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Comment by krunck | Hacker News Reader

"Is Isaac 1 teleoperated? Isaac 1 is autonomous for Laundry Flow and Daily Reset by default, with teleoperation assistance when needed to guarantee we complete tasks."

Offline and autonomous or never in my house.

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Completely offline will literally never happen at least not in any sort of off-the-shelf consumer product maybe in some sort of niche projects down the line

so just a quick counterpoint ---> I played around with qwen 2.5 4B recently locally. An older model and a tiny model.

Tested this model with optimized harness and it was good enough that it was able to complete (sometimes) a full job application flow for given json user data.

All that to say, I think that there is a strong possibility that we will even just with llm tech, develop it enough that local efficient models are entirely sufficient on their own to be able to drive basic robot 'harness'.

But we almost certainly will not be seeing that as the product from the corporations because they desperately want and need that data about you, for the same reason many tv (lcd/etc) companies make more money from 'ads' then from selling the tvs.

That's great but there's a huge difference between a llm and a robot doing chores in your house

I’d disagree with this. As local models and compute improve, I can definitely see something like this becoming doable offline in the next decades. In the meantime, at the very least, I would never use something like this unless I could bring my own API/cloud provider so that my data isn’t being handled by the vendor. Also teleoperation is a huge no go for me.

I get that the voice interface probably uses an LLM but surely the rest of the device isn’t based on LLM tech?

LBM likely - and then that creates rules for a local system to follow.

Believe it or not, I'm actually capable of operating completely offline. So there you have it.

Privacy aside, who wouldn't want their $8,000 cloud device abruptly shut down when Weave Robotics decides to pivot?

Look, I mean, would you really object to a human cleaner showing up every day and putting away your laundry?

If the answer is "no" then what's the difference if the human cleaner is not physically present but instead teleoperating a robot?

I mean at least the robot won't ever need to use the loo. I'm a bit fastidious like that but I don't like it when strangers sit on my loo.

(Friends too. Why can't we have a robotic potty that follows visitors around? OK, I get it... )

Generally when people have a house cleaner they know who it is and have some form of relationship with them that establishes a baseline of trust. That would not exist here.

This is just initial discomfort. It'll be the same as the incentives that make Uber drivers now way safer than taxis.

Eh, there's no reason why you can't choose your robot's teleoperator(s). Say the company has a page where you can check their profiles and even communicate with them.

And if robot companies were prepared to drop the pretense of robotic autonomy and sell you a by-default teleoperated robot service instead, you could always directly communicate with your robot's teleoperator while they're doing their job. Just talk to the robot, and the teleoperator replies, yes?

It's not really the same unless the human cleaner also wears a gopro to record and archive their entire cleaning session for later review (and potential sale to data brokers when the cleaning company wants more money).

First of all, yes, I would object although I've debated whether I could get over it for myself. But it's a moot point because my partner would absolutely _never_ put up with it. And that's assuming that the human cleaner doesn't show up with a go-pro and an ill defined policy about where the video from the go-pro is going and what it will be used for

Scale matters. Just because I'm fine with one cop following one suspicious person around doesn't mean I'm fine with the government spying on all citizens at all times.

Same thing for robotics companies. A single cleaner is uploading ~zero information to a myriad of databases and training sets. An internet connected robot is almost certainly going to store immense amount of data and do god-knows-what with it.

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