OpenAI's robot-hand project stalled on hardware reliability

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 44:23

   bad and ask one more broad one that's okay just based on what we're talking i mean you guys probably know maybe you don't you know i just cover hardware so deeply and um i think i'm pretty i would venture to say i've probably been to more factories and hardware startups in the u.s than just about anyone and keep an eye on china i mean the thing that always plays through my head is that yeah we're ahead on software we're ahead on ai software has been this the story of the u.s for the last 40 50 years of our strength but you know when i think about how this technology manifests itself in the physical world i do not see a future where the u.s is competitive in any way shape or form not just in robotics but you know just all the componentry that goes in to these hardware systems i go to el segundo i see 30 startups it's great there's like this flourishing of ideas and

2. 45:15

   people trying things but it's like such small potatoes compared to what i see in china um it just strikes me that there obviously will be a physical manifestation of all this in the world and the u.s just seems like extraordinarily disadvantaged to to win that to me well i think of people who are working incredibly hard to try to change that i'd say sam is like on robotics in well i know through all the investments in different hardware companies or no no we're trying to figure out how robots are an obvious part of this and we're trying to figure out how to be very successful at robotics uh the i think if you could pick one thing to make the us competitive at manufacturing and the world of atoms in general you would say we need a lot of robots that can build a lot lot more robots but like we can't even make a actuator like you know uh like we're gonna figure that out

3. 46:09

   we will open the eye okay like through your robotics you have to we have to uh the but there's other parts of this that really matter if you think about like the number of gigawatts of power that the world is going to need just to support AI workloads, the number of chips we're going to have to fabricate, the boring stuff about how we're going to just get enough racks assembled and enough network cables strung and made in the first place. The US is extremely behind here. I think robotics will be the solution if you just look at how fast this has to happen and what the US is currently good at and how much infrastructure we have to build up and how long that would take to do by hand um but you are right in the diagnosis and the criticality of it and i think luckily we have like a new uh like a new piece on the chessboard

4. 47:04

   through open ai or the united states the united states like it okay tell me i mean what do you mean i i i have a different feeling i i i feel like we're play acting at hardware and we're gonna get completely if host well on the trajectory yes no we totally agree with that uh the if we can make true general purpose robots if we can have a codex equivalent power thing for robots that you can say like go configure a factory this way and make me more of this kind of robot or go figure out a mine and refine this kind of thing then the plane and field changes okay but you said the u.s and not OpenAI specifically, but I feel like you're pointing at something that you know, though.

5. 47:46

   Well, I don't think the U.S. has a credible plan other than this kind of AI plus robotics to catch up fast enough. I didn't know what the chess piece was. Did something, you saw something recently. Oh, I meant general purpose robots or the chess piece. Okay. I feel like there's... There's a real chicken and egg that's existed in robotics, where if you don't have the robotic hardware, it's kind of hard to develop the software. And if you don't have the great brain, it's kind of hard to be motivated to develop the hardware. And we really saw this. We had a robotics project back in 2018. Do you remember the robotic hand? Yeah, yeah. Super cool.

6. 48:17

   The thing about that hand to know, so we train it through reinforcement learning, actually the exact same algorithm we use to solve competitive video games, right? Wild, single piece of technology doing both. The one difference is that this hand would run for 20 hours before it had these strings as its tendons and they would snap and then you'd have downtime mechanical engineer would come in and fix it you know maybe be wake them up have them come into the office and you realize like you cannot do ml that way you just cannot so actually we ended up canceling that project that team went on to go work on what became github copilot you know to contribute to that effort and so you just realize how much faster software world has been moving but i think we're at a point now where we have these amazing general purpose algorithms that

7. 48:56

   It can be used in all sorts of different ways. And we see how if you start to be able to apply those to the physical world, then I think you are going to have a very different story for how the hardware development and how the hardware tuning to the co-design is going to happen. So I think that there's like real potential for change. But we as a nation need to have the willpower to really do this.

8. 49:16

   But I think we really agree with you that without something like that, the current trajectory looks terrible.