Comment by hn_throwaway_99 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hn_throwaway_99 | Hacker News Reader

hn_throwaway_99

I'm curious if someone more informed than me can comment on this part:

> Besides things like the rise of humanoid robots, which I suspect is going to take most people by surprise when they are rapidly able to perform a huge number of tasks that currently require an unskilled (or even skilled) human worker (e.g., doing laundry ...

I've always said that the real test for humanoid AI is folding laundry, because it's an incredibly difficult problem. And I'm not talking about giving a machine clothing piece-by-piece flattened so it just has to fold, I'm talking about saying to a robot "There's a dryer full of clothes. Go fold it into separate piles (e.g. underwear, tops, bottoms) and don't mix the husband's clothes with the wife's". That is, something most humans in the developed world have to do a couple times a week.

I've been following some of the big advances in humanoid robot AI, but the above task still seems miles away given current tech. So is the author's quote just more unsubstantiated hype that I'm constantly bombarded with in the AI space, or have there been advancements recently in robot AI that I'm unaware of?

https://physicalintelligence.company is working on this – see a demo where their robot does ~exactly what you said, I believe based on a "generalist" model (not pretrained on the tasks): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J-UTyb7lOEw

There are so many cuts in that 1 minute video, Jesus Christ. You'd think it was produced for TikTok.

There's a laundry folding section at the end of that isn't cut. Looks reasonably impressive, if your standard is slightly above that of a teenager

That's the same video I commented on below: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42844967

There's a huge gulf between what is shown in that video and what is needed to replace a human doing that task.

2 months ago, Boston Dynamics' Atlas was barely able to put solid objects in open cubbies. [1] Folding, hanging, and dresser drawer operation appears to be a few years out still.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F_7IPm7f1vI

I saw such robot's demos doing exactly that on youtube/x - not very precisely yet, but almost sufficiently enough. And it is just a beginning. Considering that majority of the laundry is very similar (shirts, t-shirts, trousers, etc..) I think this will be solved soon with enough training.

Can you share what you've seen? Because from what I've seen, I'm far from convinced. E.g. there is this, https://youtube.com/shorts/CICq5klTomY , which nominally does what I've described. Still, as impressive as that is, I think the distance from what that robot does to what a human can do is a lot farther than it seems. Besides noticing that the folded clothes are more like a neatly arranged pile, what about all the edge cases? What about static cling? Can it match socks? What if something gets stuck in the dryer?

I'm just very wary of looking at that video and saying "Look! It's 90% of the way there! And think how fast AI advances!", because that critical last 10% can often be harder than the first 90% and then some.

First problem with that demo is that putting all your clothes in a dryer is a very American thing. Much of the world pegs their washing on a line.

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