Specialized robots may beat humanoids in homes

Transcript

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

1. 32:50

   But what you're going to get is incredibly good generalization capabilities out of the box because it's already seen so many environments and because it can just solve problems in so many different spaces. Are you imagining humanoid robots? I think that, you know, the argument against is just there's so much value to be had in, I don't know, particular tasks, purpose built. The argument for humanoid, obviously, is just we're the peak of evolution.

2. 33:14

   Our bodies are, you know, whatever, like lots of biology figured out to be a sort of dominant form factor that can do lots of things. Like, do you have an intuition around humanoids? i've tried i've worked with a lot of the uh the policies running on on humanoids and the complexity of training them uh compared to things that you control you can fully steer using a game controller like a like a franca or like a robotic arm is is is just so much harder everything is so much harder your team purpose built not general humanoid you're saying uh the humanoids do ship with game controllers and so you can actually use them to steer high level planning in a humanoid but not the the the fine um you're saying the more the more you can do sort of the core task of whatever the robot is with a controller the better it will be and therefore trying to narrow the

3. 34:03

   scope of what it's supposed to do is better our bet is that intelligence is a bottleneck and these models will hit the industry this year which means that i think that supply chains actually converge on gaming inputs instead of humanoids this is my bet um i i think humanoids are fairly impractical they're bulky heavy the stabilization of the legs is very annoying if you're training policies uh the um humans are very uh also they're right you could argue that you need a general purpose robot but humans are we our evolution is like also optimized for biology and things that like reproduction and i think right there's a lot of wasted there's a lot exactly there's a lot of wasted compute in the human body to get to where it needed to go because a lot of the constraints on the robot just aren't the same and i think people also just really like cheap robots they

4. 34:54

   they want they want to be able to afford them for specific purposes they want small robots that can do things around the house they don't necessarily need doesn't need to be a full human i think um i'm a big fan of um the the wheeled robots with cameras and just two arms um genesis i think recently launched uh an unveil of their robot i love that design i think that's really the one that's going to hit in terms of functionality the practical approaches will just win i think the other thing i'll give you one example right stabilization on on legs is the is the difference between it being able to fall on a child or not right uh wheels there's no chance wheels exactly it's a stable platform right same is true for quadrupeds for example and so i just i i i think humanoids are further out in the home than people think but closer in the factory than people think

5. 35:44

   that's sort of my is a factory can you can do a non-human factory yeah and you can train people for those for the safety uh constraints and so i think i think there's a market for you know it's don't get me wrong i just don't think the home is sort of the ideal first one um but i also but and then at the same People also just build specialized robots because guess what? People like saving energy and space, right?

6. 36:06

   So if you don't want to manufacture a $30,000 set of legs, and you just want a minimal amount of hardware with a camera that can do a thing, most of the time, that's what you're going to do.