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Cool! Does anyone have a list of challenges that must be tackled before such humanoid robots become usable for tasks such as household chores, cooking etc?


IIUC dexterity is gonna be the bottleneck.

There was actually a post on here a few months back where someone claiming robotics expertise posted exactly what you asked for: a list of things they didn't think robots were close to being able to do.

IIRC the list included folding textiles, and soon after a video was released of a robot folding textiles, but it was very janky, it's not clear to me if it proved the original article wrong or was more of an "exception that proves the rule".

Personally I have my washing machine in the basement, you need a key to access it (and I can't modify it, it's a shared space in a building I don't own). I'm always thinking about that. A robot that can do my laundry and open locked doors doesn't seem to be on the horizon yet.


Hate to say it, but I suspect people who can't afford their own laundry might be well down the list of potential customers in all this.


But people who own the shared spaces might be high on the list.

The poorer will get robotics as a condiment. Like WiFi.


Trust me, plenty of millionaires are doing their laundry in a shared Waschküche in Zürich!

Current Chinese dev bots cost like $15k. Vapourware startups are claiming they'll ship their humanoid robot product at $20k. I'd pay that in a heartbeat for robot that could actually do my laundry.

(But more impactfully surely there are loads of Californians with a utility room in their garage, or a basement that can't be accessed from inside the house)

(Also... I just realised, if there were robots that could do laundry, but couldn't navigate to my basement, I would move. I think laundry bots would genuinely be that desirable)


Maybe, but I was thinking the next bracket or two up. I'm sure things will trickle down though.


Don't think those people need robots? I don't think the next bracket up from me does their own laundry today.


The companies servicing that echelon would replace staff as soon as they could. In an apartment, the building owner would plant one in the shared laundry and add an optional price for tenants to use it.


one of the major limitations is the capability (of currently any computer system really) handling the uncertainties that occur in the real world. there is some interesting work done in the area of human-machine co-habitation that deals with safety issues (as in physical safety for both humans and the machines sharing the same space) and strategies to react to unforeseen events. handling the general messy, noisy real world (even in a semi controlled environment like a house) is still a major limitation even if the robots could technically be capable of doing a specific chore


Yes, I can imaging that a robot chef holding a knife improperly is already dangerous enough even if it does not move (e.g., what if you trip and fall against the pointed knife)


I’m sorry Dave, the best we can do with this robot is to make it capable of doing your job so you can focus on doing your chores and cooking.


What about the ability to do household chores and cook? You saw a video of a robot that can climb a single staircase in a test environment. We've had machines that climb stairs for a few decades now.

If you want a robot to do household chores, you get a dishwasher, autonomous lawnmower and a washing machine.


The dishwasher and the washing machine don't auto fill.

Scaling issues as family grows. Ex: sorting socks.


It looks like the stance of FSF is for proliferation of the copyleft to trained LLMs

> "Therefore, we urge Anthropic and other LLM developers that train models using huge datasets downloaded from the Internet to provide these LLMs to their users in freedom"


No, it looks like the stance of the FSF is that models should be free as a matter of principle, the same as their stance when it comes to software. Nothing in the linked post contradicts the description that the judgement was that the training was fair use.


In Azimov's Robot series the society that chose to live with robots gradually destructed itself by just living longer and not having so many children. The other part of humanity that avoided robots flourished (not without suffering). But that all required new planets for settlement (I am looking at you Elon).


Trying not to spoil a 40+ year old story, but Asimov eventually retconned that the flourishing of humanity was driven by a benevolent AI behind the curtain.


MIT license, supported languages beyond english: ar, ch, de, es, fr, it, ja, pl, pt.

https://huggingface.co/HumeAI/tada-3b-ml

https://github.com/HumeAI/tada


Apprenticeship. You will have to prove to the company that working at a minimal wage is still beneficial. Or we can take it even further, you will have to pay the company for getting the necessary experience. Maybe you sign a 5 year contract with a big cancellation fee. It is not unheard of. I remember some of the navy schools having something like this. You study for 5 years for free (bed and food are paid by the school) and then you have to work for at least 5 years for the navy or pay a very big fine if you refuse to do so.


30+ minutes is a gross underestimation IMHO. It is probably somewhere in the range 1:10, 10:100, especially if you include the cost of context switches a senior has to do. In my experience, the loss of flow, due to context switch is very prominent and sometimes painful.


someone still will, but quality will become really expensive


Then there will be no one to buy the robots :)


It's quite possible that the rich will essentially form a new economy.

They build the robots to build the factories, run the mines, build the solar farms, run the research labs, repair the robots, etc. They sell to and buy from each other.


I wonder why did they release it then.


Why did Google publish the Transformers paper?


Unless you can provide a (community) curated list of sources to search through (e.g. using MCP). Then I think local models may become really competitive.


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