Comment by deepdarkforest | Hacker News Reader

Comment by deepdarkforest | Hacker News Reader

> the demand side, the basic problem with humanoid robots is that they're mostly useless right now ... ... to square this circle, ... we will provide free hardware and software upgrades until we are able to make the robot fully autonomous...This way, we can have some extra cash upfront to kickstart development

Congratulations guys! The technical stuff is above my paygrade, but you have a cracked team and with open source you will have a great chance to be close or at SOTA level at your price point.

However, it looks to me that your core thesis is yes, when the autonomous robots get good enough, even at a medium family car price range they will sell like candies. Sure. But since you also want to have the cash now, to who exactly are you selling? Yes you promise that you will support the full autonomy option, but this sounds weirdly similar to Tesla selling cars promising the FSD, which we all know how that story went.

I'm not saying you won't deliver, I'm just saying you might need to a bit more careful in your story selling/narrative for this. For example, i would be super interested to get one for like 2k if it's not useful now, but paying 10k for essentially promises and possible upgrades is a bit iffy. Hence i would like to at least see some plug in and play current usecases? Even if they are just for fun.

I spent two years on Tesla's FSD team, and I think from a cash flow perspective for funding R&D this model did make a lot of sense - basically, it takes cash upfront for training models, but there's zero marginal cost for distributing the models once you've developed them.

I think this kind of "promise the future, pay now" model does alienates some people, especially when the tech is not ready today. That's why we're open sourcing everything, to avoid the feeling of overpromising on what is ready today. The core idea is that the people who bought FSD early on were very invested in it's success, and that feedback loop is very important for improving machine learning models at scale. The problem happens when actually delivering on the tech takes a long time, but I think we have a fairly clear technical roadmap to make our robot useful. At least, I think there are a lot more intermediate benchmarks for driving value for a humanoid robot than there are for self-driving cars, so I think people who buy it will have a stronger feeling that it is constantly improving.

From a cash flow perspective of course it makes sense to sell the future before you have it as working product. It just needs a great salesman or narrative to keep it going, im not arguing that.

> that feedback loop is very important for improving machine learning models at scale

Oh will you have your own feedback loop with let's say user's data? Or you meant as an example?

> * That's why we're open sourcing everything, to avoid the feeling of overpromising on what is ready today*

I agree here, it helps the today, but I dont think it helps the feeling of overpromising on what is ready today, its more like, even if it's open source , it does not increase the chances of it being ready/autonomous in the future. (im just playing devils advocate here)

I also agree with the intermediate benchmarks for sure, this is more to what i was referring to, it would be nice to see some more short term usecases/fun applications that are realistic to hit today or in the nearer future, that would drive a lot of sales value, at least for me, rather than go from now to full autonomy. Good luck!

> Oh will you have your own feedback loop with let's say user's data? Or you meant as an example?

That's more or less the idea - obviously since it's open source we wouldn't scrape peoples' data without their consent, but I would hope that people would contribute to the project in some form. Like, the core idea of the open source ethos is that building something like this collaboratively is a better / cheaper way to scale data collection / experience than us trying to collect all the data ourselves.

> it does not increase the chances of it being ready/autonomous in the future.

Yea that's true. At the end of the day it's just technical execution, so it's pretty risky. I just prefer that if people sign up for something risky, it's pretty transparent what exactly it is they're signing up for :)

> we're open sourcing everything

Does/will this include the training data, hyperparams, and weights for the models?

People will be reluctant to buy an "open source" robot if the key ML magic to make it work is closed off, e.g. if you charge a subscription for it.

Yeah of course. That's kind of the whole point - I don't think you can really trust a humanoid robot in your house around your family if it is not clear what it's running. Basically, for myself, I would not want to buy a closed sourced humanoid, and I view myself as relatively representative of the early adopter mentality. So personally I think this is the right way to build a great product.

I basically believe that in a world where humanoid robots are actually useful, we will not have any trouble monetizing. Probably we will verticalize manufacturing at some point in the future. I think the bigger risks for our business model are not from people copying us or something, but from not making progress fast enough.

Great to hear, thanks for the response!

Love it. It's tough to balance keeping the ship afloat vs giving back to the community, I think you've got a good thing going.

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