SoftBank has now exercised that option.
That's not what I'm seeing. My mom always wanted Google to just answer questions, and now ChatGPT can. She uses it enough in her daily life that she bought a subscription.
Yes, she knows it hallucinates and you have to double check everything, but so far she finds a ton of use for it even with those caveats.
Now, I agree that a personal servant robot would get a ton of business. Even at new-car prices, it's still cheaper than a human caretaker/maid/butler/etc. And the maid usually doesn't also mow the lawn on a hot day, while a robot would potentially do all kinds of different things without complaint.
Reminds me a lot of AskJeeves :)
I thought it was interested that the movie looper had argidrones, but what inspired that wasn’t part of the training set or discussion online. I get remarkably bad answers and search results which seem misleading at best.
Claude includes links to references.
When asked to give specific links, it's usually even worse.
Also, mowing the lawn on a very hot day is pretty bad for the grass.
Neither I not almost all coworkers I know do not pay for AI subscriptions (or companies do).
But quite a few people’s sisters and parents and friends are paying $20-200/month for ai to help them with their “projects.” Whatever that means.
I can envision a future where people have a humanoid trimming a small backyard but at the same time the maintenance of e.g. a golf course would be done by dedicated robots.
EDIT: my point is that just like smartphones replaced a number of specialised devices for most people, a humanoid robot could do the same, by virtue of being a general purpose machine
I want a pretty good facsimile that can cook, clean, mow, carry stuff around the yard.
I want this much more than a robot lawnmower + robot vaccuum + plus other single purpose automatons.
Once you take maintenance of a machine with price-parity to a new car into consideration, it’s surely cost competitive to just hire a human to do all those things.
The price needs to fall drastically below new-car territory before it’s competitive with manual human labour.
The cost of labour varies hugely in different parts of the world. The cost of hiring someone in Switzerland is on the order of 100X more expensive compared to Bangladesh, for example.
With many countries currently in an anti-immigration political mindset and with birth rates declining globally, labour costs are likely to continue to increase in the future.
But once a technology like general-purpose humanoid robotics exists, it’s costs are only likely to decrease over time.
What is this based on? We're well past a 50-ish year deflationary period in the cost of major appliances (refrigerators, washing machines, etc). We're pretty clearly at or near the end of the deflationary era for computers and computation. Automotive... speaks for itself. We're still there for televisions, surprisingly; but it looks like these technologies tend to have a handful of decades of rapid cost decrease, followed by a never-ending cost increase over time as the manufacturers consolidate and claim an ever-increasing margin.
EVs are a great example: they keep getting cheaper for what they provide, even if the price stays the same. 200 miles of range 5 years ago is now 400+ miles of range today. Compared to ICEs, where advancement has stalled for the last 20 years, which seem like a worse deal every year.
It hasn't really stalled: VVT, VCR, Cylinder deactivation that works properly, and start-stop becoming commonplace are all meaningful improvements (though smaller than the ones seen in EVs over the same time frame, which makes sense given the relative maturity).
It is mostly because ICE tech is mature and has no real place to go for improvements beyond incremental refinement. EVs can ride the wave of battery tech advancements for another decade or two.
Even crazier take: Japanese companies always do this. Like knocking out features in an alternating fashion, so that you never get features A and B together, and such.
But the point was currently general-purpose humanoid robots is not affordable by the average person like say cars or washing machines currently are, but it will be because the costs will decrease. There was no argument that the price will forever keep going down, just like the price of cars or washing machines are not expected to constantly go down.
>> There was no argument that the price will forever keep going down
It's very hard for me to read the first quote as anything other than a continuing decrease in expected value of cost as a function of time. This directly contradicts the second quote.
The components of computation have been getting cheaper every year… it hasn’t lately because the demand for memory suddenly massively started outstripping supply.
Even in Switzerland, unemployment is on the rise - it's up by a massive 12.2% compared to last year[1].
The only way I see humanoid robots becoming a threat is a company with deep pockets mass manufactures them and subsidises them heavily that they can compete with desperate humans.
However, I doubt an actual competent robot could ever be that cheap in the near future. I mean, I still haven't come across a Roomba-style robot that's actually smart enough to detect which obstacles it can go over, or have a small robotic arm or something that can move light things that's in the way. Like say there's a sock on the floor, it should be able to simply move it out of the way and continue vacuuming; or say there's a wire, it should be able to determine whether or not it's safe to go over the wire instead of going around it. So until I see some real advancements in roombas, I remain skeptical about humanoid robots. And when we do get a humanoid robot that's clever enough to make sense of all the chaos in common households - and take care of it intelligently - you can bet that it won't come cheap.
[1] https://swisscareer.substack.com/p/the-myth-of-low-unemploym...
George Jetson always dreamed of beating a robot chef/maid.
How much do you think youd need to pay a maid every year to do your cooking, cleaning, laundry, dirty dishes etc? Coming once a day for 2 hours would be very expensive and still wouldnt be comparable to a robot that you own and is constantly deployed.
And at that point you’re probably comparing owning a robot to renting one.
A car has a number of periodic maintenance to do + in most country some tax and some yearly technical inspection.
This is non counting the energy required by that car, electricity or gasoline
Apparently $50K is closer to average in the U.S.
Depends on the service life/performance/etc.
As a simple benchmark, I will propose 'Mowing the lawn with a push mower'. Let's wave hands and assume there is a setup on a truck where the mower can be parked and then lifted in.
If you're paying the people doing that lawn-mowing federal minimum wage, at 40 hours a week it's 15K/year.
After 3 years that's 45K, or a little under the current US median price of a new car.
IOW, if the robot costs 45-50K, but can make it through 4 years without expensive maintenance you are still 'saving costs'.
There's hand-waving on both sides of my equation; At least where I live even pushing a lawnmower gets you a bit more than minimum wage (although it is more seasonal,) and also I have no clue if when we say 'new car territory' we are talking median or an 80K EV.
When you really look at the economics of it, a robot that never gets sick/doesn't require payroll/etc. makes a lot more sense.
All that being said, what do you think this will cost? Several of you are scoffing at my numbers but I am very curious what you think they will leave their house for on a daily basis and how many days a month they would be coming by. Plus all the taxes and such that come with doing it legally.
If we’re trying to compare this to some sort of robot that does all your chores, then we have to at least start at 3 days a week. I’d compromise at 2 I guess but 8 days a month doesn’t seem like a fair comparison to a full-time robot chore handler.
The total cleaning time (and thus price) goes up, but it's not 4x what you're getting now, which a whole-house cleaning once a month would be.
Also, we are comparing to a robot that does all your chores any day. Once a month is not a fair comparison to begin with. This is carrots to oranges.
Let’s be super generous here. $100/day twice a week for a basic pass at your house. Dishes, laundry, some wipe downs, put things way, standard chores. $800/mo, $9600/yr. Plus payroll service/taxes/etc. Hell do $100 once a week, which you’d be lucky to get. This is a $5-6k a year investment for the bare minimum and you’re still doing 80% of the chores annually. If you’ve got kids this person is barely making a dent.
Hiring people is expensive. If it isn’t, you’re not treating them with basic dignity.
It is expensive, just not four times as expensive as a once-a-month job.
Sorry, what? Unless you're doing a deep clean of your house twice a week or you live in a particularly HCOL area, those numbers don't add up. You shouldn't be spending more than $1k/month on household chores, and even that seems high.
Source: A client of ours runs a "personal help" service (mostly focused on household tasks like laundry, tidying, organizing, etc as opposed to deep cleaning) so I have a lot of data on this. And they're a relatively premium service compared to some of the cheap labor you can actually buy. But they also don't operate in SF or NYC, so maybe prices are drastically different there.
> In Seattle, hiring a house cleaner typically costs $150 to $500+ per visit, with most recurring standard cleanings for an average-sized home landing between $180 and $300. If you pay by the hour, rates generally range from $45 to $65 per hour for self-employed independent cleaners and $75 to $125 per hour for professional cleaning companies.
Also, like 10 neighbors could potentially share a robot and have it just go house to house every day.
You wouldn't but apparently your employer would.
I don't disagree with you on robotics, though. For an empire like softbank, not buying an "insurance against the rise of robotics" also seems like a mistake to me.
That being said, they may expect robotics to rise through self-driving cars (hence their investment in Wayve).
Except they can't. I get it, merging advanced AI with robotics has made huge leaps in the past few years, but building a truly autonomous laundry robot is an incredibly difficult problem that still feels many years away. And I've seen all the "folding robots" over the past few years, and they are still miles away from being useful in your average home (they only "fold" if pieces are handed to them one-by-one, or the more advanced ones that can pick out clothes from a pile look like they were folded by a 3 year old).
Also, consider that all-in-one washer/dryer combos have existed for a while, but they are still a teeny percentage of washer sales because they're expensive and require more maintenance. There is a surprisingly low threshold on what people are willing to pay for labor saving devices.
A lot of people gladly pay humans to launder their clothes, so the market is there. But the current iteration of wash/dry combo machines doesn’t solve the main issue. I don’t mind transferring my clothes from the washer to the dryer, because that takes 60 seconds. It’s folding and putting away the clothes that makes laundry a chore.
So why do you suddenly think you need it for controlling a body when animals do it with far less?
I know there's tons of activity on humanoid teleoperation data collection, and motion model training, but it hasn't seemed to bear out much of anything.
Like.... AI would be great if I could put it into a magical semi-corporeal familiar but I'm just not seeing a path to those either.
Cars will be able to safely drive themselves autonomously well before there is a humanoid robot capable of safely driving non-autonomous cars.
The only way I could see these AI robots take off is if on top of all those things, it could also perform sexual favors and develop personalities for people to bond with. Robosexuals would buy these primarily for those features and then household duties as nice plausible deniability.
Agreed. Boston Dynamics’ focus has always been more on industrial uses, though, and while they’re getting to the point where eg. Atlas might be useful in a factory environment, they’re still a ‘premium’ supplier.
Seeing some of the stuff coming from Unitree and other competitors, SoftBank might be wondering if BD can stay in the game.
Seems like the only companies VCs want to fund now are robotics, energy, and chips. That "software AI" has had its run.
Being less cynical, I do think it’s fair to say that they just didn’t quite find PMF; they aren’t good enough for factory work, Spot is niche, and Atlas is too scary for in-home.
The robot butler business model just hasn’t been tested in the same way AFAIK.
spot as a ground recon unit that works with
drones in the air that create 3d plan of attack
instead of sending elite human and dog operators in first, a squad of 4 atlas, 2 spots, and 4 drones is deployed
the human teams move in second, close behind
also do people really want humanoid robots at home?
that’s a lot of space
The other day I was reflecting on how currently the notion of supervising AI agents sounds like my idea of hell and I'm glad I can mostly do my job without doing it.
But conversely, I'd absolutely love having even 1 humanoid robot which could follow simple verbal directions like "hold this tape measure" or "raise your end a little higher" while working as a collaborative team around the house.
There is an absolute ton of practical jobs where another human form is needed, but one person is pretty obviously leading the activity and just needs "another pair of hands".
A pair of bots which can carry sheet rock over uneven ground around a house? Absolute game changer.
> also do people really want humanoid robots at home?
Yes, they will be everywhere IMO
For the right price and capabilities? Sure. I pay various people to do things around the house. Replacing those people with a humanoid robot is probably a big ask. But I'd certainly consider it if possible and cost-effective.
1) https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/1u7aiwg/oc...
2) https://www.reddit.com/r/teslamotors/comments/1hro33r/global...
Regardless, Boston Dynamics has been burning cash for 35 years and all they have to show for it are some fancy demos and trial deployments. Eventually you have to wonder what their future prospects are.
Boston Dynamics is a defense contractor, their future prospects are designing and manufacturing war machines, the same thing they’ve always done.
The dog robots are meant to carry stuff/support combat troops.
The humanoid robots are designed to rescue injured soldiers and possibly other risky tasks.
They may have plans to commercialize these robots, but I’m not sure where the consumer/commercial market for robotic dogs is. Jobs that need machines to carry heavy stuff already have solutions and have had them for a long time, and they’re safe to operate as long as you’re not in a combat zone. I guess it would be nice to have a robot dog portage my packs and canoe for me in the BWCA but I’m not spending new car money for that.
Although the tracked drones we see starting to appear in war are terrifying and I'd rather not be on the receiving end of them.
When cursor is selling for $60B, then grok has to really be worth several times that, right?
I haven't tried Cursor, and I'm sure it's a perfectly good IDE, but given that JetBrains was valued at $7B in 2021 [1] $60B seems rather high.
1) https://servreality.com/news/jetbrains-startup-valued-at-7-b...,
If they had paid $60 billion dollars in cash for Cursor, it would have been a ripoff.
Some buyees of course insist on cash. Which moves the effect of stock sales onto the buyer. Most buyers would prefer to pay in stock as it doesn't impact cash flow at all.
So, a all-stock deal already has the future-price of the stock built in. Which probably (but not necessarily) inflates the headline number.
In other words, let's say I offer you 60b stock[1], or 30b cash. Which would you take? If you're risk adverse, take 30b cash. You can buy a nice diversified portfolio with that.
If you're confident SpaceX will be around say 10 years from now, and still worth good money, then take the 60b and sell it slowly over a long time. It's a big bet though (if SpaceX goes into liquidation, all stock immediately goes to 0.) Of course if you think the price will ultimately go up, then it's a good choice as well.
[1] there are likely some boundaries which dictate when you can start selling the stock.
The average (and above-average?) investor really does not understand tech.
I'm not sure if you're following your own advice...?
The ~10% just sold was bought for $325 million.
The total price they paid was $1.205 billion ($880 million in 2021, $325 million now).
The $1.1 billion figure in the HN headline is kind of just wrong and presumably based on what they considered to be Boston Dynamics' total valuation in 2021, but represents neither what they paid for the ~10% nor the actual total they paid over both transactions.
Hey, Hyundai isn't "just a car company"
This is a good hint that robots are really about to take off.
Humanoid robots loaded with an AI agent, on the other hand, could actually make you a sudo sandwich, do your laundry, or help you with that weekend project in the backyard. They're finally about to get useful.
I'm not a fan of humanoid robots personally (they creep me out), but I'd love to have a functional R2-D2 with me.
The value proposition is being able to fit in and navigate spaces built for humans without complete overhauls.
Stuff like small elevators, workbenches, server racks, etc.
> functional R2-D2
It would be pretty amazing to buy a kit with the hardware for this and be able to put your own software in it!!
How are they still able to be a thing
This is the same thing about spacex buying cursor
That news was also published twice!
It's car manufacturing. Everything that could be done by a purpose specific robot arm bolted down to the factory floor is already done by a purpose specific robot arm bolted down to the factory floor.
What remains unautomated, then?
The long tail of tasks that are too minor, too finicky, too open-ended or too reliant on manual dexterity to be offloaded onto traditional robots.
This is where this new generation of robotics comes in. This is the kind of task they're designed to do: "a task that's still done by a human in a high automation environment". Universal robots are angling for the tasks that are impossible or uneconomical to automate with traditional industrial robots.
Hah! Hardly. I say this as someone whose first "real job" was in applying robotics research to automotive assembly - there are still a ton of assembly tasks that could be performed by a fixed-base robot arm, or a robot arm on a linear rail/fixed gantry. Wheeled mobile manipulators are only needed in a few cases, and humanoid form-factor is only "necessary" in very few cases (and I don't think the current crop of humanoids is particularly suited to these tasks).
In my opinion/experience, the impediments are that (1) the system integrators that are usually responsible for assembly-line robotics are too stupid to figure out how to apply robots to the problem, (2) the automakers themselves are often too short-sighted/stupid/unwilling to invest in increased automation (and particularly in building the in-house competency that they really need), (3) the hostile/exploitative relationship between (most) automakers and their main suppliers means that low-hanging improvements to parts/assemblies are a non-starter, and (4) the automaker C-suite (and investors) are too drawn to silver-bullet solutions (e.g. humanoids) than practical automation improvements.
Everyone in the industry learned that the hard way.
At a certain point, the tasks that remain stop being "dexterity" problems and start being "AI" problems. That is: a robot could do the task - if you either spent big $$$ on redesigning the entire task around the robot's intellectual limitations (uneconomical), or if you had an incredibly advanced AI capable of problem solving driving that robot (impossible with 00s AI).
The "universal robot" bet is the "incredibly advanced AI capable of problem solving" bet. That in 2020s, AI is finally capable. The body only has to be "good enough to make most tasks possible".
The auto industry is notorious for making incredibly myopic choices to save money/make money in the near term versus long-term investments. The relationship between automakers and their suppliers/vendors is basically a century-plus of the automakers trying to (1) outsource anything they can for a quick buck, and (2) grind the supplier/vendor margins down to nothing. (This is part of why the newer Chinese automakers with much greater vertical integration are such a threat to the traditional automakers; vertical integration has a high up-front investment but the payoff in flexibility and speed is significant).
The name of the reason is: corporate rot. They don't have the organizational backbone that wouldn't let their "in-house manufacturing" rot away into inefficiency and waste.
Not that it has much to do with why automation fails to penetrate certain tasks. The reason why "long tail" tasks are often beyond automation is: piss poor ROI, calculated correctly.
You go out of your way to automate a certain process with traditional robotics, and it'll probably pay off in 15 years. The chassis this applies to is going to be in manufacturing for 10 years. At least half the systems work you've done there would have to be redone for the next chassis. Fun.
The bean counters counted their beans, and found out that using traditional robotics there is a losing game. Thus the search for better options. And the humans performing the tasks in the meanwhile.
I actually don't think any of the big automakers have ever really, in-depth considered the ROI of "traditional" assembly automation (i.e. anything SoTA pre-2020), with experts in all parts of the process in same room. It's easy to assume that these companies must make careful measured decisions based on evidence, but in practice big decisions are made by small groups within the C-suite, often pretty divorced from the reality on the ground.
For example, many of the big asian automakers seem to have completely ignored the well-understood effects of their demographic crises (i.e. significantly aging population) on the future of their workforce (i.e. they are having trouble retaining and hiring new workers as the older generation retires) and this totally changes the economics of automation! Now they are all having to play catch-up, having realized that they must automate, at whatever the cost, because the issue is not "robots must be cheaper than human labor" it is "we might not be able to afford human labor at all".
An Amazon warehouse or Tesla factory tour would likely change your mind.
I had to do both of these in the last year and not a lot of humans around…
This is over the last decade at one of the largest automakers in the world. Naturally there is significant variation between individual lines and plants; some are newer and more automated, some are older and much less automated. Are some cars being built on more automated lines? Yes. But a great many, probably the vast majority, are being built with fairly low assembly* automation.
* There is a significant split in automation between "body weld" stages and "assembly" stages. Body weld is very heavily automated basically everywhere (although there are some surprising exceptions in places), while assembly is much less automated.
Agreed, and hence I suggested an amazon warehouse tour (they offer one for their flagship robotics 'research' warehouse) to anyone, or a Tesla factory tour (might need to talk to someone, fairly manageable).
This reminds me of the quote, "the future is already here – it's just not very evenly distributed."
> I can’t imagine this would bring much actual experience with this new generation of robotics.
Luckily for you, my job has always been within the robotics research side of the company, so I am very much aware of the strengths and weaknesses of the current technology.
Indeed, Ford. Leaving aside the "old school" six axis robots that have been around for decades, Ford absolutely uses UR10s collaborating with humans to sand the entire car body in about 30 seconds, and to fit shock absorbers. They're also used at the engine plants. They also use the Symbio platform for transmission assembly, and fully autonomous forklift robots throughout their Tennessee plant.
Ford isn't a tech company, they don't even make their own robots. They buy them from someone else. What... positive experience do you have to assume that one of the lowest-tech industries in existence is somehow giving experience with some of the most advanced tech in the world?
If you had any auto industry experience, you would know that the people responsible for the design and build of the physical car and the people responsible for the user-facing software are very separate (in fact, the user-facing software might be entirely contracted out).
> What... positive experience do you have to assume that one of the lowest-tech industries in existence is somehow giving experience with some of the most advanced tech in the world?
You do realize how laughable this position is, commenting on an article about one of the largest automakers in the world buying out the remaining stake in the robotics development company that they already effectively owned. Do you really think that somewhow between owning BD and their partnership with GDM that no-one in the entire corporate structure of Hyundai is aware of the state of the art in robotics?
enhance:
>commenting on an article about one of the largest automakers in the world buying
ENHANCE:
>buying
It does not support your point to show that Hyundai is purchasing the company that actually built the robots.
If you want to make your point about how laughable it is that companies don't tend to be in the business of making highly advanced robots, you should probably not prove it with a company that essentially achieved world-largest-status before even finishing their straight-up purchase of this knowledge and tech.
I think you've gotten hung up on the idea that making robots is the essential part of the problem. I'm not going to go as far as much of the ML community and say that making hardware is secondary, but the software side is where most of the latest and greatest work is happening. Better hardware is not going to magically solve all the outstanding problems of manipulation. Better software might solve them entirely independent of hardware so long as the hardware is "good enough". I think there is a general sense that the field that robotics is approaching the equivalent on the mid 2000's with respect to computing architectures - there are still first-party RISC UNIX workstations on the market (e.g. Apple, IBM, Sun) but the incoming tide of commodity x86 platforms is clear for all to see. There are still some gains to be had by designing everything in-house, but the marginal gains versus off-the-shelf components or even full systems are steadily narrowing. There is every reason to believe that COTS hardware capabilities will continue to mature and become more commoditized.
Of course, the purchase here that actually mattered happened several years ago; this headline is just the final piece. BD and Hyundai have been working fairly closely on Altas applications to auto manufacturing for some time, never mind the additional research being done at BDAII/RAII.
The west may have to change in the future.
Things have been moving pretty fast in the last year when it comes to semi-bipedal robots doing the long tail of previously unreachable tasks.
Libraries are typically either governed by a municipality's rules around employment and treatment of employees, or part of a school/etc where there are again additional guidelines about these things to be sensible and not leading people into unsafe behavior.
Wouldn’t that just be “ionized”?
The only thing I can think of are tasks that are so rarely done, it's not economical to build a robot for. But I then I also don't see how another robot solves this problem.
One can lift insane weights, has insane torque, and absurd precision, and can do the same movement millions of times with virtually no deviation. You program these with an exact movement plan, just like you would programm a CnC with a tool path. They are basically cnc machines.
The other one is a inacurate, unstable, dynamic system controlled by neural networks and heuristics. It has massive deviation over each run, but that means that the programming must be able to account for it. Which makes it suitable to operate on problems that are messy, unrepeatable and human-shaped.
A robot that has to be carefully adapted and set up for the task vs a robot that you can point at a task and have it figure out how to do it. A robot that doesn't deviate vs a robot that absorbs all kinds of deviations.
It's a bet that The Bitter Lesson will win over Moravec's Paradox, in the end.
If I were Hyundai, I'd be looking at this as buying a significant amount of vision, dynamics, and integration systems expertise, not necessarily the dream of self-motive walking systems.
That's exactly the reason why it's usually a bad idea to run a classical robot on a neural controller. If atlas bumps into something you get a small bump and maybe a broken atlas. Your average industrial robotic arm will happily yeet whatever it bumps into across the room.
B) there’s a long tail of individual tasks it’s uneconomical to build purpose-built robots for each individual task. But it’s economical to have 1 robot that can do all of them.
The point is, human shape plus general purpose intelligence is an amazing combination to resolve the “long tail”.
Without the intelligence part, the body is useless.
Perhaps Boston Dynamics has that part resolved now too.
Do they? A human can both chuck kilograms of stuff across a room or kick in a door, but then pick up a single hair off the ground, or feel and manipulate (things even lighter than) a literal feather.
Robots can certainly do things more repeatably, if not more precisely.
But the rest of the human body is not useful in a factory environment, so the arms could be mounted on a mobile base that does not have any resemblance to a human.
I dunno, a legged design is pretty useful for navigating complex environments. The arms and legs have to attach to something so you've still got some sort of torso. About the only thing you can easily do away with is the head I think.
But certainly a bipedal design seems unnecessarily complicated unless you need it to climb ladders inside narrow tubes or something similarly specific. I feel like a quadruped with 4+ arms mounted on top and many-jointed fingers might be ideal (both in terms of utility and also creepiness).
But of course the wheels could be replaced with feet where that's needed.
All you need to do is look at a recent video of car manufacturing process, and watch what the humans are doing.
Better than what? It seems that as long as they perform the tasks "better" (cheaper / faster / lower-error) than the humans that are currently performing them, that is an improvement for the factory owner.
>What remains unautomated, then?
Stuff that can be done by purpose specific robot arms on wheeled platforms, which is very difficult, but will be much more feasible than a humanoid robot doing anything.
You can't put a robot arm on a wheeled platform without making the platform very heavy otherwise the whole thing will topple over. This gives your entire assembly a mandatory floor space requirement that may be quite large, and severely constrains how much reach you have (see the Handle robot from BD itself).
A platform like the Segway with a self-balancing system can help with this, but since it doesn't have legs it has very little ability to keep the top of the platform steady - all it can do is accelerate around to try and accommodate wobbles, whereas a bipedal robot can simply shuffle it's legs around and keep the top of it's body stable.
It is difficult to build a control system which can do this, but once it's done it's done.
This strike me more as a repeated internet myth more than anything else. There is near endless opportunity for purpose-specific robot forms.
Lots of things that don't require legs.
Humanoids are to the 2020s what VRML was to the '90s. A fantasy fueled by the imaginations of cloistered techoids.
Or a new take on car design with automated production in mind regarding all the wiring and what not (easier said than done, I'm sure many have tried and failed, but eventually someone will succeed).
Even if I think this has legs, where do the cheap humans go to work after? Where/what are the remaining jobs for all of this displaced labour in both white collar and blue collar worlds? It basically screams UBI. And in a UBI world, the economy looks pretty different and humanoid esque robots start to look either very altruistic or very dystopian depending on how hard the oligarchs don't want things to change.
Like, what's the end game for humans in this path we're embarking?
The market becomes more efficient as fewer human beings are needed to create value and move capital. A lot of them are going to die, surplus to requirements. A lot more will be stuck in lives of grinding and meager poverty, probably doing gig work acting as "flesh AI" for less expensive robots or "blood boys" for the rich. But the rich will be very rich indeed.
It won't just be end-stage capitalism killing people, either. The collapse of the knowledge economy, scientific and research institutions and the mass adoption of AI to fill the gap will kill tons of people too, as will the return of diseases like polio and smallpox, and mass starvation as climate change destroys global agriculture, and the normalization of christofascism.
We're almost certainly not getting UBI, at least not in the US. It would help too many black people and immigrants, half the country would secede. We might get something called UBI but only so long as it isn't universal, and has tons of racially biased and religiously motivated means testing and plenty of carve-outs that keep that money flowing to the top, and out of the hand of the "useless eaters."
And the tasks that change from day to day.
The comic strip is saying if above is true, then people still have to learn at some point so on average it would be around 10k people per day.
I think the math is this:
For people born in a given year: 4000000/365/30 = 365 people per day
but you have 30 sets of those people (those born this year, those born last year, those born two years ago, etc.) So 365 * 30 = 10950. 10k is easier to say for viral purposes.
https://www.bmwgroup.com/en/news/general/2024/humanoid-robot...
Maybe what they're actually acquiring is Handle, not Atlas.
Dishes, laundry, house cleaning, cooking, food prep, organization, lawn work, car repair, home repair, etc etc etc. Expecting purpose built robots for every single task seems ridiculous.
There's half a dozen techno-creationists in this HN submission.
Something these techno-creationists are silent about is the fact that "for human designed" environments require the full intelligence of a human and not just have the limbs of a human. The reason for that is that most of these environments are hardly designed at all and instead rely intensively on extreme levels of human adaptation.
It's like self driving cars. The extreme tail end of things a driver must do is endless. You will have to draw a line somewhere that designates the limits of the robots and the moment you do, you will have to design environments for humanoid robots instead of humans.
The humanoid form factor is certainly may not be ideal but I guess they think the flexibility is worth it
I think this is smart and not very risky. Tesla is playing a similar game with Optimus, for now Hyundai/Boston Dynamics is at least 5 years ahead.
For example, having 3 arms would help a lot of tasks. Or having fingers with twice the length of human fingers and 4 joints on each finger could enable them to switch a headlight bulb on a French car.
Hands are just hard: no one is building good hands yet because the materials science and motors isn't there to do it (see the production Atlas's with the 3 finger grippers).
And of course training data: we have a wealth of examples of how to move a bipedal platform around, but there are no 4-armed humans so you'd be figuring out the balancing from scratch (but it also has the same problem: 4 arms in physics terms is still basically 2: if you lose your balance you'll need to involve both arms to correct it).
Perhaps they want to put some of the sensing and control features in, so a humanoid-like dexterity or adaptability for the business end of a floor-mounted robot arm?
https://www.google.com/search?q=nasa+robonaut+video+hand+why...
The gist of it is that all tools on the spacecraft (eg: space-drill, space-coffee-maker, space-airlock) are all designed to fit a gloved human astronaut hand. Waaaaay more complicated to make a robo-hand than a robo-suction cup or robo-claw, but then you are matching the environment, and guarantee tool compatibility against all extant tasks!
We already have specialized robots on earth... paper slicer, lawn mower, bazooka, whatever. They're all machines that are specialized for the task at hand, we're not making a humanoid robot that gets down on all fours and individually plucks blades of glass.
The car factories already have specialized robots... they're not mimicking a human hand holding a can of spray paint, shaking it up, and painting the car that way... it's a 6-axis arm, or a whole "grab the car and flip it while spraying paint" system.
It's not about inventing purpose-specific robots, it's about handling that long-tail of "stuff with tools that a human is designed to be able to use." Go over there, push that button. Go move that box from table1 to table2. Etc.
For well defined tasks in the factory domain, make a "real robot". For ad-hoc tasks in the interim... strap an LLM to a camera, battery, robo-legs and arms, cross your fingers, and hope for the best?
the human frame is just an experimental proxy for functionality, which turned out to be promising
two arms alone is the purpose-built robot you're referencing
They would be. When everything what could be done would be done by a robot. 24/7. Even without the lights on the floor.
You're not seeing "cheaper": you're seeing a literal arms race.
"building what it can with anything it can get" is the definition of cheaper.
If it was easier or cheaper to create a multi-purpose robot to control vehicles and deliver bombs that's what we'd see Ukraine doing.
So the reason you see a lot of drone designs is because they're constantly innovating to try and build something effective: which is not cheap. Then whatever they come up with, it's preferable to use it right now if you can: because it's available and delay may mean you no longer have it.
Cheap is that last step: if it works you production optimize it and try to get the cost down so it's sustainable. But while that's happening you're generally also back to innovating because the enemy is deploying counter measures.
And all of this is happening across multiple dimensions at once: if you can get a great bulk price from Alibaba for some part via an intermediary but it doesn't turn up on time, or an alternative is delivering faster or the warehouse for some part got hit last week then get, there's now a new drone design with that variant.
Hell a lot of the output is just because the small machine shop knows how to build some particular design and has the parts, but another does not.
Its war: the cash price of things is not the only price nor even necessarily the most important one.
I've never been to a factory but I bet there's a lot of the same bullshit. Ditto in a mine.
On the other hand, I've been in a datacentre. I don't see much need for a humanoid form in there, everything is flat and predictable. Why don't we have robot DC techs? This is probably an interesting clue re the next 10 years of robotics and maybe the reason Boston Dynamics is only valued at $1.1B.
Seems we might still be pretty limited on usecases. Maybe a dexterity bottleneck.
What are you talking about?
Go outside, look around! The whole word was created by and for humans.
I do think this might be tied to South Korea's demographics, by 2040 the working-age population is projected to decline 25% from 2020 and keep declining almost linearly until leveling out around 17M around 2065, a 50% drop total in < 50 years. I would think HMG / Hyundai sees a huge business opportunity or this might be a national-level political priority but I don't know the specifics.
While Atlas is the best humanoid robot so far, it still isn't useful in a car factory that's fully equipped with the latest factory robots that are strong enough to juggle car engines and are bolted to the floor.
Everyone knows the killer app for humanoid robots is building the Mars colony amirte?
My personal take is that one of the reasons is their posture against ML. They've been very "GOFCT" and have only recently started to incorporate ML concepts.
But as a flip side of this, Boston Dynamics developed certain idiosyncratic interests in getting the hydraulic valves just right, etc. Their machines required a lot of tender care, (expensive!) and were dangerous to be around.
When Google acquired them, many things were mismatched. Andy Rubin, the VP at Google who advocated for BD, got fired for alleged sexual misconduct. This cast a shadow on the whole plan that he was trying to implement. DARPA finding did not sit well with Google's ethics. They pushed BD to stop getting grants from DARPA.
Expensive and dangerous robots were not an ideal fit for AI experimentation. Google was buying cheap and much safer tabletop robots for that. All in all, there was no good fit, and after spending tons of money on it, Google have gotten rid of them. They did encourage BD to develop a cheaper, safer electric robot, and this became Spot Mini.
Well...there is the uncanny similarity to the T-800 and and uneasy realization that the owner of BD could become Cyberdyne Systems IRL. Perhaps some companies like that notoriety but not sure if many want that.
This seems like a small correction if they wanted to reacquire and clearly the market isn't valuing BD all that high.
Why do you think it's one of Sundar's biggest mistake?
But imagine: robotics cred of BD combined with AI chops of GDM. It would have been something. Turns out, internally, GDM has robots they're training, experimenting on, etc even today. So why dump BD and lose that platform?
That seems out of character
All those tokens have to go somewhere
Who cares about quality. Speed is the new black.
On a relevant note: https://www.theverge.com/news/674366/nick-clegg-uk-ai-artist...
Whether it’s moral or not to not remunerate everyone who produced the training material is of course important but a different question. I sort of agree with Sanders et al that Ai should be a public trust like the Alaskan oil reserves. But good luck.
Start to be sloppy somewhere, you'll be sloppy everywhere. As we "learn and enable" to do things faster with less effort, the quality of the thing we (as in humans collectively) do decline.
AI, when used as the sole blunt instrument, accelerates this dramatically.
Rest is previously reported stuff.
Related from earlier in the year:
Hyundai Introduces Its Next-Gen Atlas Robot at CES 2026 [video]
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46520508
And old discussions when the intial buy happened:
2020: Hyundai to acquire Boston Dynamics
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25363981
2021: Hyundai acquires controlling stake in Boston Dynamics for $880M
Source: https://www.kbb.com/car-advice/car-warranty-guide/
Teslas new car warranty transfers as is to the new owner.
Source: https://www.tesla.com/sites/default/files/blog_attachments/m...
Seems like the effect would be to take off a significant chunk of value off your used car in a way that makes it more difficult to buy a new car.
There's no shame in being broke, of course-it is merely a catastrophe. The fourth owner of a '11 Sonata is gonna have a different outlook than the fourth owner of a '73 Mercedes 600 Pullman.
Sort of "join the army see the world" kind of stuff.
The reality is however, pushing a parts cart to the other side of the factory, returning and doing it again. 12 hours a day, 7 days a week, with time-off to recharge or possibly re-oil.
I sincerely hope they're not sentient and unable to communicate it. It would certainly account for the blank stare coming from behind the tinted lenses.
The upkeep cost is going to be astronomical for a very long time.
The human body gets beat up doing physical work but can self heal. The robot can not.
Accidents happen all the time doing work and the robot is not going to be as accurate as a human.
I would assume there are zero robot mechanics in the town I live.
I think we will just look back at this time as the good ol days during the peak of the bubble when buying a humanoid robot seemed like something on the horizon.
I imagine 5 years from now it will feel much further away than it does right now.
the other timing here is the increasingly belligerent union who are demanding pretty outrageous compensation for what a typical American worker would make. I think the goal is to immediately automate the workforce and move the plants out of korea speaking to insiders.
However, let's hope they will keep on doing cool stuff under their new owner.
Car factories seem to be a pretty good initial market, given that Tesla is doing Optimus and Figure has humanoids in a BMW factory. But the whole point is that these are general purpose robots, and there are lots of other factories. By the time that market is saturated they'll be capable of more.
Huh?
I mean...what evidence does the management at Hyundai have that shows them that these things aren't just YouTube stars? What teams does it have in place to start the transition from not profitable?
The new Qwen robotics suite is impressive.
Hyundai (the chaebol) has no such policy. They sell their heavy equipment to oppressive regimes to blatantly use in projects and efforts deemed illegal under international humanitarian law and by the International Court of Justice.
Progress in robotics has been impressive, but is there any evidence that we are approaching this point? How many days are needed to teach a robot a task at even 90% reliability? Given that most companies are still only showing of demos, that number looks to be way more than 2...
Chinese companies were quick to jump in and fill that unfulfilled demand. I work with robots and have never seen a Boston machine irl. Tonnes of Chinese though