Back in December 2020, Hyundai purchased an 80% controlling interest in Boston Dynamics from SoftBank for $880 million, part of a transaction that valued the robotics company at $1.1 billion. That agreement included a put option allowing SoftBank to sell its remaining stake to Hyundai at a later date.
Oh. It's Softbank exiting humanoid robotics at Softbank's discretion. That's a lot different than " Hyundai buys Boston Dynamics". Hyundai bought them years ago. This is just the last 8%.
Seems like a mistake. AI in its current form has limited usefulness for most people. Not something I would pay for to use outside of work. But a household robot that could clean, wash and fold the laundry, do the dishes, maybe even be a chauffeur... that would be huge. I think a lot of people would pay new-car money for something like that.
> AI in its current form has limited usefulness for most people.
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.
> 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.
Google summaries from websites mainly did this before “AI” came around. Now I just don’t know the source unless I dig myself. Would rather it went back to before, or at least they implemented the veracity checks better.
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.
What's a problem though is that while it includes a reference, its distillation from the source, or worse, from the combination of sources, is often plain wrong. I check them regularly, and it made me very distrustful of Claude's capacity to faithfully summarise or explain from a source.
When asked to give specific links, it's usually even worse.
I don’t disagree. Many times when I’ve checked the source links a language model provides, I get concerned. It’s definitely important to stay vigilant and exercise critical thinking, but the model’s ability to synthesize information and converse with it in natural language still blows my mind sometimes
So does ChatGPT. The hallucination problem is not completely solved, but much better than a few years ago, especially if you use reasoning mode, where it’s more likely to spontaneously do a web search
We already have robot grass trimmers and they work pretty well. Why would you want a crude, inefficient, facsimile of a human push or power an inefficient form of mowing the lawn?
Cameras worked pretty well, but most people take photos with their phones nowadays. Pro photographers still mostly use cameras though.
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
> robot maid that could clean, wash and fold the laundry, do the dishes, etc. would be huge. I think a lot of people would pay new-car money for something like that.
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.
> ”it’s surely cost competitive to just hire a human to do all those things.”
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.
> 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.
The computer of 10 years ago is still a lot cheaper than a modern model. Deflation stops basically only if hardware advancement stops.
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.
> Compared to ICEs, where advancement has stalled for the last 20 years,
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).
ICE advancements haven’t materially affected car performance like EV advancements have. Start-stop is considered an annoyance to most car owners, for example, not a feature.
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.
Crazy take: this only appears to be the case because industry incumbents tend to start applying mechanisms of gambling addiction to products; providing gratifications right on the lower threshold of expectations promotes dependency. New entrants to the car industry have no reason to adopt such a strategy, and so EV owners always look happier than ICE owners, but not crucially so, mysteriously trapping ICE owners in their thing despite EVs appearing massively better by joy as subjective proxy measurement for actual progress.
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.
Honestly I think the biggest advancements in ICE cars recently have been the development and maturation of hybrid cars. Imagine telling someone in 2006 that your minivan got 36 miles per gallon!
Those are all tech that almost everyone owns. Makes sense that mass production would reduce costs and then the cost reductions would go towards zero. For new technology that hasn't been mass produced, it's a completely different story.
But that's my point. If you're basing your society shape around adopting a technology based on it continually decreasing in price, but you only get a few decades of that behavior before saturation and then you're at the mercy of the consolidated winners... generally adoptions like this aren't reversible at the societal level. You're locking in a long-term structural change based on a short-term pricing trend.
Still doesn't make sense. You were criticizing: "But once a technology like general-purpose humanoid robotics exists, it’s costs are only likely to decrease over time."
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.
That’s only if you look at the final price without understanding the makeup of that price.
The components of computation have been getting cheaper every year… it hasn’t lately because the demand for memory suddenly massively started outstripping supply.
With joblessness on the rise and no signs of a reversal, there will always be people desperate for work, even at minimum wages. And there will be those so desperate, that they will willing to be exploited by agencies that will underpay them, for instance to get visa sponsorships. Humanoid robots won't be able to compete with that, at least, not in the near future.
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.
A new car is what, $25-50K? Thats a one time cost.
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.
With the way subscription models and terms of use have been evolving over time, even if you buy a futuristic robotic assistant outright, you won’t really “own” it.
Price aside, the more important factor is that we don’t have the repair infrastructure to make something like this worthwhile yet.
For something as critical as a car, we have workshops, spare parts supply chains, and the skilled technicians to do the repairs.
Conventional robots require a similar skill set, but you still won’t be able to rely on a local repair for something people would expect to be dependable, like aged care or home assistance.
> it’s surely cost competitive to just hire a human to do all those things.
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.
Humans are messy to deal with. Say you're rich enough to afford a personal chef. Unless you're an inhuman monster, their problems become your problems as well. So if your chef is out because their mother is sick and needs someone to take care of her, you pay for a nurse for your chef's mom, so that you have your chef. A robot servant is still gonna need maintenance, sure, but it's a bit easier to be callous to a robot than a person.
But for now, humanoids are still relatively incompetent. So if you're rich enough and you want things done like cleaning and cooking, it's more convenient to hire a human and give them specific instructions instead of buying a robot that can currently do only half the things they want to get done. Or they just want a nice gadget.
If you're paying cash/under the table, then maybe. But even then a twice a week household cleaning hire is going to cost upwards of $1500/mo unless you're being particularly exploitative. If you're not under the table, you're paying payroll taxes, probably paying for a payroll service, etc. so you're talking $2000+. At best you can maybe stay under $20k a year.
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.
This comment seems insane to me. Like at $50 an hour thats 30 hours a month, or 8 hoursish a week. How dirty or huge is the house? And $50 an hour is way over what most hourly degree edgucated workers earn so definitely not exploitation.
But presumably would not be for four hours a week, since they would do more maintenance-like cleaning. Once a month, yeah, it’s going to take that long.
Why wouldn’t it take that long? When you hire people to do housekeeping they don’t just come for the exact amount of time you need them on an infrequent, case by case basis. You generally have to agree to a standard number of hours and days or a flat rate per day. They’re trying to make a living. If you can’t give them consistency and a meaningful amount of hours, they won’t work for you (or only will temporarily). They will find someone else who can provide more stability.
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.
> But even then a twice a week household cleaning hire is going to cost upwards of $1500/mo unless you're being particularly exploitative.
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.
$1k/month in an HCOL like here in Seattle doesn't give you much:
> 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.
Then tell me what you think it would cost. Hourly pay, how many hours they’d work in a day, and how many days a month you would expect them. What would be the monthly cost for the kind of help you are envisioning?
Yeah I only see robomaids as an affordable option for someone that needs help with absolutely everything. These things are built out of commodity parts. Maybe you can make a robomaid a little cheaper if you build a lot of them to offset the upfront costs but not by much. Anytime the robomaid isn't working, it's just decreases the value of having one versus how much you paid for it. So the point would be to put it to work as much as possible such as for an elderly person that's unable to do anything for themselves.
Who spends new-car money to clean their homes? Maybe ultra high net worth individuals? I know people with 8 figures net worth who spend a fraction of that money for cleaning their homes.
Given the current context the presumption would be you have somebody coming 2 to 3 days a week. Are you telling me somebody’s going to come work for you for less than $100 a day 2-3 days a week? Why would they even take the gig?
But a robot is much better than a human for these tasks. I feel uncomfortable paying a person to come to my house every day and clean. But a soulless robot, I don’t mind. Same for an in house private chef. Etc etc.
Also, like 10 neighbors could potentially share a robot and have it just go house to house every day.
See what you do is make it tele-operated. That way there is no stranger physically in your house, but technologically it's a lot easier to implement than some grand challenge-level laundry folding AI.
> Not something I would pay for to use outside of work
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).
> But a household robot that could clean, wash and fold the laundry, do the dishes, maybe even be a chauffeur... that would be huge.
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.
> 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.
Getting to a cheap household helper robot requires building the expensive one. I don’t think Boston dynamics believes any reasonable consumer would buy their atlas robot, but by building it and scaling its production in industrial use cases they will learn things that make building a cheaper one much easier. And they will have built some factories to mass produce them. It’s not something that will be in everyone’s home next year, but sooner or later the robot hardware and robot intelligence will both be cheap enough to be accessible by average people (at least in the developed world)
Well, that assumes that if you just keep throwing more data and compute at large language models you'll end up with something akin to AGI to control those robots. Which is far from guaranteed.
LLMs already solved the "System 2" part of this, to borrow from Kahneman, it's the "System 1" part that's lagging behind here. Current Claude/Gemini/ChatGPT is more than enough to tell a robot what chores to do, what to do with a thing, how, where to put it, etc. but what's still missing is the ability to reliably translate those goals to movements of a robot in diverse and tight environment that is a typical house or apartment, with any kind of reliability and safety.
But an animal has way more intelligence than an LLM? And unlike a chatbot, I can't delude myself into thinking it has done my laundry or fed my dog just because it tossed some clothes halfway into the washer without soap or spilled dog food on the floor. Unlike code, you can't just simply edit real life mistakes after the fact and call it good. My carpet can't be magically unstained, my glasses unbroken, or my dog or child unsmashed by the falling robot that had a bug fly in to a sensor at the wrong moment.
LLMs aren't the specific architecture you'd use, but it very much looks like a tractable engineering problem to go from a university research lab project that can manage to fold clothes as a demo that needs to be played at 8x speed, to a sellable consumer product. The timeline is gonna be off, so no one knows if it's gonna take 3 years or 30, but it's not going to take an unknown breakthrough in materials science and physics the same way that nuclear fusion looks like it will require.
Is there any sign beyond flashy demos that humanoid robots will be functionally feasible though (before we even get to economically feasible)?
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.
SoftBank has a history of making investment decisions that are the absolute opposite of good. I'm always bewildered as to how they still exist since they make nothing but absolute blunders.
I would be more worried about the Chinese owning this market (like they did with robovacs) and not leaving much for Korea/USA outside of the defense market. We are still 5 years away from a general purpose functional household robot, but the rate of advances, even if they slow down substantially, will get us there.
The west can compete but lack the will to do so see the consumer drone market, note that attitude had better change or else the rest of the century is going to be hell.
> But a household robot that could clean, wash and fold the laundry […]
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.
We're probably still decades away from that kind of robot. And I firmly believe the domestic robot revolution will not involve any humanoids. It'll be a few purpose-built machines that resemble nothing organic.
There are machines that already do those things. And if you’re rich enough to afford and maintain these humanoid robots, you would probably just hire staff already.
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.
Now how about a household robot that does all those things and is controlled by an Elon Musk company or by some other completely benevolent techno oligarch?
> If you show revenue, people will ask 'HOW MUCH?' and it will never be enough. The company that was the 100xer, the 1000xer is suddenly the 2x dog. But if you have NO revenue, you can say you're pre-revenue! You're a potential pure play... It's not about how much you earn, it's about how much you're worth. And who is worth the most? Companies that lose money!
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.
now imagine atlas with depleted uranium armor plates, 120 5.56 rounds (99.7% accuracy), and whatever specific equipment for an individual operator role
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?
>also do people really want humanoid robots at home?
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.
Boston dynamics already tried selling to the military but it never really panned out as a big market because their robots were very loud. Which is why they focused on enterprise niches
> also do people really want humanoid robots at home?
So you think replacing humans on the battlefield with human shaped robots...why? It makes no sense in the same way that humans on a car production line are not replaced by human shaped robots, instead by far stronger, far more capable, far faster robots designed for purpose, not mimicry. There's nothing about a battlefield that makes it a good use case for human shaped robots.
> also do people really want humanoid robots at home?
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.
There's a lot of insanity in the stock market. SpaceX is apparently worth more than the entire aviation industry[1] and Tesla is worth more than all other cars makers combined, or just about[2].
$325M for 9.65% implies a valuation of around $3.4 billion, so it's more like 18x.
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.
The future is unlimited however the Operating System for robotics, from the outside looking in seems to be the biggest stumbling block the company that can pull it off would be/become the ultimate vertical computer company on the planet. I don't think Hyundai (software) can pull it off.
> 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.
It is remarkable how rarely alternative movement styles like slug crawling, flying or rolling get used in the animal kingdom to move around compared to 2-8 legs. If a company can figure out how to do legs and manufacture them cheaply I expect there'd a be a lot of money in that; they must have some sort of practical advantage somewhere in warefare.
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.
I was trying to think about the why with Cursor, and the only thing that makes sense to me is they wanted experts in making harnesses so that they can pivot that expertise towards building harnesses intended for autonomous agents to use instead of humans. There's no world where a 60 billion IDE makes sense.
I think it's more that Space X's valuation is ridiculous, and they need acquisitions that are ridiculous to pretend that the emperor is still wearing clothes.
When cursor is selling for $60B, then grok has to really be worth several times that, right?
It's probably a bit of both. Space X is overvalued, and so is Cursor. It's easier for Space X to justify buying Cursor for $60B than it would be for other, because it's a rounding error compared to Space X's valuation.
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.
The US has GDP of 32 trillion. In an economy of that size, you would expect a few companies for which 60B is not crazy money, although rounding error is really stretching it.
I don't know that I disagree, but this had to be in the works before the IPO right? Acquisitions don't typically materialize in a timeline of <1 week (or perhaps they do when someone walks in and offers 60B...)
I know quite lot of people who could fork vs code and write a passable agent harness. I don't know one single person who could build a humanoid robot and I majored in mechatronjcs.
SpaceX paid that $60 billion entirely in stock. In other words, they traded 2% of their own inflated stock value, for 100% of Cursor's inflated stock value. This is actually a great deal for SpaceX.
If they had paid $60 billion dollars in cash for Cursor, it would have been a ripoff.
You can't sell 60b worth of stock without moving the price. It has to be dribbled out over time.
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.
> This was just ~10% of boston dynamics at that price. HN pro-tip: before commenting, read the articles not just the headlines.
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.
Humanoid (or dogoid) robot hardware on its own offers no benefits over non-humanoid factory machines. It just has fancy firmware controlling its motions.
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.
SoftBank hold huge positions in companies like OpenAI, funded using debt. The interest on those loans is killing them, and until OpenAI actually IPOs and SoftBank can sell their stake, they have to pay that interest using cash from somewhere else.
I don't understand why they would implement humanoid robots instead of purpose-built robots. The human form is not the most optimal way to do most tasks, especially as it relates to manufacturing. Robots don't need to look like humans, they need to be useful. Seems like putting in an awful lot of extra unnecessary work to end up with a worse result.
I'm not sure how many times this has to be restated.
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.
> 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.
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.
"Could be in principle" and "could be in practice, under technical and economical considerations in play" are two very, very different beasts.
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".
> "Could be in principle" and "could be in practice, under technical and economical considerations in play" are two very, very different beasts.
> Everyone in the industry learned that the hard way.
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).
Vertical integration is superior if you can pull it off. Big fucking "if". There's a reason why automakers don't usually do it.
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.
> 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.
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".
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."
“One of the largest automakers in the world” makes me think of very low-tech companies like Ford or whatever. I can’t imagine this would bring much actual experience with this new generation of robotics.
Ford doesn't even make the top 5 - and however "low-tech" you think these companies are is the point, the overwhelming majority of new cars are being built by those "low-tech" automakers. The problem is not the limits of current technology (or even of the state of the art 10 years ago), it is the lack of vision and will within these companies to invest in using it.
> 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.
I don't need robotics experience, I need automaker experience. Their software is universally terrible.
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?
> I don't need robotics experience, I need automaker experience. Their software is universally terrible.
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?
>commenting on an article about one of the largest automakers in the world buying out the remaining stake in the robotics development company
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.
> companies don't tend to be in the business of making highly advanced robots
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.
You have to have the will to be a vertical company how many companies want too in the west? Not many do.. BYD, DJI, Huawei, maybe Apple a little there are few others but most are partial but the Chinese are the leaders in a willingness to do it all, note Ford Motor at one time did it all for a short time at their beginning.
This gives me vibes of "... but they're dinosaurs" that pervades Tesla-type discussions. I've watched several extensive discussions here with some Tesla fans breathlessly announce "really cool", "futuristic" "new thinking" functionality or features for their cars that "the dinosaurs just aren't even considering"... except to their initial skepticism, disbelief, actually, the dinosaurs often do have those things (examples including "adaptive blind spot", where triggering of those alerts is highly dependent on speed differentials, so if the vehicle is more rapidly approaching you, the alert fires earlier, dynamic traffic sign recognition - my car doesn't just recognize school zones, but can see when they are active if they have flashing lights, and, based on equipment installation, will actually count down to when my intersection light will turn green, or road mapping radar, where it actually scans the road surface ahead, avoiding potholes when safe, and adjusting ride height dynamically, not just 'press a button or choose a mode to raise or lower').
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.
My point isn't that they're dinosaurs, it's that they don't really develop robots. Some automakers do, rarely, but they mostly buy them from specialized robotics companies. It's not knowledge-gathering to buy a sander, nor even really to use one. Not on the same way it is to develop that sander. If they were all making their own robots and competing in that way, maybe my response would be different.
I have visited factories for work and my experience is the same. There is so much stuff that could easily be automated but is not because it is too expansive for too little value to make a custom one off machine. The big high volume things will be automated but these machines will have 90% success rate and lot's of stuff that needs to be done by hand. You can search for factory tours on youtube to get an idea. Here are two videos, an Amazon warehouse and a Tesla factory. the big heavy stuff is automated but lot's of work is still done by hand.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/-R6cBkza17khttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=45slYC99uUg
Do you think humanoids would be a fit on assemblying the assembly line itself? To my limited knowledge a lot of setting up the factory is making sure your line works as expected with X 9s reliability. Here dexterous humanoids are this _universal_ virtual-to-physical interface and, akin to Auto Research, could run assembly line experiments autonomosuly?
automotive workers unions started around 1918 and became major political players in the 30s -- a fact that i'm sure is wholly unrelated to why there are so many un-automated tasks in that industry.
It’s not really a secret that most new auto factories serving the US tend to open in places where those unions are not active, like the South or Mexico
Pretty different tasks, environments, outcomes, metrics, goals, and other things in a warehouse vs. a factory… really have no clue how this is supposed to be relevant. Why not mention farms or libraries?
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.
But if these tasks are too minor, too finicky, too open-ended or too reliant on manual dexterity for a purpose-built robot, how can a general purpose robot perform them better? If anything, they should be doing worse.
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.
A) the idea is that these robots do have dexterity capabilities a lot closer to human hands
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.
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.
Robot arms can have reproducible movement with error bars measured in double-digit microns. Where they lack is in the force feedback, and even then they have had huge strides.
The human arms and hands are very versatile, and imitating them is a good choice for a universal robot, though 3 or 4 arms are definitely better than 2, and the hardest to imitate are the sensors, not the actuators.
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.
> the rest of the human body is not useful in a factory environment
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).
And C) they don't always have to be at parity with human hands to be good enough because humans are flat out expensive. Humans need health accommodations, have sick days, vacation, and make mistakes too. The bar is much lower and the incentives are much higher than many people probably think.
These robots operate on completely different principles.
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.
Pretty much. It's a total paradigm shift from how industrial robots normally work. A pre-planned motion executed carefully and precisely vs open-ended "do this thing" powered by a very large bag of opaque neural network heuristics.
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.
It's also worth noting that when e.g. inputs to a stage might have unpredictable defects or alignment, a robot arm utilizing neural networks for planning and analysis might still be the best way to handle that - without the extra degree of freedom of movement-relative-to-floor, planning can be done more rapidly, and movement can be executed more aggressively and quickly.
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.
> movement can be executed more aggressively and quickly
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.
Because it is general purpose. We did not have the ability to create a single robot form which could do all of these minor, finicky, and opened ended tasks. Now that seems within reach. The nice property of humanoid robots is that the world is already made for human form, and so if you're trying to replace people naturally this is what you'd want.
Well, humans obviously do those jobs, so a clearly a general purpose robot (in this case, a biorobot) has been found to do the job better. Don't overthink it.
>> how can a general purpose robot perform them better
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.
It's not a "general purpose" robot, it is a "human replacement" robot, with similar skills and shortcomings to a human. Humans are not general purpose.
All you need to do is look at a recent video of car manufacturing process, and watch what the humans are doing.
>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?
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.
No one ever considers the physics of this situation.
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.
What you need then is a better arm (or even just hand), not a human.
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).
If the task is too finicky, too open-ended or too reliant on manual dexterity for a purpose-built robot arm to handle, why would a walking, humanoid generaic-use robot do any better?
Naw, the real answer is that factories have been built around human labor - they weren't built to be forward-compatible with purpose-built robots, so during the transitional period where we build these purpose-built robots, you need humanoid robots to fill in the parts where the factories were geared for human labor.
So we want to replace a lot of cheap human labour with expensive robots?
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?
>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."
We were alive in an interesting time where a clerical caste of society was needed to get the most out of capital. Once this is no longer the case it could be that we return to something feudal.
'Everyone over 30 knows this' is a prior assumption (it is not necessarily correct; and nothing is said about shame).
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.
I took a tour of the BMW Group Plant Spartanburg body shop. It's heavily automated with industrial robots inside safety cages. But they still have human workers pick up parts from rolling carts and place them into templates for the robot arms. BMW has been running a trial with Figure humanoid robots to automate that remaining piece. Apparently those robots haven't worked very well, but presumably Hyundai thinks they can do it better?
Some colleague of mine visited the Mini plant earlier this week. Apparently they had a Boston Dynamics dog patrolling simply to spot stuff that had been left where it wasn't supposed to be left
Conveyor belts? What about those funny looking warehouse robots that are on wheels and just move pallets around, maybe an arm strapped to it? Surely there are myriad ways to do this more efficiently and precisely than a humanoid robot! Just look at Intel's Fabs for example with the ceiling robots moving the delicate wafers..
Humanoidal robots make sense when they need to operate in spaces designed for humans bodies. Cars are designed and built to be used and serviced by humans, especially their interiors so you need humanoid robot to automate building them. Car exteriors are not built for humans to interact with so they are already being built by specialized robots.
This exactly. You need to mow and leaf blow and weed and edge lawns. You need to get transported in a car from location to location. You need hands to operate all these tools. And arms. And given landscaping, likely legs. You need to move bags of mulch. Fitting in human environments and using human tools is a huge thing for areas of work and life where it doesn't make sense to move a 2000 pound robotic arm around from place to place.
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.
Custom built robots are expensive (basically an R&D project in themselves) and inflexible, if you want to update the process you have to redesign your automated system. The dream of humanoid robots is they can adapt to new manufacturing processes like human workers.
#1 is the main reason. There is basically unlimited data of things being done with human bodies, and it's also the easiest data to collect (tell a human to do something).
Whenever the topic is about humanoids all the technologists suddenly become creationists to sell the product.
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.
That's like saying there's no need for a generic CPU. The only way forward is a ASIC. Once a generic CPU does everything well enough, it's extremely versatile.
I think the rationale is that they are already using typical car factory automation, but they see a huge potential market for general purpose robotics in the coming decades, they don't need the humanoids, they are simply dogfooding a future product.
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.
I wonder what the reason is to not go humanoid but super-human? Lack of training data?
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.
The third arm would put a load in one direction of the robot. You can no longer balance by swinging 1 arm back, you have to swing both of them, or involve a leg motion you might not want to because the third arm has a more limited range of motion.
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).
Because a humanoid robot can replace (theoretically) any human worker, whereas a purpose-built robot can only replace one kind of worker. Or at least that's what Asimov said in Caves of Steel.
I'm spitballing here as I don't actually have a concrete answer for you. But from my understanding automobile manufacturing is one of if not THE most advanced 'purpose-built' robotics sectors. While I agree with you that having a purpose-built thing usually wins out for assembly line manufacturing, I wonder if this isn't an attempt to branch out away from single-purpose robotics into more general or multi-faceted manufacturing.
Training data of task completion. See, e.g., robots doing backflips. Presumably there’s an optimal robot for gymnastics but if you start with humanoid form you can train based on many videos of human movement. The alternative - world model sim with physics and loss functions- perhaps ends up being too unconstrained when you add in optimization of the robot form…
AI watching videos of humans seems an incredibly inefficient way to solve acrobatic balance. It is just physics and engineering. The hard part is in the materials and assemblages for enabling complex and subtle movements and the fine motor control, not knowing what the motions are.
We have a world built for humans, designed for humans to walk around and get things done. How, exactly, would it not be useful to have a robot that looks, walks, runs, jumps, lifts, carriers, pushes, pulls, twists, bends, steers, and labors like a human? It would obviously be incredibly useful.
As a person who works in a factory, areas are changed drastically, regularly, and quite fast. The cost of adapting areas to accommodate purpose-built machines pales in comparison to making robots work in suboptimal ways. It's much more cost-effective to rebuild a production area for very specific machines (something my workplace does frequently but never seems to replace workers) than it is to engineer and manager a machine to do work that's already best-suited for human workers.
I understand the sentiment, but you assume they are planning to build humanoid robots to walk around the human-oriented space in the factory.
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?
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 world is built for the human form already. If we design around the robotic form instead, we lose compatibility with all that, and lose the fallback of using human tools/interfaces manually if the automated systems go down. Plus I'd rather have robots that look like Robin Williams than the sentinels from the Matrix.
For my personal use, I really fucking want a humanoid robot, coz my home and all the bullshit in it was built for humanoids, I want a robot to do the bullshit for me. I don't want to move into a new, robot-oriented home.
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.
They have god knows how manny bajillion dollars tied up in machinery designed for human use, a human can step in when the robot breaks, and they can buy more robots if the humans get uppity. Those seem like a bunch of good reasons to me.
The humanoid form factor is certainly may not be ideal but I guess they think the flexibility is worth it
You don’t understand because you’re not an expert? First off they have numerous non-humanoid robots if you follow them at all. Second, Clearly they’ve got strong reasoning, they’ve just been bought. Third, out of thousands of attempts at humanoids, their robots are seemingly the best we’ve yet seen in this class. They must be doing it right when so few others got any traction.
This same nonsensical question again. Because the world is built for humans, because these are general purpose to replace a human laborer. It can immediately go from picking up parts in a factory to mowing the lawn in the same day.
War is the definition of "not cheap" because the stakes are so high (you die). Ukraine is building what it can with anything it can get and also in a constant race to adapt and develop superior designs.
You're not seeing "cheaper": you're seeing a literal arms race.
I don't think this is solely tied to car manufacturing automation. Even though Hyundai Motor Group is acquiring them, I would imagine they'd be well-positioned to commercialize general-purpose robotics and not just for car manufacturing, if Tesla is anything to go by.
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.
Hyundai bumped their ownership up to 100%, and took the opportunity to reset expectations about when Atlas would be working in Hyundai factories.
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?
There are plenty of tasks a relatively weak humanoid robot is well suited for. Basically any task that is 'human shaped' and not worth an automated line.
Wire harness making is basically a 100% human task now, this is one of the biggest things that would need to get automated but it's a PITA with huge variation and connectors with poor-fish documentation
There's got to be something wrong at the core of BD. They've been pawned off a bunch of times, and they still don't have products out the factory line like they should. I think the tech community has been impressed by their videos, but the fact that their most sold thing is a toy dog at a luxury car price point says a lot about the company.
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.
Marc Raibert was a student of Ivan Sutherland. Sutherland had a lot of pull at DARPA. This facilitated the unique prototyping work done at Boston Dynamics to get noticed and supported by DARPA.
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.
>> There's got to be something wrong at the core of BD. They've been pawned off a bunch of times,
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.
What is Gofct and does robotics industry generally just have had a slower adoption of ML because of the realtime domain requirements, I'm just curious and wondering aloud here.
Not capitalizing on LLMs until OpenAI came out with ChatGPT, and then suddenly everybody was running around like headless chickens is bigger. And then there was Fitbit. Motorola. and more recently, Noam and Character.AI.
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?
Wikipedia shuns primary sources, such as personal websites and company registration documents. They prefer reliable secondary sources such as mainstream news media.
Is it really that surprising that no-one has invested the time and effort into figuring out the personal information of some tech employee-turned-founder? I bet no-one outside of tech even knows his name.
Yeah. Google was too impatient and forced BD to productize prematurely (Spot, Handle), then dumped them when it didn't work out immediately. AI just wasn't ready yet. Imagine if Google had let BD focus on research until DeepMind was ready with the AI side of things. I think with the right joint research program they could have already been deploying humanoids today.
South Korea has the world’s highest manufacturing robot density.
1,220 robots per 10,000 employees in 2024
Growing 7% annually since 2019
(source: IFR)
ai generated imagery can’t be copyrighted while all other photography can and generally needs to be treated as it is. Therefore you likely have to pay a royalty to Getty or other asset outlet. Of use AI.
It might be "fair use" on the way out, but AI companies certainly didn't pay for a copy of every book in existence to train on. It's also straddling a super fine line between legality and morality.
It’s actually likely fair use on the way in as well. What’s not fair use is the production of copyright material with the model and the question is the extent to which model providers have to prevent it. These topics came up with the photocopier, VHS tapes, etc. The training side is more subtle because they are clearly unlicensed and used in the model but this is actually similar to taking a book and photocopying sections and using them for handouts and in training materials or other uses. The crucial part is they effectively destroy the original material in training and no where in the model is the copyright material, even if they can produce something similar when deliberately induced to do so. However you the user induced it, and depending on what you do with what you induced, you can violate the original copyright holder. (N.b., IANAL, but these are my summaries of discussing with a law professor at length who specializes in copyright, open source, etc)
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.
There's a saying in Zen which I live by. "How you do something is how you do everything".
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.
Little appreciated fact is news orgs have full time employees just dealing with licensing all day long, and they pay out millions of dollars when someone fucks up.
So true. I hear they replace more engines than any other brand. I'm surprised they sell so well; a used Toyota would be a far better choice than a new Hyundai
Although confusingly, the battery/motor on a Hyundai EV is covered under a different 10-year/100K warranty which does transfer to used car buyers. Important because of their unfixed ICCU problems.
MBAs don't care about what happens a few years from now, they only care about the next quarter or two. By time consequences come back from consumers they will have already been cheered for their contribution and possibly given a bonus for it.
Their much hyped 10 year 100K mile power train warranty is only for the original purchaser. Once sold the warranty reverts to a more standard 5/60K term.
Of the important life-lessons to have before one turns 18;
"don't ever be the third or fourth owner of a Hyundai" is right up there with not eating the yellow snow.
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.
So this appears to mean that Hyundai is effectively taking BD's humanoids "off the market" (B2C/B2B markets). And Softbank wants to take a different humanoids stake in OpenAI's plans.
Why do many people seem to think we have solved human robots because of the advances in LLMs? We are still yet to solve 4 wheeled robots navigating a constrained environment. Are we really expecting these things to be let loose _in people’s homes_?!
Boston Dynamics has been the dancing robot demo company since its inception. I guess they held out long enough to cash out on a hype cycle. Well played by them.
Exactly. Atlas right now cost about $150,000 in manufacturing cost.
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.
These kind of stories always make me chuckle. The Boston Dynamics videos always show the humanoid robots running through debris, dancing to the latest music, regaining balance after being assaulted, ever at the ready, ever the obedient servant.
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.
Wow, Cursor (parent company) gets 60 billion in SpaceX stock. But Boston Dynamics was really purchased for 1 billion by Hyundai over time. That seems way off!
Shame. Boston Dynamics is famous for having a “no using our machines for evil” policy. If you break it (eg mount weapons on their robots, even if you’re a government), they won’t sell to you.
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.
Just a note for the thread Hyundai Motor Group makes cars and a lot of other heavy industry things - trains, defense, plant. Rolling robotics fully into their motor group makes complete sense.
rnteresting part is defense although the economics and power/range limits its practicality.
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.
So if three Tech companies (Boston Dynamics, Google, and Softbank), very smart ones at that, couldn't think of a way to make Atlas profitable, well for sure an automotive company should have no problem at all figuring it out.
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?
Am I the only one who feels Boston completely missed their chance and fell behind by being slow on selling robot dogs?
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
> Atlas would need to learn new factory tasks in a day or two and reach 99.9% reliability before it could be truly useful on the floor
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...
I’m sorry, what is that personal robot going to do for me? Do the laundry for which I already have a machine? Dry my clothes for which I already have a machine? Vacuum clean for which I already have a robot? Cook for which I already have an oven? Do the dishes for which I already have a machine?
This is a bit disappointing, isn't it? Boston Dynamics had the coolest robots and everybody was marveling how they would take over the world eventually. Turns out the market isn't gigantic and the use cases are limited, at least for now.
However, let's hope they will keep on doing cool stuff under their new owner.
Outside of some military applications and maybe search and rescue, a lot of people kind of freaked out about Boston Dynamics. They have cool robots, sure, but at what cost if they are implemented by a bad actor? No thanks.
I don't think that follows. Hyundai could well sell these after they've dogfooded them for a while.
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.
Back in December 2020, Hyundai purchased an 80% controlling interest in Boston Dynamics from SoftBank for $880 million, part of a transaction that valued the robotics company at $1.1 billion. That agreement included a put option allowing SoftBank to sell its remaining stake to Hyundai at a later date.
SoftBank has now exercised that option.
Oh. It's Softbank exiting humanoid robotics at Softbank's discretion. That's a lot different than " Hyundai buys Boston Dynamics". Hyundai bought them years ago. This is just the last 8%.
Well, the original story title is "Hyundai takes full control of Boston Dynamics as SoftBank exits for $325 million".
Seems like a mistake. AI in its current form has limited usefulness for most people. Not something I would pay for to use outside of work. But a household robot that could clean, wash and fold the laundry, do the dishes, maybe even be a chauffeur... that would be huge. I think a lot of people would pay new-car money for something like that.
> AI in its current form has limited usefulness for most people.
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.
> 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.
Reminds me a lot of AskJeeves :)
Google summaries from websites mainly did this before “AI” came around. Now I just don’t know the source unless I dig myself. Would rather it went back to before, or at least they implemented the veracity checks better.
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.
> Now I just don’t know the source unless I dig myself.
Claude includes links to references.
What's a problem though is that while it includes a reference, its distillation from the source, or worse, from the combination of sources, is often plain wrong. I check them regularly, and it made me very distrustful of Claude's capacity to faithfully summarise or explain from a source.
When asked to give specific links, it's usually even worse.
I don’t disagree. Many times when I’ve checked the source links a language model provides, I get concerned. It’s definitely important to stay vigilant and exercise critical thinking, but the model’s ability to synthesize information and converse with it in natural language still blows my mind sometimes
So does ChatGPT. The hallucination problem is not completely solved, but much better than a few years ago, especially if you use reasoning mode, where it’s more likely to spontaneously do a web search
Those references often have no actual relation to the answer. A surprising amount of the time, if you check them they’ll prove it wrong.
I have a feeling that humanoid robots will have other, more intimate, tasks first. Our most primal drives seem to drive the advancement of technology.
Also, mowing the lawn on a very hot day is pretty bad for the grass.
I knew someone was gonna go there.
Yeah, I felt that someone had to speak up about the health of the lawn.
I think more non-tech workers are buying subscriptions than people in industry.
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.
FWIW, Google does just answer questions now.
We already have robot grass trimmers and they work pretty well. Why would you want a crude, inefficient, facsimile of a human push or power an inefficient form of mowing the lawn?
Cameras worked pretty well, but most people take photos with their phones nowadays. Pro photographers still mostly use cameras though.
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
For when they don't work pretty well and for a thousand other things besides trimming grasss.
I don’t want a crude facsimile.
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.
Because houses and tools are made for humans.
You're honestly comparing a computer that can poorly answer questions to a fully functioning robot that does chores?
Well, one of those is already a reality in each persons pocket, and the other is a vision needing a lot of money and effort to implement at all
> robot maid that could clean, wash and fold the laundry, do the dishes, etc. would be huge. I think a lot of people would pay new-car money for something like that.
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.
> ”it’s surely cost competitive to just hire a human to do all those things.”
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.
> 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.
The computer of 10 years ago is still a lot cheaper than a modern model. Deflation stops basically only if hardware advancement stops.
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.
> Compared to ICEs, where advancement has stalled for the last 20 years,
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).
ICE advancements haven’t materially affected car performance like EV advancements have. Start-stop is considered an annoyance to most car owners, for example, not a feature.
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.
Crazy take: this only appears to be the case because industry incumbents tend to start applying mechanisms of gambling addiction to products; providing gratifications right on the lower threshold of expectations promotes dependency. New entrants to the car industry have no reason to adopt such a strategy, and so EV owners always look happier than ICE owners, but not crucially so, mysteriously trapping ICE owners in their thing despite EVs appearing massively better by joy as subjective proxy measurement for actual progress.
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.
Honestly I think the biggest advancements in ICE cars recently have been the development and maturation of hybrid cars. Imagine telling someone in 2006 that your minivan got 36 miles per gallon!
Those are all tech that almost everyone owns. Makes sense that mass production would reduce costs and then the cost reductions would go towards zero. For new technology that hasn't been mass produced, it's a completely different story.
But that's my point. If you're basing your society shape around adopting a technology based on it continually decreasing in price, but you only get a few decades of that behavior before saturation and then you're at the mercy of the consolidated winners... generally adoptions like this aren't reversible at the societal level. You're locking in a long-term structural change based on a short-term pricing trend.
Still doesn't make sense. You were criticizing: "But once a technology like general-purpose humanoid robotics exists, it’s costs are only likely to decrease over time."
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.
That’s only if you look at the final price without understanding the makeup of that price.
The components of computation have been getting cheaper every year… it hasn’t lately because the demand for memory suddenly massively started outstripping supply.
With joblessness on the rise and no signs of a reversal, there will always be people desperate for work, even at minimum wages. And there will be those so desperate, that they will willing to be exploited by agencies that will underpay them, for instance to get visa sponsorships. Humanoid robots won't be able to compete with that, at least, not in the near future.
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...
Just like RAM and disk prices have been continually decreasing for as long as people remember.
A new car is what, $25-50K? Thats a one time cost.
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.
Most people buying a new car don't pay them in one payment, they either lease or credit.
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
With the way subscription models and terms of use have been evolving over time, even if you buy a futuristic robotic assistant outright, you won’t really “own” it.
"A new car is what, $25-50K?"
Apparently $50K is closer to average in the U.S.
Price aside, the more important factor is that we don’t have the repair infrastructure to make something like this worthwhile yet. For something as critical as a car, we have workshops, spare parts supply chains, and the skilled technicians to do the repairs. Conventional robots require a similar skill set, but you still won’t be able to rely on a local repair for something people would expect to be dependable, like aged care or home assistance.
> it’s surely cost competitive to just hire a human to do all those things.
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.
Humans are messy to deal with. Say you're rich enough to afford a personal chef. Unless you're an inhuman monster, their problems become your problems as well. So if your chef is out because their mother is sick and needs someone to take care of her, you pay for a nurse for your chef's mom, so that you have your chef. A robot servant is still gonna need maintenance, sure, but it's a bit easier to be callous to a robot than a person.
I think that’s a feature. Not a bug.
But for now, humanoids are still relatively incompetent. So if you're rich enough and you want things done like cleaning and cooking, it's more convenient to hire a human and give them specific instructions instead of buying a robot that can currently do only half the things they want to get done. Or they just want a nice gadget.
>but it's a bit easier to be callous to a robot than a person.
George Jetson always dreamed of beating a robot chef/maid.
Around $80 - $100 an hour here in Sydney.
maintenance cost of machines is largely driven by human labor cost
unless you need rare earths (or any short supply / scarse resource)
extraction of which is driven by.......?
It's robots all the way down.
If you're paying cash/under the table, then maybe. But even then a twice a week household cleaning hire is going to cost upwards of $1500/mo unless you're being particularly exploitative. If you're not under the table, you're paying payroll taxes, probably paying for a payroll service, etc. so you're talking $2000+. At best you can maybe stay under $20k a year.
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.
This comment seems insane to me. Like at $50 an hour thats 30 hours a month, or 8 hoursish a week. How dirty or huge is the house? And $50 an hour is way over what most hourly degree edgucated workers earn so definitely not exploitation.
I pay $40/h for 4 hours once a month. If the wife had her way, it would be weekly.
But presumably would not be for four hours a week, since they would do more maintenance-like cleaning. Once a month, yeah, it’s going to take that long.
Why wouldn’t it take that long? When you hire people to do housekeeping they don’t just come for the exact amount of time you need them on an infrequent, case by case basis. You generally have to agree to a standard number of hours and days or a flat rate per day. They’re trying to make a living. If you can’t give them consistency and a meaningful amount of hours, they won’t work for you (or only will temporarily). They will find someone else who can provide more stability.
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.
> But even then a twice a week household cleaning hire is going to cost upwards of $1500/mo unless you're being particularly exploitative.
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.
$1k/month in an HCOL like here in Seattle doesn't give you much:
> 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.
Even in high cost of living coastal Southern California these numbers are insane unless you have a $10mil house with 10,000sqft
Then tell me what you think it would cost. Hourly pay, how many hours they’d work in a day, and how many days a month you would expect them. What would be the monthly cost for the kind of help you are envisioning?
Not really? I pay $40/h, it takes them 4 hours to clean a 4 bed/2 bath. I do it once a month, but they’re talking twice a week.
Yeah I only see robomaids as an affordable option for someone that needs help with absolutely everything. These things are built out of commodity parts. Maybe you can make a robomaid a little cheaper if you build a lot of them to offset the upfront costs but not by much. Anytime the robomaid isn't working, it's just decreases the value of having one versus how much you paid for it. So the point would be to put it to work as much as possible such as for an elderly person that's unable to do anything for themselves.
Who spends new-car money to clean their homes? Maybe ultra high net worth individuals? I know people with 8 figures net worth who spend a fraction of that money for cleaning their homes.
Given the current context the presumption would be you have somebody coming 2 to 3 days a week. Are you telling me somebody’s going to come work for you for less than $100 a day 2-3 days a week? Why would they even take the gig?
My point is even 8 figures net worth individuals do not pay for someone to clean their house 2-3 times a week.
We set a bar for income brackets here as well as decided this is just for individuals?
None...
But a robot is much better than a human for these tasks. I feel uncomfortable paying a person to come to my house every day and clean. But a soulless robot, I don’t mind. Same for an in house private chef. Etc etc.
Also, like 10 neighbors could potentially share a robot and have it just go house to house every day.
See what you do is make it tele-operated. That way there is no stranger physically in your house, but technologically it's a lot easier to implement than some grand challenge-level laundry folding AI.
> Not something I would pay for to use outside of work
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).
> But a household robot that could clean, wash and fold the laundry, do the dishes, maybe even be a chauffeur... that would be huge.
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.
> 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.
Getting to a cheap household helper robot requires building the expensive one. I don’t think Boston dynamics believes any reasonable consumer would buy their atlas robot, but by building it and scaling its production in industrial use cases they will learn things that make building a cheaper one much easier. And they will have built some factories to mass produce them. It’s not something that will be in everyone’s home next year, but sooner or later the robot hardware and robot intelligence will both be cheap enough to be accessible by average people (at least in the developed world)
Well, that assumes that if you just keep throwing more data and compute at large language models you'll end up with something akin to AGI to control those robots. Which is far from guaranteed.
LLMs already solved the "System 2" part of this, to borrow from Kahneman, it's the "System 1" part that's lagging behind here. Current Claude/Gemini/ChatGPT is more than enough to tell a robot what chores to do, what to do with a thing, how, where to put it, etc. but what's still missing is the ability to reliably translate those goals to movements of a robot in diverse and tight environment that is a typical house or apartment, with any kind of reliability and safety.
No, you're assuming that you need AGI to control a robot, when LLMs have already shown you don't need anything close to hold a conversation.
So why do you suddenly think you need it for controlling a body when animals do it with far less?
But an animal has way more intelligence than an LLM? And unlike a chatbot, I can't delude myself into thinking it has done my laundry or fed my dog just because it tossed some clothes halfway into the washer without soap or spilled dog food on the floor. Unlike code, you can't just simply edit real life mistakes after the fact and call it good. My carpet can't be magically unstained, my glasses unbroken, or my dog or child unsmashed by the falling robot that had a bug fly in to a sensor at the wrong moment.
LLMs aren't the specific architecture you'd use, but it very much looks like a tractable engineering problem to go from a university research lab project that can manage to fold clothes as a demo that needs to be played at 8x speed, to a sellable consumer product. The timeline is gonna be off, so no one knows if it's gonna take 3 years or 30, but it's not going to take an unknown breakthrough in materials science and physics the same way that nuclear fusion looks like it will require.
Is there any sign beyond flashy demos that humanoid robots will be functionally feasible though (before we even get to economically feasible)?
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.
> ”maybe even be a chauffeur”
Cars will be able to safely drive themselves autonomously well before there is a humanoid robot capable of safely driving non-autonomous cars.
SoftBank has a history of making investment decisions that are the absolute opposite of good. I'm always bewildered as to how they still exist since they make nothing but absolute blunders.
I would be more worried about the Chinese owning this market (like they did with robovacs) and not leaving much for Korea/USA outside of the defense market. We are still 5 years away from a general purpose functional household robot, but the rate of advances, even if they slow down substantially, will get us there.
The west can compete but lack the will to do so see the consumer drone market, note that attitude had better change or else the rest of the century is going to be hell.
Oh yes. We definitely have anti-intellectualism and a defeatist attitude to get over, or China will be the sole preeminent power very very soon
They're not making household robots. They have a factory robot that only needs to operate in a controlled environment and boost profitability.
Ok but that is pure fantasy.
> But a household robot that could clean, wash and fold the laundry […]
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.
We're probably still decades away from that kind of robot. And I firmly believe the domestic robot revolution will not involve any humanoids. It'll be a few purpose-built machines that resemble nothing organic.
Don’t you think SoftBank has more insight and a ground level view on their own investment though?
SoftBank at times seems to be clueless with some of their investments, Arm Holdings was their best however...
I think they would sell like hot cakes if they had attachments to also do mrs and mr after the chores ;-)
There are machines that already do those things. And if you’re rich enough to afford and maintain these humanoid robots, you would probably just hire staff already.
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.
All of finance is trading money for time. $1 million today vs $100,000 for the next ten years. Softbank needs the money today vs later.
Now how about a household robot that does all those things and is controlled by an Elon Musk company or by some other completely benevolent techno oligarch?
Exactly. Headline is just missing the “[2020]” qualifier.
Why is SoftBank getting out now when every VC is all about "embodied AI"?
Seems like the only companies VCs want to fund now are robotics, energy, and chips. That "software AI" has had its run.
But an accurate headline would only reveal a meh-burger and narrow its reach. Can't have that, now ...
That feels so low of a price when compared to the insane valuation people attribute to Tesla robots
The problem is Boston Dynamics makes actual robots, which are much more limited than robots constructed from pure hype.
> If you show revenue, people will ask 'HOW MUCH?' and it will never be enough. The company that was the 100xer, the 1000xer is suddenly the 2x dog. But if you have NO revenue, you can say you're pre-revenue! You're a potential pure play... It's not about how much you earn, it's about how much you're worth. And who is worth the most? Companies that lose money!
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.
For anyone not familiar with the reference: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=BzAdXyPYKQo
https://bostondynamics.com/solutions/warehouse-automation/tr... they have a few hundred of these in operation.
you don't make it into the tres commas club by showing revenue
now imagine atlas with depleted uranium armor plates, 120 5.56 rounds (99.7% accuracy), and whatever specific equipment for an individual operator role
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
>also do people really want humanoid robots at home?
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.
Boston dynamics already tried selling to the military but it never really panned out as a big market because their robots were very loud. Which is why they focused on enterprise niches
> also do people really want humanoid robots at home?
Yes, they will be everywhere IMO
So you think replacing humans on the battlefield with human shaped robots...why? It makes no sense in the same way that humans on a car production line are not replaced by human shaped robots, instead by far stronger, far more capable, far faster robots designed for purpose, not mimicry. There's nothing about a battlefield that makes it a good use case for human shaped robots.
> also do people really want humanoid robots at home?
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.
*actual robot demos
Yesterday I read about Cursor being sold for $60bn. Cursor being worth more than 50x Boston Dynamics seems insane.
There's a lot of insanity in the stock market. SpaceX is apparently worth more than the entire aviation industry[1] and Tesla is worth more than all other cars makers combined, or just about[2].
1) https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/1u7aiwg/oc...
2) https://www.reddit.com/r/teslamotors/comments/1hro33r/global...
$325M for 9.65% implies a valuation of around $3.4 billion, so it's more like 18x.
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.
The future is unlimited however the Operating System for robotics, from the outside looking in seems to be the biggest stumbling block the company that can pull it off would be/become the ultimate vertical computer company on the planet. I don't think Hyundai (software) can pull it off.
> 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.
Looking at actual combat robots in Ukraine Boston Dynamics robots are conceptually different and not necessarily in a convincing manner.
Those robot dogs have been looking amazing for as long as I can think. What's in the way of the big military contract?
In Ukraine they are using tracked autonomuous vehicles for the same tasks. Much cheaper.
It is remarkable how rarely alternative movement styles like slug crawling, flying or rolling get used in the animal kingdom to move around compared to 2-8 legs. If a company can figure out how to do legs and manufacture them cheaply I expect there'd a be a lot of money in that; they must have some sort of practical advantage somewhere in warefare.
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.
I was trying to think about the why with Cursor, and the only thing that makes sense to me is they wanted experts in making harnesses so that they can pivot that expertise towards building harnesses intended for autonomous agents to use instead of humans. There's no world where a 60 billion IDE makes sense.
I think it's more that Space X's valuation is ridiculous, and they need acquisitions that are ridiculous to pretend that the emperor is still wearing clothes.
When cursor is selling for $60B, then grok has to really be worth several times that, right?
It's probably a bit of both. Space X is overvalued, and so is Cursor. It's easier for Space X to justify buying Cursor for $60B than it would be for other, because it's a rounding error compared to Space X's valuation.
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...,
How far we have come that 60B could be considered a rounding error for a company
The US has GDP of 32 trillion. In an economy of that size, you would expect a few companies for which 60B is not crazy money, although rounding error is really stretching it.
I don't know that I disagree, but this had to be in the works before the IPO right? Acquisitions don't typically materialize in a timeline of <1 week (or perhaps they do when someone walks in and offers 60B...)
Inflating SpaceX's perceived value would have been the primary goal for a lot of the business for at least the past year leading up to the IPO.
Not just an IDE, look at the prospect, they’ll soon lead in farming, genetics, AGI and teleportation. Remember to price in the TAM of that!
Time travel!
I know quite a lot of people who use (or used to use) Cursor. I don't personally know one single person who owns a humanoid robot. YMMV.
I know quite lot of people who could fork vs code and write a passable agent harness. I don't know one single person who could build a humanoid robot and I majored in mechatronjcs.
SpaceX paid that $60 billion entirely in stock. In other words, they traded 2% of their own inflated stock value, for 100% of Cursor's inflated stock value. This is actually a great deal for SpaceX.
If they had paid $60 billion dollars in cash for Cursor, it would have been a ripoff.
Couldn't they just have sold their stock for dollars?
You can't sell 60b worth of stock without moving the price. It has to be dribbled out over time.
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.
Dumping $60 billion worth of shares would tank the stock price, causing it to not convert into anywhere near $60 billion.
Because it is.
The average (and above-average?) investor really does not understand tech.
This was just ~10% of boston dynamics at that price. HN pro-tip: before commenting, read the articles not just the headlines.
Still only 3b valuation, or 20x less than Cursor.
Ack Yep my bad. Actually my bad for reading the “comment” incorrectly and being out of the loop with the cursor sale til now.
> This was just ~10% of boston dynamics at that price. HN pro-tip: before commenting, read the articles not just the headlines.
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.
Boston Dynamics robots can do gymnastics...
Hey, Hyundai isn't "just a car company"
The insane valuation is for Elon meme vibes and the "vision" of "colonizing Mars", not any of the products.
Meanwhile SoftBank buys ABB’s robotics business .. https://group.softbank/en/news/press/20251008
SoftBank’s investment plays have largely been comically wrong.
This is a good hint that robots are really about to take off.
Humanoid (or dogoid) robot hardware on its own offers no benefits over non-humanoid factory machines. It just has fancy firmware controlling its motions.
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.
Thank you. I felt like I was having deja vu because I remember reading this headline
This is the same thing about spacex buying cursor
That news was also published twice!
Softbank is bleeding money and they need cash, AI isn't shaping up to what they thought it would be
Not sure how to square this post with recent headlines like "SoftBank posts $46 billion gain at Vision Fund driven mainly by massive OpenAI bet".
SoftBank hold huge positions in companies like OpenAI, funded using debt. The interest on those loans is killing them, and until OpenAI actually IPOs and SoftBank can sell their stake, they have to pay that interest using cash from somewhere else.
Paper money vs cash
Sometimes the first one to leave the casino is the last one to join an add hoc concert playing "smoke on the water" for the first time
didnt they get absolutely rekt on WeWork?
How are they still able to be a thing
SoftBank owns 90% of Arm which is up about 1000% since the IPO in 2023.
I don't understand why they would implement humanoid robots instead of purpose-built robots. The human form is not the most optimal way to do most tasks, especially as it relates to manufacturing. Robots don't need to look like humans, they need to be useful. Seems like putting in an awful lot of extra unnecessary work to end up with a worse result.
I'm not sure how many times this has to be restated.
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.
> 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.
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.
"Could be in principle" and "could be in practice, under technical and economical considerations in play" are two very, very different beasts.
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".
> "Could be in principle" and "could be in practice, under technical and economical considerations in play" are two very, very different beasts. > Everyone in the industry learned that the hard way.
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).
Vertical integration is superior if you can pull it off. Big fucking "if". There's a reason why automakers don't usually do it.
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.
> 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.
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".
How long ago was your robotics experience?
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…
> How long ago was your robotics experience?
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.
> probably the vast majority
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."
“One of the largest automakers in the world” makes me think of very low-tech companies like Ford or whatever. I can’t imagine this would bring much actual experience with this new generation of robotics.
Ford doesn't even make the top 5 - and however "low-tech" you think these companies are is the point, the overwhelming majority of new cars are being built by those "low-tech" automakers. The problem is not the limits of current technology (or even of the state of the art 10 years ago), it is the lack of vision and will within these companies to invest in using it.
> 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.
What an unnecessary comment dismissing the expertise of an actual expert - what’s your robotic experience to dismiss him so contemptuously?
I don't need robotics experience, I need automaker experience. Their software is universally terrible.
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?
> I don't need robotics experience, I need automaker experience. Their software is universally terrible.
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?
>commenting on an article about one of the largest automakers in the world buying out the remaining stake in the robotics development company
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.
> companies don't tend to be in the business of making highly advanced robots
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.
You have to have the will to be a vertical company how many companies want too in the west? Not many do.. BYD, DJI, Huawei, maybe Apple a little there are few others but most are partial but the Chinese are the leaders in a willingness to do it all, note Ford Motor at one time did it all for a short time at their beginning.
The west may have to change in the future.
This gives me vibes of "... but they're dinosaurs" that pervades Tesla-type discussions. I've watched several extensive discussions here with some Tesla fans breathlessly announce "really cool", "futuristic" "new thinking" functionality or features for their cars that "the dinosaurs just aren't even considering"... except to their initial skepticism, disbelief, actually, the dinosaurs often do have those things (examples including "adaptive blind spot", where triggering of those alerts is highly dependent on speed differentials, so if the vehicle is more rapidly approaching you, the alert fires earlier, dynamic traffic sign recognition - my car doesn't just recognize school zones, but can see when they are active if they have flashing lights, and, based on equipment installation, will actually count down to when my intersection light will turn green, or road mapping radar, where it actually scans the road surface ahead, avoiding potholes when safe, and adjusting ride height dynamically, not just 'press a button or choose a mode to raise or lower').
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.
My point isn't that they're dinosaurs, it's that they don't really develop robots. Some automakers do, rarely, but they mostly buy them from specialized robotics companies. It's not knowledge-gathering to buy a sander, nor even really to use one. Not on the same way it is to develop that sander. If they were all making their own robots and competing in that way, maybe my response would be different.
I have visited factories for work and my experience is the same. There is so much stuff that could easily be automated but is not because it is too expansive for too little value to make a custom one off machine. The big high volume things will be automated but these machines will have 90% success rate and lot's of stuff that needs to be done by hand. You can search for factory tours on youtube to get an idea. Here are two videos, an Amazon warehouse and a Tesla factory. the big heavy stuff is automated but lot's of work is still done by hand. https://www.youtube.com/shorts/-R6cBkza17k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=45slYC99uUg
Do you think humanoids would be a fit on assemblying the assembly line itself? To my limited knowledge a lot of setting up the factory is making sure your line works as expected with X 9s reliability. Here dexterous humanoids are this _universal_ virtual-to-physical interface and, akin to Auto Research, could run assembly line experiments autonomosuly?
The Amazon video is from four years ago, and the Tesla one from 1.5 years ago.
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.
I remember around 2018 Tesla was actually criticised for excessive automation because it purportedly was slower and more expensive than manual work.
automotive workers unions started around 1918 and became major political players in the 30s -- a fact that i'm sure is wholly unrelated to why there are so many un-automated tasks in that industry.
Hyundai’s manufacturing facilities in the U.S. are not unionized.
But in Korea?
What do American labor union practices have to do with Korean domestic manufacturing?
It’s not really a secret that most new auto factories serving the US tend to open in places where those unions are not active, like the South or Mexico
Amazon warehouses still have a huge number of ununionized workers doing manual labor
> ununionized
Wouldn’t that just be “ionized”?
Pretty different tasks, environments, outcomes, metrics, goals, and other things in a warehouse vs. a factory… really have no clue how this is supposed to be relevant. Why not mention farms or libraries?
Well, Farms have the UFW...
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.
Yeah, my point is that they're all unrelated choices.
Also, a general purpose robot vs a custom purpose robot represent very different capital investment profile for the factories?
Your work experience does not represent the current state of the art in car manufacturing automation
But if these tasks are too minor, too finicky, too open-ended or too reliant on manual dexterity for a purpose-built robot, how can a general purpose robot perform them better? If anything, they should be doing worse.
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.
A) the idea is that these robots do have dexterity capabilities a lot closer to human hands
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.
These industrial robots have much better dexterity than any human alive.
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.
> much better dexterity than any human
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.
Robot arms can have reproducible movement with error bars measured in double-digit microns. Where they lack is in the force feedback, and even then they have had huge strides.
Intelligence is absolutely a valuable addition to dexterity, but no, current industrial robots have nowhere near the dexterity of a human hand.
The human arms and hands are very versatile, and imitating them is a good choice for a universal robot, though 3 or 4 arms are definitely better than 2, and the hardest to imitate are the sensors, not the actuators.
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.
> the rest of the human body is not useful in a factory environment
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).
In a factory, where you can guarantee a hard, smooth floor, I would think wheels are better in most cases than four feet.
But of course the wheels could be replaced with feet where that's needed.
They don't have the dexterity to spend money and buy that car...
And C) they don't always have to be at parity with human hands to be good enough because humans are flat out expensive. Humans need health accommodations, have sick days, vacation, and make mistakes too. The bar is much lower and the incentives are much higher than many people probably think.
and humans collude via unions
These robots operate on completely different principles.
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.
Pretty much. It's a total paradigm shift from how industrial robots normally work. A pre-planned motion executed carefully and precisely vs open-ended "do this thing" powered by a very large bag of opaque neural network heuristics.
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.
It's also worth noting that when e.g. inputs to a stage might have unpredictable defects or alignment, a robot arm utilizing neural networks for planning and analysis might still be the best way to handle that - without the extra degree of freedom of movement-relative-to-floor, planning can be done more rapidly, and movement can be executed more aggressively and quickly.
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.
> movement can be executed more aggressively and quickly
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.
Because it is general purpose. We did not have the ability to create a single robot form which could do all of these minor, finicky, and opened ended tasks. Now that seems within reach. The nice property of humanoid robots is that the world is already made for human form, and so if you're trying to replace people naturally this is what you'd want.
Well, humans obviously do those jobs, so a clearly a general purpose robot (in this case, a biorobot) has been found to do the job better. Don't overthink it.
>> how can a general purpose robot perform them better
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.
It's not a "general purpose" robot, it is a "human replacement" robot, with similar skills and shortcomings to a human. Humans are not general purpose.
All you need to do is look at a recent video of car manufacturing process, and watch what the humans are doing.
>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?
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.
No one ever considers the physics of this situation.
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.
> What remains unautomated, then?
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.
> I'm not sure how many times this has to be restated.
This strike me more as a repeated internet myth more than anything else. There is near endless opportunity for purpose-specific robot forms.
What you need then is a better arm (or even just hand), not a human.
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).
If the task is too finicky, too open-ended or too reliant on manual dexterity for a purpose-built robot arm to handle, why would a walking, humanoid generaic-use robot do any better?
> What remains unautomated, then?
And the tasks that change from day to day.
Naw, the real answer is that factories have been built around human labor - they weren't built to be forward-compatible with purpose-built robots, so during the transitional period where we build these purpose-built robots, you need humanoid robots to fill in the parts where the factories were geared for human labor.
So we want to replace a lot of cheap human labour with expensive robots?
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?
>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."
We were alive in an interesting time where a clerical caste of society was needed to get the most out of capital. Once this is no longer the case it could be that we return to something feudal.
They're just one of today's lucky ten thousand.
https://xkcd.com/1053/
According to this widely cited comic strip, if you are over 30 and didn't know it, you should be ashamed.
'Everyone over 30 knows this' is a prior assumption (it is not necessarily correct; and nothing is said about shame).
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.
I don't think that's what it's saying at all. It explicitly says we should not be negative towards people for not knowing things.
The math on the xkcd is just wrong tbh. In multiple ways.
I took a tour of the BMW Group Plant Spartanburg body shop. It's heavily automated with industrial robots inside safety cages. But they still have human workers pick up parts from rolling carts and place them into templates for the robot arms. BMW has been running a trial with Figure humanoid robots to automate that remaining piece. Apparently those robots haven't worked very well, but presumably Hyundai thinks they can do it better?
https://www.bmwgroup.com/en/news/general/2024/humanoid-robot...
BD was training Atlas for Hyundai factory in Savannah, Georgia for a while:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CbHeh7qwils
Some colleague of mine visited the Mini plant earlier this week. Apparently they had a Boston Dynamics dog patrolling simply to spot stuff that had been left where it wasn't supposed to be left
Can't you just, you know, stick another robot arm on the damn carts and have it offload itself? Surely there's a simpler way.
Maybe what they're actually acquiring is Handle, not Atlas.
Conveyor belts? What about those funny looking warehouse robots that are on wheels and just move pallets around, maybe an arm strapped to it? Surely there are myriad ways to do this more efficiently and precisely than a humanoid robot! Just look at Intel's Fabs for example with the ceiling robots moving the delicate wafers..
Humanoidal robots make sense when they need to operate in spaces designed for humans bodies. Cars are designed and built to be used and serviced by humans, especially their interiors so you need humanoid robot to automate building them. Car exteriors are not built for humans to interact with so they are already being built by specialized robots.
This exactly. You need to mow and leaf blow and weed and edge lawns. You need to get transported in a car from location to location. You need hands to operate all these tools. And arms. And given landscaping, likely legs. You need to move bags of mulch. Fitting in human environments and using human tools is a huge thing for areas of work and life where it doesn't make sense to move a 2000 pound robotic arm around from place to place.
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.
Custom built robots are expensive (basically an R&D project in themselves) and inflexible, if you want to update the process you have to redesign your automated system. The dream of humanoid robots is they can adapt to new manufacturing processes like human workers.
Two things: 1) we have abundant training data for humanoid embodiments (watch humans do things), and 2) the world is already designed for humans.
#1 is the main reason. There is basically unlimited data of things being done with human bodies, and it's also the easiest data to collect (tell a human to do something).
Whenever the topic is about humanoids all the technologists suddenly become creationists to sell the product.
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.
That's like saying there's no need for a generic CPU. The only way forward is a ASIC. Once a generic CPU does everything well enough, it's extremely versatile.
I think the rationale is that they are already using typical car factory automation, but they see a huge potential market for general purpose robotics in the coming decades, they don't need the humanoids, they are simply dogfooding a future product.
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.
This recent article has a few relevant notes about the uses (or lack thereof) of humanoid robots: https://www.csmonitor.com/Business/2026/0612/ai-humanoid-rob....
I wonder what the reason is to not go humanoid but super-human? Lack of training data?
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.
The third arm would put a load in one direction of the robot. You can no longer balance by swinging 1 arm back, you have to swing both of them, or involve a leg motion you might not want to because the third arm has a more limited range of motion.
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).
Because a humanoid robot can replace (theoretically) any human worker, whereas a purpose-built robot can only replace one kind of worker. Or at least that's what Asimov said in Caves of Steel.
I'm spitballing here as I don't actually have a concrete answer for you. But from my understanding automobile manufacturing is one of if not THE most advanced 'purpose-built' robotics sectors. While I agree with you that having a purpose-built thing usually wins out for assembly line manufacturing, I wonder if this isn't an attempt to branch out away from single-purpose robotics into more general or multi-faceted manufacturing.
Spitball the who going to buy the product down the road...
Training data of task completion. See, e.g., robots doing backflips. Presumably there’s an optimal robot for gymnastics but if you start with humanoid form you can train based on many videos of human movement. The alternative - world model sim with physics and loss functions- perhaps ends up being too unconstrained when you add in optimization of the robot form…
AI watching videos of humans seems an incredibly inefficient way to solve acrobatic balance. It is just physics and engineering. The hard part is in the materials and assemblages for enabling complex and subtle movements and the fine motor control, not knowing what the motions are.
We have a world built for humans, designed for humans to walk around and get things done. How, exactly, would it not be useful to have a robot that looks, walks, runs, jumps, lifts, carriers, pushes, pulls, twists, bends, steers, and labors like a human? It would obviously be incredibly useful.
As a person who works in a factory, areas are changed drastically, regularly, and quite fast. The cost of adapting areas to accommodate purpose-built machines pales in comparison to making robots work in suboptimal ways. It's much more cost-effective to rebuild a production area for very specific machines (something my workplace does frequently but never seems to replace workers) than it is to engineer and manager a machine to do work that's already best-suited for human workers.
I understand the sentiment, but you assume they are planning to build humanoid robots to walk around the human-oriented space in the factory.
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?
I'm looking for a better video of it (from one of the engineers), but look at the NASA robot hand. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vfDXzkFHnz0
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 world is built for the human form already. If we design around the robotic form instead, we lose compatibility with all that, and lose the fallback of using human tools/interfaces manually if the automated systems go down. Plus I'd rather have robots that look like Robin Williams than the sentinels from the Matrix.
Maybe it's like Formula 1: it's a purposefully-extreme goal, which drives new development and makes "lesser" goals feel more achievable.
For my personal use, I really fucking want a humanoid robot, coz my home and all the bullshit in it was built for humanoids, I want a robot to do the bullshit for me. I don't want to move into a new, robot-oriented home.
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.
The human form IS the most optimal way to do most tasks
Most human tasks. Earth-movers and mining-trucks aren't human form.
Most tasks are human tasks.
The first somewhat general purpose humanoid robot will sell like gangbusters to the rich, even just as a parlor toy/trick.
Our'legacy' world is built for human shsped operation. So a generic operator will hsve to mimic human shape.
At least a third arm would be helpful. I can't count how many times I've wished for a third arm!
How about a third leg? Eh?
They have god knows how manny bajillion dollars tied up in machinery designed for human use, a human can step in when the robot breaks, and they can buy more robots if the humans get uppity. Those seem like a bunch of good reasons to me.
The humanoid form factor is certainly may not be ideal but I guess they think the flexibility is worth it
Patient complex moves first.
You don’t understand because you’re not an expert? First off they have numerous non-humanoid robots if you follow them at all. Second, Clearly they’ve got strong reasoning, they’ve just been bought. Third, out of thousands of attempts at humanoids, their robots are seemingly the best we’ve yet seen in this class. They must be doing it right when so few others got any traction.
Marketing
Hugsbox has absolutely no idea what he's talking about, that's why he hasn't responded to anyone here.
This same nonsensical question again. Because the world is built for humans, because these are general purpose to replace a human laborer. It can immediately go from picking up parts in a factory to mowing the lawn in the same day.
> they need to be useful
They would be. When everything what could be done would be done by a robot. 24/7. Even without the lights on the floor.
Why do you need software when FPGA can solve everything.
It's much cheaper to create one general-purpose robot for everything than many different robots, each optimized to each task.
War in Ukraine does not validate that assessment: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XiGwWwcnT7M
War is the definition of "not cheap" because the stakes are so high (you die). Ukraine is building what it can with anything it can get and also in a constant race to adapt and develop superior designs.
You're not seeing "cheaper": you're seeing a literal arms race.
Your sentences do not agree with each other.
"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.
Robot Chicken had a fairly cynical take on this. I won't link it here.
they don't need to use the whole humanoid, they can take the legs or abdomen alone and use them as is
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
>The human form is not the most optimal way to do most tasks
What are you talking about?
Go outside, look around! The whole word was created by and for humans.
I don't think this is solely tied to car manufacturing automation. Even though Hyundai Motor Group is acquiring them, I would imagine they'd be well-positioned to commercialize general-purpose robotics and not just for car manufacturing, if Tesla is anything to go by.
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.
https://en.hyundai-wia.com/business/defense_business.asp
Wait, haven’t they already owned them for years? Edit: right, they’re just buying the remaining 9%.
Hyundai bumped their ownership up to 100%, and took the opportunity to reset expectations about when Atlas would be working in Hyundai factories.
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?
There are plenty of tasks a relatively weak humanoid robot is well suited for. Basically any task that is 'human shaped' and not worth an automated line.
"weak" in what sense?
In context, not being able to juggle car engines.
Wire harness making is basically a 100% human task now, this is one of the biggest things that would need to get automated but it's a PITA with huge variation and connectors with poor-fish documentation
I still think dumping BD was one of the biggest mistakes of Sundar's career. And that's saying something.
There's got to be something wrong at the core of BD. They've been pawned off a bunch of times, and they still don't have products out the factory line like they should. I think the tech community has been impressed by their videos, but the fact that their most sold thing is a toy dog at a luxury car price point says a lot about the company.
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.
Marc Raibert was a student of Ivan Sutherland. Sutherland had a lot of pull at DARPA. This facilitated the unique prototyping work done at Boston Dynamics to get noticed and supported by DARPA.
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.
>> There's got to be something wrong at the core of BD. They've been pawned off a bunch of times,
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.
https://terminator.fandom.com/wiki/T-800
They already are Cyberdyne Systems IRL?
https://en.hyundai-wia.com/business/defense_business.asp
What is Gofct and does robotics industry generally just have had a slower adoption of ML because of the realtime domain requirements, I'm just curious and wondering aloud here.
Sorry, I wanted to make a pun for GOFAI (good old fashioned AI). CT stands for control theory.
Per this sale, BD is worth $3.25B. Just recently, Google paid $2.7B for two years of Noam Shazeer through the Character.ai deal.
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?
Not capitalizing on LLMs until OpenAI came out with ChatGPT, and then suddenly everybody was running around like headless chickens is bigger. And then there was Fitbit. Motorola. and more recently, Noam and Character.AI.
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?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noam_Shazeer
Can we go on a small tangent and wonder how we don't know when the guy was born?
Wikipedia shuns primary sources, such as personal websites and company registration documents. They prefer reliable secondary sources such as mainstream news media.
Is it really that surprising that no-one has invested the time and effort into figuring out the personal information of some tech employee-turned-founder? I bet no-one outside of tech even knows his name.
A person with an Wikipedia page is not "some tech employee"
Yeah. Google was too impatient and forced BD to productize prematurely (Spot, Handle), then dumped them when it didn't work out immediately. AI just wasn't ready yet. Imagine if Google had let BD focus on research until DeepMind was ready with the AI side of things. I think with the right joint research program they could have already been deploying humanoids today.
Google dumping a project when it does not produce instant results?
That seems out of character
Wow I’m so glad that didn’t happen.
You'd rather we end up with Chinese humanoids? Because they're coming either way.
2017 was shortly before Google stopped being afraid of being pegged as an AI killbot company.
South Korea has the world’s highest manufacturing robot density. 1,220 robots per 10,000 employees in 2024 Growing 7% annually since 2019 (source: IFR)
It’s so weird to use an AI generated image for this article when there are so many images of Atlas out there.
Take a step back and look at this article's diction and the rest of this entire website. Completely AI generated.
All those tokens have to go somewhere
Generating an image from an already open tab is faster than making a search engine query and selecting a good, high resolution image.
Who cares about quality. Speed is the new black.
Letting AI generate your image also dances around the issues of attribution and licensing, for better or worse.
ai generated imagery can’t be copyrighted while all other photography can and generally needs to be treated as it is. Therefore you likely have to pay a royalty to Getty or other asset outlet. Of use AI.
…who have quite conveniently already stolen and trained on all the copyrighted images. Thanks AI!
Please. It's all fair use. Otherwise AI companies can't repackage and sell what's out there for free.
On a relevant note: https://www.theverge.com/news/674366/nick-clegg-uk-ai-artist...
It might be "fair use" on the way out, but AI companies certainly didn't pay for a copy of every book in existence to train on. It's also straddling a super fine line between legality and morality.
It’s actually likely fair use on the way in as well. What’s not fair use is the production of copyright material with the model and the question is the extent to which model providers have to prevent it. These topics came up with the photocopier, VHS tapes, etc. The training side is more subtle because they are clearly unlicensed and used in the model but this is actually similar to taking a book and photocopying sections and using them for handouts and in training materials or other uses. The crucial part is they effectively destroy the original material in training and no where in the model is the copyright material, even if they can produce something similar when deliberately induced to do so. However you the user induced it, and depending on what you do with what you induced, you can violate the original copyright holder. (N.b., IANAL, but these are my summaries of discussing with a law professor at length who specializes in copyright, open source, etc)
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.
This is major cope. They torrented copyrighted works. It’s theft. It is in no way equivalent to photocopying pages.
Yes, exactly. My comment was a sarcastic take on that fact.
and tech companies wonder why consumers hate AI
What seems to be the problem here? Why is it offensive that someone didnt spend more time hand selecting a picture for the article?
There's a saying in Zen which I live by. "How you do something is how you do everything".
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.
Because it's not being used to deliver better products, it's being used to flood the market with even more garbage
The text reads LLM-ish as well.
And figure out usage and licensing and all that crap. So much easier to just generate a brand new image.
Little appreciated fact is news orgs have full time employees just dealing with licensing all day long, and they pay out millions of dollars when someone fucks up.
Yeah, now they don’t need that department.
If only they could make an engine or transmission that doesn't blow up at 80,000 miles.
So true. I hear they replace more engines than any other brand. I'm surprised they sell so well; a used Toyota would be a far better choice than a new Hyundai
Luckily they have a 10 year 100k mile warranty.
...which AFAIK isn't transferable. IOW, used Hyundais are cheap for a reason.
Are you sure? The warranty is on the car, not the owner. Almost all manufacturers (except Tesla) transfer automatically and are based on mileage.
You have it backwards. Hyundai, KIA, etc will knock it down to 5yrs/60K for used car buyers.
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...
Although confusingly, the battery/motor on a Hyundai EV is covered under a different 10-year/100K warranty which does transfer to used car buyers. Important because of their unfixed ICCU problems.
5yrs is only for the 2nd owner. 3rd owner and beyond gets the shaft. Or rod, I suppose.
Why would they do that? It just seems like such a bad business move without really affecting anything.
Some MBAs probably calculated that it saves more money than they would lose by pissing off used car buyers. And they want people to buy new cars.
> And they want people to buy new cars.
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.
MBAs don't care about what happens a few years from now, they only care about the next quarter or two. By time consequences come back from consumers they will have already been cheered for their contribution and possibly given a bonus for it.
Their much hyped 10 year 100K mile power train warranty is only for the original purchaser. Once sold the warranty reverts to a more standard 5/60K term.
Who told you that? Unless you buy your Hyundai new, or CPO from a dealership, the powertrain warranty is 5/50.
Only if you happen to be the second owner. Third owners get nothing.
Of the important life-lessons to have before one turns 18; "don't ever be the third or fourth owner of a Hyundai" is right up there with not eating the yellow snow.
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.
Hyundai EVs are great though, the Hyundai Ionic 5N is probably the best EV there is (for car enthusiasts).
Same goes for the ICCU, I guess! (Mine hasn't blown yet, knock on wood...)
So this appears to mean that Hyundai is effectively taking BD's humanoids "off the market" (B2C/B2B markets). And Softbank wants to take a different humanoids stake in OpenAI's plans.
Why do many people seem to think we have solved human robots because of the advances in LLMs? We are still yet to solve 4 wheeled robots navigating a constrained environment. Are we really expecting these things to be let loose _in people’s homes_?!
Boston Dynamics has been the dancing robot demo company since its inception. I guess they held out long enough to cash out on a hype cycle. Well played by them.
Looking forward to a three month wait for my robot to be repaired. Basing this assumption on current vehicular maintenance times.
Exactly. Atlas right now cost about $150,000 in manufacturing cost.
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.
`buys` sounds like they have just purchased BD, should be `takes full control` or something similar.
These kind of stories always make me chuckle. The Boston Dynamics videos always show the humanoid robots running through debris, dancing to the latest music, regaining balance after being assaulted, ever at the ready, ever the obedient servant.
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.
What is my purpose? You pass butter.
Butter. Yessir.
Wow, Cursor (parent company) gets 60 billion in SpaceX stock. But Boston Dynamics was really purchased for 1 billion by Hyundai over time. That seems way off!
Shame. Boston Dynamics is famous for having a “no using our machines for evil” policy. If you break it (eg mount weapons on their robots, even if you’re a government), they won’t sell to you.
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.
BD always seemed more like an R&D company to me or even a university lab. Doesn’t seem like a good fit for a car company.
All I really want to know is if we're getting Mecha suites now to fight Godzilla ;)
Hyundai could be the first owner that can actually turn BD's robotics in real product
Just a note for the thread Hyundai Motor Group makes cars and a lot of other heavy industry things - trains, defense, plant. Rolling robotics fully into their motor group makes complete sense.
Wonder if we see Atlas in Ukraine.
rnteresting part is defense although the economics and power/range limits its practicality.
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.
I feel Boston Dynamics appears to be doing far more impressive work to be way 'cheaper' then how much Cursor (60b) or Wiz was acquired for (32b)
Can anyone suggest some ways to understand automation trends in manufacturing? Watching factory tours on youtube has been super interesting.
Boston Dynamics is the same type of cool companies that always demos but never ships.
I'm stumped such a company was on the market for foreign companies. I thought they had deep ties with US Military Industrial Complex.
China is leading the world in robotics use in factories.
The new Qwen robotics suite is impressive.
https://qwen.ai/blog?id=qwen-robotsuite
I’m pretty surprised to see no mention of Agility in the conversation about other humanoid companies
So if three Tech companies (Boston Dynamics, Google, and Softbank), very smart ones at that, couldn't think of a way to make Atlas profitable, well for sure an automotive company should have no problem at all figuring it out.
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?
Title really should clarify: Hyundai takes full control of Boston Dynamics
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
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27588047
Atlas wrote this article, didn't it?
Am I the only one who feels Boston completely missed their chance and fell behind by being slow on selling robot dogs?
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
"demand"
Just give it to me, I’ll monetize it.
This is by far the best robot available: https://clonerobotics.com/
Boston Dynamics gets passed around again
Nope, Hyundai already owned it, they’re just going to 100%
> Atlas would need to learn new factory tasks in a day or two and reach 99.9% reliability before it could be truly useful on the floor
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...
How fucking cool would robohorses instead of cars or bikes be?
wow
This article is AI slop and it’s on a news site. How embarrassing.
Hyundai/Genesis vehicles are pretty bad imo. Wonder if they are pivoting to strictly robotics and automation.
I’m sorry, what is that personal robot going to do for me? Do the laundry for which I already have a machine? Dry my clothes for which I already have a machine? Vacuum clean for which I already have a robot? Cook for which I already have an oven? Do the dishes for which I already have a machine?
Skynet does suspicious purchases. The robodog may get new weapons soon.
BD always felt like they had some awkward demos but never really revolutionized anything. Now they seem far behind Chinese companies. What happened?
Warning: AI slop articles ahead.
nice
This is a bit disappointing, isn't it? Boston Dynamics had the coolest robots and everybody was marveling how they would take over the world eventually. Turns out the market isn't gigantic and the use cases are limited, at least for now.
However, let's hope they will keep on doing cool stuff under their new owner.
Outside of some military applications and maybe search and rescue, a lot of people kind of freaked out about Boston Dynamics. They have cool robots, sure, but at what cost if they are implemented by a bad actor? No thanks.
I don't think that follows. Hyundai could well sell these after they've dogfooded them for a while.
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.
If it's disappointing then it's been disappointing for over 5 years, since Hyundai has owned the company for 5 years.