I'm looking forward to robotics a lot because solving menial tasks will have a huge class impact as we can stop looking for ways to keep a portion of society suppressed and dumb.
One can dream, right?
I don't like utopianism and I'm certainly not going to plan on a best case scenario. But I can't help a tiny fraction of my brain that says "There are ways in which it could turn out well." Probably not, but the existence of a best case scenario feels like it should mean something.
Yeah I said it. Time to start the countdown timer.
2. However to argue against basically any other robotics startup, I think they would only be acquired if it was a robotics SW company _with real customer distribution_/revenue, or a robotics company focusing on HW that is worth acquiring the IP for. The problem with the latter is that it is also a huge cost, and that cost is only worth it if the ML side actually catches up to the HW. I don't think a frontier lab would want to sustain a full physical supply chain for a non-revenue additive product. And frankly, most robotics companies have no meaningful distribution/revenue or HW IP that is worth acquiring, considering the cost.
Hopefully this is like the first GPT models and it gets better over time.
But somehow this was pushed to the front page of HN before receiving a single comment with a title reminiscent of a major LLM release. Like I can only find 1 other reference historically to this lab and nobody noticed it or cared.
Everything about this page strikes me as having been optimized for investors, not customers. Why would they cite a literal toy as a leading example of automation work? It doesn’t make any sense unless they’re maximizing for what investors remember seeing in headlines, not what actual automation customers would be interesting in paying for.
I think the product they’re selling is their equity, and their target customers are acquirers. The demos and the model feel like marketing material for that highly specific goal, but they forgot to include enough about how it could be useful to anyone.
Folding laundry seems like one but then quickly falls apart the more I think about it. Not sure what else.
we shouldn't aim for economies of scale on this problem as there are massive negative externalities attached to it. Hopefully, a chinese lab will release an open source version soon.
Unironically there's lots of companies who will clean your house for free right now, but their staff get to wear cameras while they do it. People dont seem to care.
Im completely against all of this just fyi, but the capital owners are certainly going to try and cut out as many humans as possible. Get ready for lots of poverty, crime and generally a worse society in <20 years.
You rent a couple of robots who will build it for you for $3/hr.
Once a robot can do everything an IQ 80 human can do, only better and cheaper, there will be no reason to employ IQ 80 humans. Once a robot can do everything an IQ 120 human can do, only better and cheaper, there will be no reason to employ IQ 120 humans. Once a robot can do everything an IQ 180 human can do, only better and cheaper, there will be no reason to employ humans at all, in the unlikely scenario that there are any left by that point.
In the earlier stages of the process, capitalism becomes more and more uncoupled from its previous job as an optimizer for human values. Now most humans are totally locked out of the group whose values capitalism optimizes for. They have no value to contribute as workers – and since in the absence of a spectacular social safety net it’s unclear how they would have much money – they have no value as customers either. Capitalism has passed them by. As the segment of humans who can be outcompeted by robots increases, capitalism passes by more and more people until eventually it locks out the human race entirely, once again in the vanishingly unlikely scenario that we are still around.
I discovered the Robocurve benchmark after someone on X was saying that Kimi K3.1 Pro was performing particular bad on it.
Anyway I found the model particularly interesting because I think it's the first time I see an API for a random bimanual robot. Also HN removes "Introducing" so it's just the name of the model.
However this comment got me thinking. Whats up with all the YC backed benchmarking companies? I know there’s only a few, but what is the business model for companies like Robocurve exactly?
What's hard in robotics is doing real tasks with high success rates. I guess there's just a lack of understanding generally about what's actually hard and useful in robotics.
measurablefunc•1h ago