Is anyone else entirely unimpressed / bored with this? It's just AI mimicking reddit... I really don't see the big deal or technical innovations, if any.
Because we live in the most politicized time in history, enabled by social media. We also have the largest proportion ever of mentally ill and under/unemployed people in America with nothing better to do, no real career and/or family prospects, so they must latch onto trying to further their feel-good ideologies to give their lives meaning.
It's incredibly ironic that the left, originally the party of labor, is so strongly protecting illegal immigration. When you let in 20 million low skilled workers from different cultures into your country, who do you think suffers: capital or labor? Who feels the pressure in rising housing prices, job prospects, rising crime in cities, etc?
The other ironic part to this whole situation is that the current administration goes so hard on their rhetoric and marketing but ultimately are deporting less people than ever before. Everyone is losing here, and the American Empire is fading away, eroding from the inside out.
I don't understand, doesn't the market solve these issues? Here's what I figure would happen:
1. App creators will pass the extra cost over to the iPhone users.
2. Android (and other platforms that can host smartphone apps) will be more competitive and start to look better for both app creators and consumers.
Sure, there's a bit of a context switching cost. Not everyone will just be able to automatically change over to an Android phone tomorrow. But it doesn't need to happen all at once. These phones get updated and replaced every 1-2 years. If iOS users see their app store prices rising too high, and they aren't OK with this, then they will switch to Android eventually, once it's worth it.
Otherwise, I don't see any problem with Apple reaping the benefit of their powerful and well-built walled garden ecosystem.
Meta comment: it seems like you can only voice a particular direction on the politic topic of immigration enforcement on this thread without getting downvoted. The opinion is obvious because everyone automatically jumps to malice as opposed to incompetence as the prevailing theory for the article's claim.
I had a condescending response from a HN mod the other day telling me that HN isn't all that left wing, just a 'slight skew'. Well OK buddy, exhibit A, read through the diversity of opinions that aren't flagged in this thread. I'd go as far to say that HN is basically like Reddit, except more of you happen to have computer science degrees.
And that's fine, it is what it is, but let's not pretend this website doesn't have a heavy bias in a particular direction.
"I've noticed" was my wording - communicating my claim and opinion. I will make claims and opinions on a message forum, thank you very much. Unless you want to pull up a specific moderation rule instructing me otherwise.
"Slight skew" is just your claim and opinion. We're both equally entitled to them. I'd be happy to look at actual data: try an anonymous poll on HN for political affiliation sometime. We both know that skew wouldn't be "slight".
Please don't make unfounded counter claims without evidence.
LLMs have already proven themselves to be economically valuable. At a bare minimum, they can help people develop most low-mid level software considerably faster, at a good enough quality.
They also have proven themselves in other white collar knowledge endeavors as well, as valuable tools that augment human economic output. Marketers can make more copy material, any office worker can improve the quality of their email communications, etc. Easy.
What are humanoids doing exactly? What can they do, that actually makes sense and provides positive economic impact over existing alternatives? Not clear to me.
Ok but can we get into the nuts and bolts of what we actually want these robots to do?
Because every time I think of something, either an existing industrial setup can or will do it better, or a special-purpose device will beat it.
So general intelligence + general form factor (humanoid) sounds great, if feasible. But what will it do exactly? And then let's do a reality check on said application.
Meta comment - what a weird comment to downvote. I am expressing curiosity in good faith after reading the article, with a fairly logical follow up. What is the point of commenting in this community if it's primarily cynicism and negativity?
Interesting indeed. Does such a finding suggest any worthwhile easy-to-try 'treatments' that may help alleviate symptoms?
I don't know much about the biochemistry here, I assume this is not something like GABA that can be directly supplemented. But maybe there are precursor nutritional and supplemental substances that can help these people upregulate how much of the glutamate molecule in question the body can produce.
No, "AI" is software, and software is a tool, and tools aren't people that should pay taxes.
You wouldn't charge your CNC Machine taxes for the productive labor it produces that could have otherwise been done by a dozen blacksmiths.
By all means have corporate and sales taxes pertaining to the owner of said tools though. Even as a right-leaning individual, it's become pretty clear to me that corporations pay too low in taxes compared to the broad 'middle class'. Corporate tax cuts don't help the common man. An extra few hundred in their pockets each month certainly would though.
Costco doesn't seem to be like a monopoly, broadly speaking they compete with many grocery stores and bulk food outlets. That being said they often have solid inventory, and the samples used to be a nice touch until all my local locations got way too crowded.
They seem decent enough. I barely play games these days, so I don't fully understand the value they add. Just seems like a convenient app store that lets me port my collection across different computers.
I loved Pebble back in the day, and Eric is a great guy and friend to entrepreneurs trying to build cool things.
I do wonder how a modern revival of Pebble will compete from a product perspective within the current landscape. Obviously there's the high-end Apple Watches, but there's also incredibly cheap and long battery life products from China that you can see on Aliexpress and similar. Fitness tracking is another related niche that seems oversaturated, unless you do something really unique in biometrics sensing.
So it seems like a hard market to get back into, curious where they take things.
People comparing this to GPT-2 is very interesting. While it sounds like a nice analogy or even a good story to investors, the fundamentals are very different.
To train GPT, all of the training data (the internet of text, scanned books, etc) had already existed, even before the GPT project began. Arguably, the compute required (for GPT-3) also already existed, even before GPT-2.
The GPT project really just came down to investing in all of the pieces to take the ideas from a 2017 research paper to the next level. Nobody knew if X thousand GPUs, plus all of the internet's text, plus neural network transformers, would work out. But somebody took a risk in putting together the existing pieces, and proved that it can.
There's no analogy here to humanoid robotics. Not only is the data required for neural network operated humanoids close to non-existent (at the scale needed), but the nature of the data itself is enormously more complicated that taking a list of tokens in a vocabulary, and outputting 1 more token from the same vocabulary.
That being said, I still applaud the ambition of the Figure team. While I think it's clear they are presenting incredibly cherry-picked examples, they aren't trying to mislead consumers with a product for sale (because... they can't). Instead, they are productizing important research to investors, who would otherwise waste money on less important and less ambitious projects. So overall I find projects of this nature to be a net positive for technical innovation.
That's fine, but for future reference, robotic arms should have their specs listed and quantified - stuff like reach, payload, repeatability. If I'm a researcher, how do I know if this arm can do what I need? I can only infer so much from a few demo videos.
Final comment I'll say, it's a weird and tough price point. Actual research labs would rather spend $20,000 on a very high quality and likely larger high-fidelity platform. A random hacker or grad student will need some real convincing to shell out $2,000, sub $1K might better serve them. So what's the target customer profile exactly?
I encountered similar issues developing a $3K plug and play robot research arm in the past. The economics are awkward. You can actually just spend $5K and get a really good second-hand industrial robot (maybe even first-hand now from China). Or you could spend $500 and get a 6 DOF platform at least as good as your current platform's arm and then buy the sensor separately and bolt it to your workspace - bam, done. And no, the software isn't that important, servos are easy to work with...
Therefore my 'in between platform' was stuck in a hard place. I made some one-off sales, but never really scaled the business, which is what would be needed for any fancy "we're the platform where people do AI" vision to manifest to investors. Hardware is tough - they'll see your numbers and easily pass. They'll realize you need sales in quantity to get anywhere meaningful otherwise.
So I wanted to share criticisms and my experience so you can look ahead to likely challenges and hopefully get further. Best of luck.
> I would say the problem is that most manufacturers, including chinese, sell you platforms that are not reliable enough for AI manipulation, and there's a race to the bottom for it, to which we try not to participate
Pretty lofty claims though, really think you're so above everyone on quality at this price point? I know what dynamixels are capable of, and I see the jitter in the demo videos.
Why aren't the manipulator specs easily accessible on the website? Have you run a real repeatability test? Payload even?
It's a neat high-fidelity garage build platform, but I don't see any reason to assume this price premium is due to hardware quality.