupid not to. In the event of a working humanoid robot, every single dependency needs to be onshore, or it's not scaling.

DiggyJohnson 14d ago
You could have made the same point without starting with the insult.
- gjsman-1000 14d ago
  The original commentator works at a private equity fund, admits he has lost $1B twice, and yet any blue-collar laborer has a better grasp of the material world. The insult is earned.
  - deleted 14d ago
    [deleted]
  - vessenes 14d ago
    If you tour SpaceX’s hawthorn factory they will tell you: “raw materials come in, rockets go out.” Spacex manufacturing had a mix of robots and humans manufacturing together on the floor the last time I was there, like six years ago. But it was definitely deeply vertically integrated manufacturing. Similarly BYD in china has plants over an acre in size that run lights out with one human worker. My understanding is these are also vertically integrated, taking inspiration from Tesla and SpaceX. I’m happy to learn more about the material world from people at any walk of life; right now we have humans building robots out of raw materials and robots building robots out of raw materials already in the world. My prediction is that humanoid robots building robots will scale rapidly in the next two years; please give me the bear case though, I’m genuinely interested.
MisterTea 14d ago
> You can't have a factory without motors, ... This might hold true if the nation building the robots did not have a well established manufacturing base. However, I can see this working in China who has a strong manufacturing base where they can rapidly source all of theses components. It would make for a great experiment but you need working robots first. And that is where I think this idea falls short -- there are no capable robots to accomplish this self-replicating task.

troupo 14d ago

> When we see humanoid robots actually out in the wild for sale at retail, they are going to come very very quickly, at scale. Building factories and other robots is trivial. Just go and watch videos of any modern factory. What's nigh impossible is doing complex interactions requiring finesse, "human touch", and at speed. Even if you build a million robot-building robots, not a single one of them will be able to fold clothes, for example.

dawnerd 14d ago
Re: folding clothes, there’s machines that can do that already at the industrial scale.
- troupo 14d ago
  But probably not when those clothes come out if the dryer, or (in the retail) when someone just throws a shirt on a shelf
vessenes 14d ago
Weave robotics (no affiliation) claims they are folding over 1,000 lbs of laundry a week in homes right now: https://www.weaverobotics.com https://www.weaverobotics.com. I have no idea how well these work.
- troupo 13d ago
  It's strange that there are no videos on the site of their robots doing what they claim they are doing (or they are not playing on mobile safari?) And existin videos elsewhere don't inspire confidence: https://www.reddit.com/r/robotics/comments/1reacvq/weave_robotics_isaac_0_a_stationary_laundry/ https://www.reddit.com/r/robotics/comments/1reacvq/weave_rob... (though it is impressive in a way)

DennisP 14d ago

It was a team of robots. One has battery for three or four hours. I don't think it really addresses the article's concerns about long-horizon tasks or complex object manipulation. The objects were just bags and boxes, the manipulations were very simple, and each task was a few seconds long.

vessenes 14d ago
I guess the VLA proposal is that frontier models will keep extending the planning and action horizon and that the action models will keep improving simultaneously leading to a moment when they suddenly get useful. This seems likely to me, but I’m not a robot guy. We have certainly seen this 10x in value with 2-5x increase in context and horizon dynamic play out at least three times since 2019 with llms, and with self driving cars; having watched it I’m inclined to believe it can occur again.