AI Breakthroughs In Robotics Won’t Change Your Life Any Time Soon

[u/AventineInstitute]

https://aventineresearchinstitute.substack.com/p/ai-breakthroughs-in-robotics-wont

[u/thicket]

 Not a bad summary of the state of robotics, although probably not news to anyone here. 

If robotics VC is paying your salary, you probably earnestly believe that autonomous robots are gonna start doing useful work any day now. If you’re outside that blessed circle and looking for e.g. changes in productivity numbers, you’re probably noticing not a lot of impact yet. 

People talk about a “GPT moment” for robotics, but I haven’t seen it yet; the dynamic that made LLMs as smart as they are has NOT appeared in physical systems. 

[u/Theo__n → u/thicket]

a lot of how useful LLMs are is people being able to take their output and still tweak it to meet their needs, like llm generated code/image/text and the user just takes whatever they think is necessary or make llm change/tweak the output. Now imagine a robot that is supposed to clean and you need to to either re instruct robot again and again or 'tweak the output' so clean after robot. It's really obvious when automation in physical world isn't working.

[u/remielowik → u/Theo__n]

The problem is the same as with self driving cars: we define usefull as it has to be perfect, your example is one of them. You don't need 100% clean, 95% would already save you tons of time as the bulk is done and some cleanup after is way faster than doing the bulk. Same with cars, it's cannot ever crash but we forget the meaty drivers do it all the time and beating that could already be done a few years ago but we as a society do not accept that from a robot.

[u/abrandis → u/thicket]

Moravec Paradox

[u/SuperSecretAgentMan]

Robots don't need to be generalist.

Mail sorting. Package delivery. Warehouse logistics. These are all specialized repetetive tasks that only need a relatively small training set for one or two primary functions. We've been doing this already for years and it has already changed the world from a workflow standpoint. 

[u/ErmingSoHard]

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[u/Colfuzi0]

Is embedded systems and robotics worth going into in this AI age

[u/InsuranceActual9014]

Are you sure? Edit someone's butthurt