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Comment by scronkfinkle | Hacker News Reader

LLM's are a funny technology because on the one hand this is all undeniably impressive at the rate of what's changed from them, and yet despite that I find myself disappointed by the lack of breakthroughs for things I don't find interesting. I like math and programming, and LLM's are pretty good at it, when are they going to get good at folding laundry for me? I think a lot of robotics work promises to solve this category of "boring" breakthroughs, and I'm optimistic we'll be able to achieve it, i just wonder when

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The bottleneck is not really the intelligence here.

We can build robots that do the things you want. Arrange a visit to Amazon's robot warehouse tour.

We can't ship them because they break all the time with current technology. It would be a tough sell to have to being in a 100kg robot for servicing every few weeks.

This was cars in the first several decades of automobiles. The tide shifted as soon as you could just drive the car to a neighborhood dealership for servicing. It's fun to imagine the logistics of that for robots but the material science and engineering has to advance a bit.

I don't think we can build a robot that takes a pile of crumpled up clothes from the dryer and folds them (reliably without destroying any of them).

I think the parent's point - and what I more or less agree with - is that the problem is the hardware.

Human arms and hands are incredibly intricate. Reproducing their facility with hardware requires a large number of actuators and finicky fine parts. This isn't a software problem. Industry solves it with maintenance schedules.

There's probably nothing in your house that has as many moving parts as a robot needs. Your car maybe, and pretty much all it does is rotate wheels.

That's part of it but OP presented it as a solved problem but the hardware is expensive/unreliable.

That's not the case. I've seen folding robots. They require standardized input, only fold one type of clothing and don't do it reliably.

Yes we can do this, and if you look for it you'll find plenty of videos of this happening.

But you can't buy it because it'll break in about seven days.

Just have two robots, and teach them to service each other. Problem solved!

Only sort of kidding, tbh having bots service themselves (and being intentionally made in a way that they can service each other) just makes a lot of sense.

An automated service station could be quite compact; it wouldn't need plumbing, lighting, human-comfortable climate control. Parts can be modular, and when a station gets low on spare parts, a self-driving truck could come by to pick up damaged parts and drop off replacements.

We're not there yet, but I think we're a lot closer than most people realize.

This is kinda terrifying from an AI apocalypse angle, though.

It almost feels like "A robot shall not autonomously build or repair another robot" should have been another of Asimov's laws.

Really? All you need to do to stop this is to stop governments from hiring robot "labor". Surely a democracy can make that decision, even when it means paying a little bit more, no?

Just need a third one for when the second one breaks while servicing the broken first robot.

What breaks?

I am trying to understand in your view what are the parts that actually breaks and what kind of improvement we would need.

Robot vacuums are massively simpler and they fucking break all the time. Wheel motors or their position sensors, belts, plastic gears, contacts that corrode, a circuit board someone decided to not comformally coat and a cat puked on it...

My roomba (Rosie) is going strong 8 years in. It’s just the bump into everything vacuum only kind but it gets the job done for my 900 sqft apartment

Not an expert on this.

Passing on what I have heard from robotics researchers at lunch conversations.

My impression is that any moving part that is not an electric motor or an hinge breaks.

I've learned that I spend significantly less time folding laundry than many of the people commenting about modern ai powered robotics. It's not meant literally is it? For instance keeping floors and counter-tops clean seems a much bigger time sink for me.

My partner spends at least 10x time on this task than I do. I think the task has a varied workload?

I think my grandmother is the only person I can think of in my entire family that legit folds cloths properly. Dying art? :D

There's definitely a wide variance in laundry. Laundry is something that I can do to kill time while boiling pasta on the stove, for my partner it is an entire afternoon task.

It's just a general "thing I don't want to do" not the thing that takes the most time. Could be taking out the garbage. It's just an example menial task.

Do you have kids?

Pretty soon. Sunday Robotics had a 3 hour stream of folding clothes with 99% accuracy. You can watch it for yourself. There’s a lot of “hand” companies with very compelling videos just over the last two months. Then there was Figure’s multi day livestream of package manipulation that was very impressive. Physical LLMs are definitely coming. Given enough training data we know LLMs can output coherent data in any space, it’s just a matter of time.

I feel the iPhone or ChatGPT moment for robotics is coming soon. Lots of different companies doing interesting things. What’s missing is somebody putting it together into a compelling package.

I'm starting to think that a ChatGPT moment for robotics would require abandoning the current brute force approach to artificial intelligence. ChatGPT's trick was simply more data and compute. A stochastic parrot will eventually become very impressive. But we don't have an equivalent of billions of lines of code for robotics.

The economic value in automating high skill and expensive labour that the most profitable corporations rely on is what attracts the most investment and effort.

Once you lose your job you'll find plenty of time to do all those menial tasks you hate wasting time on.

Jokes aside, programming and mathematics are just well ordered environments. Already digital and verifiable. Perfect for a GPU cluster to power through. The real world is big slow and complex in comparison.

f folding clothes, i wanna just have a robot be my personal chef. the amount of different tasks and capabilities a robot will need to make any meal that I can in my kitchen is huge and i feel like it’s still a while from being solved.

It may sound strange, but cooking is one of the most intense and attention-consuming tasks I encounter.

I have to do it every day too.

So I fully agree with this line of thought... Many a time I have considered that I would happily spend more on a personal 24/7 chef than I ever would on a car. Cars to me are utilities and should simply be efficient and optimized to purpose - food is luxury and taste, it is sublime experience and art. Maybe that's why I can't make it, treating every recipe like a strict command chain isn't how art is done. Can my taste buds be scanned?

Hire a butler/personal assistant that is also a decent cook. Sometimes there is a husband/wife pair. But be ready for substantial expense.

I mean honestly anything is taste and art. People care about very different things. Some people see their clothes as the biggest expression of themselves, whereas others don't care about their clothing but see their cars as art and a special experience thats separate from the purpose.

But yeah, I think a lot of food is just practicing. And if possible, learn from someone who's food you do really like, and experiment. Just try making some dish you really liked, you'll be surprised at how far you can get.

The cooking robots I have seen are massively complex and can only make one dish. I agree this is a ways off.

I saw a cocktail-making robot that was pretty impressive, but it was the size of a room and broke down frequently.

Unless we spend a bunch of money generating data, I can't imagine the machine steps to fold laundry are very big in the general training sets. Someone is going to have to find a hardware system, cheap enough to make it economically feasible then train it. As far as tasks people will pay a lot of money for a robot, this seems low on the list.

There are companies that are paying housewives in India to record all their activities. I assume laundry is part of that.

future is on the way, three to four generation ( one each year ?) will unfold this, primarily quantum computer improving material and battery, humanoids becomes standardised and modular enough to be easily replaceable ( think ibm pc ) ( most components are simple injection moulded advance plastics , mass produced in some corner of china, self detection of wear and tear and self replace that part ), other is optical computers ( 100x lower power x 100x speed = local inference ), problem is, when this will become reality, who will benefits more ? who will hold moat ?

It's because existing models are a brute-force approach to intelligence. With enough data and compute, a stochastic parrot will become very impressive.

But with robotics, there's no pre-made dataset that can be parroted. Notice that these datasets, e.g. how to fold clothes, need to be created by humans. That's as if humans needed to write algorithms like quicksort to teach LLMs how to code.

The problem is we're orders of magnitudes better at manipulating bits at scale than we are at manipulating atoms.

I'm not holding my breath for advanced robots in the home within the next ten years.

But, then again, I didn't see LLMs coming either.

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