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Comment by sebastos | Hacker News Reader

As somebody working near the field, I do enjoy the fun of dreaming bespoke vision and autonomy algorithms (if I didn’t, I wouldn’t work in the field to begin with!). But I would drop it all in a heartbeat for a robot that works well. Robust, resilient robots would be such an incredible advance that the ‘how’ doesn’t matter. All of the nonsense from the current AI hype cycle would be worth it if it cashed out in Robots That Actually Work.

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I can't wait for a robot that does my household chores and cleaning.

Not to mention construction, infrastructure, agriculture, manufacturing, logistics...

AI hype cycle? It's working today.

It's optimizing ML model graphs for me while I type this, and it already cut inference time from 30s to 18s.

Some people act like there was no way for the AI labs to make back the $800B being invested in data center construction this year.

If we look at global GDP, it's $126T, and even a 5% productivity gain would correspond to $6T.

Is that impossible? Is it guaranteed to all crash? I don't think so.

How do you justify all these data centers when models are becoming good enough to run locally and other models are being directly "burned" into chips (model on chip)? Open weight models are almost as good as the closed ones now and they are free/uncensored.

The only thing DCs will still be need for is training, everything else will be done locally on your own hardware.

This bubble will burst and it will be ugly.

Open models are still behind February's Mythos.

Whether they can narrow that gap in the future, or OpenAI and Anthropic widen the gap with access to more compute and their better models assisting in the research process, remains to be seen.

At this time I see no reason to believe these data centers won't be in high demand.

> OpenAI and Anthropic widen the gap

Extremely unlikely seeing what the Chinese have been able to do with the limited resources they have. The creativity in finding improvement such as what deepseek has released is incredible. At this point it's a bet on the looser if you think the open models won't catch up and surpass the closed ones.

How do you know that what OpenAI and Anthropic have isn't even more incredible?

Rumored breakthroughs in efficiency were reported a few times.

Why do we need robots when we already have people?

I just want a robot butler. It doesn't have to prove mathematics theorems, just do my laundry and make lunch.

Me too but unfortunately theorem proving seems to be easier than doing laundry.

Hire a housekeeper for 2 hours a day.

I want a 24/7 robot butler. And I don't want any human strangers in my house, seeing my mess or seeing me naked.

For dull, dirty, and dangerous jobs!

Seems to me that AI is coming for clean well paid office jobs long before it comes for anything dirty and dangerous.

I think robotics AI revolution will come just a few years after the knowledge work AI revolution. We already have very promising robotics systems in active development.

When AI does all the good jobs who is going to afford a robotic butler?

> Why do we need robots when we already have people?

Is this a serious question? Use your imagination...

To do what people do, but cheaper seems to be what it boils down to.

To do what people do, without exposing humans to harms, dangers, and unnecessary risks.

Also to do the things humans don't even want to do.

There is a type of person who thrives on risk and danger. Should we say they aren't allowed to work?

No, but they should probably work for themselves.

I don't want them working for my company, at least. I want my workers safe & sound.

So that humans can live in harmony and prosperity, where no one has to work anymore and surely every resource will be distributed fairly.

It will surely not devolve into the ultimate class war like Elysium and similar.

I think there will be a bad time, but no I don't think it'll be Elysium. There was a lot of scarcity in that plotline.

And that would be the incorrect conclusion. Yes, cheaper is better, but worse and more expensive is still in the running if your boss doesn't have to deal with the human aspect and the tasks still get done. Early cars were worse than horses, but they still won out because there wasn't the biological aspect to contend with. Think about it, a human has all sort of mushy human crap to deal with. They're going to come in hung over or just tired from the weekend/last night, all sad because their mom/brother/sister/partner got cancer/died and get into fights/trouble with HR over something a coworker did and have lower output. A magic box you can put the same tasks into and get sufficiently good output back out, and not have to give it time off because it's Christmas/their daughter's ballet recital, that you can spin up 30 copies of and spin them back down with no remorse is worth way more than simply being able to pay the box $18/hr vs $20/hr to a real live human. That's why businesses are salivating at the idea of AI/robots. Not because they'll eventually be cheaper.

The robot loses an arm because your factory is unsafe? vs a human losing an arm?

What we're not ready for is replacing GDP as the important metric. There have long been known problems with GDP, and robots are only going to make that worse. A robot maid, purchased once, saves, say 20/hrs a week in household chores. That's a meaningful quality of life upgrade, but doesn't result in the GDP bump that getting a raise and hiring a service to clean your house does.

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