Lugh

joined 2 years ago
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It's a compliment to Unitree that when I first looked at this video with the latest updates to the G1 Bionic humanoid robot, I wondered if it was rendered and not real life. But it is real, this is what they are capable of, and the base model is only $16,000.

There are many humanoid robots in development, but the Unitree G1 Bionic is interesting because of its very cheap price point. Open source robotic development AI is rapidly advancing the capability of robots. Meanwhile, with chat GPT type AI on board we will easily be able to talk to them.

How far away are we from a world where you can purchase a humanoid robot that will be capable of doing most types of unskilled work with little training? It can't be very many years away now when you look at this.

 

This data is courtesy of Dan Shapiro.

As there are only so many people and hours in the day, the market for human attention is finite. Hollywood is spending more money to make TV and movies, but its market share is declining. People, especially younger people, are far more likely to watch videos on the internet made by small creators. Needless to say, the small content creators' costs are vastly cheaper. AI is rapidly making them cheaper still.

And it's not just that small creators using AI-generation will displace Hollywood's existing efforts; they are likely to create new artforms that will displace the old screen/broadcast formats of TV shows & movies too. AI-gen artforms, as yet uninvented, may be real-time rendered, personalized for individuals, hyper-niche, etc, etc

This is all part of a surprising trend with AI, its tendency towards decentralization. Some dommerist nightmares see all powerful corporations in the future, but as with open-source AI & robotics equalling the Big Tech efforts, the trend seems more for AI's power to be dispersed.

[–] Lugh 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

LLMs seem to be rapidly evolving robotics AI. Looking at Figure right now, it seems general purpose robots capable of most unskilled work (cleaning, warehouses, etc) can't be far off.

[–] Lugh 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Musk again recently said that he believes Tesla could finally deliver on its promise of an unsupervised self-driving system by the end of the year, or he will “be surprised” if it doesn’t happen next year.

The CEO doesn’t have much credibility with these predictions as he said the same thing every year for the last 5 years.

Precisely.

I wonder if the first Level 5 car is going to happen in China?

[–] Lugh 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

There's a huge amount of humanoid robots in development around the world. Here's a list I compiled from another post (and I probably missed several).

LimX Dynamics

1X's NEO

Astribot S1

Tesla's Optimus

Agility Robotics

Xiaomi's CyberOne

Apptronik Apollo

Ubtech's Walker S

Figure's Figure 1

Fourier Intelligence's GR-1

Sanctuary's Phoenix

Unitree Robotics' H1

XPENG's PX5

[–] Lugh 8 points 1 year ago

Germany, like several other European countries with proportional representation voting systems, frequently has its Green Party in power. It's interesting that laws around NIMBYism were changed to overrule objections that were blocking people from doing this.

The more decentralized power generation gets, the more it's an issue for the owners of the electricity grid. It will be interesting to see how Germany deals with this.

[–] Lugh 3 points 1 year ago

The crux of this idea is that if the speed of light severely limits two-way communication, why not get around that problem by sending the AI to them so they can talk to it, and not need back and forth communication to learn about us.

Needless to say, readers of 'The Three Body Problem' will have mostly negative thoughts on this idea, but to me it poses a question. What if there are other alien civilizations doing this already - how would we spot them?

[–] Lugh 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

For sure. Though I think by definition the word "lie" implies the intent. Anything accidental is just getting your facts wrong.

[–] Lugh 5 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Many people will ask who gets to decide what a lie is? This mentions an "independent judicial process". Courts and juries generally have a good record of establishing truth, so it will be interesting to see how this works.

One of the little realized aspects of so much of 21st-century politics being lies - is how inefficient it makes life. Technology and change are accelerating. Yet every instance our political discourse wastes time countering lies, it's taking valuable time away from solving problems.

[–] Lugh 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

They are pretty grainy images, but its amazing to think we are able to look at another solar system 12 light years away. It's worth noting that space agencies around the world are ramping up efforts to get more detailed data about solar systems and their exoplanets within 100 light-years of Earth. Estimates vary, but that is thought to include 12,000 - 15,000 solar systems. Presumably, the exoplanet tally will be 100,000. If microbial life is widespread in the Universe, it seems a near-certainty it will have to be in some of these.

[–] Lugh 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

There is certainly progress to be made with multi-modality, but I wonder if they've already exhausted scaling LLMs based on data.

[–] Lugh 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

To think six months ago they were valuing OpenAI at $80 billion. I don't think so ...

[–] Lugh 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Good riddance - don't forget your coat on the way out.

[–] Lugh 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I really suspect this is how the plateau of productivity will look for machine learning.

It seems finding more data to scale up LLMs is a bottleneck too.

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