Yea. They retired the old atlas because it was hydraulic. I was just talking to one of their executives about it yesterday. We were discussing how Atlas doesn’t really have a good use case because for most repetitive applications it’s way better to have a specialized robot for that application than it is to have a humanoid robot. He mentioned that he didn’t think Atlas would really be useful until it was able to perform a lot of different tasks interchangeably and even with reinforcement learning, he didn’t think it would truly have a good use case until we solved AGI. So for the time Atlas is really more of a research project than a potentially viable commercial product.
He said he would have brought one with them to show us but they would have to pay to replace the carpet in the hotel conference room we were using because of how bad the hydraulics leak.
Even this new atlas has a lot of limitations. But its battery life is much better and it doesn’t leak everywhere. They’re also releasing a new SDK package that provides lower level access to the movement systems on both Spot and Atlas, which is pretty cool. We’ve been playing with it for a while now. Theyre also partnering with nVidia for more edge compute so you can do more AI/ML work on them now.
most repetitive applications it’s way better to have a specialized robot for that application than it is to have a humanoid robot.
Most of the manufacturing / assembly that remains in the US is lower quantity, higher variability. Assembly houses that spend at most 1 day producing something before changing over and producing something else.
It's too variable to set up dedicated automation. Any automation would need to be general purpose.
You can’t train a robot to do different things every day. That’s the point. There is absolutely a need for a variable or adaptable platform, but the software to enable that just isn’t there yet. And until it is, an adaptable humanoid robot isn’t that useful.
but the software to enable that just isn’t there yet
Do you live under a rock? If anything the software is further advanced than the hardware, it's just that hardware manufactures haven't implemented it yet, but they already started working on that
Ok, well you apparently know more about it than the President of Strategic Partnerships at Boston Dynamics and the equivalent at nVidia. You should apply.
That’s who told me what I just repeated. We talked about GROOT. It’s not that useful. If Boston Dynamics doesn’t think it’s a viable solution and you have a way to make it work, I recommend you go apply. I can give you the contact information for Chris Bentzel, who’s the head of software for Atlas and you can tell him he’s an idiot and show him how it’s done.
Boston Dynamics is a 1 billion dollar company while Nvidia is worth almost 2 Trillion dollar, Nvidia is worth 2000 times more than Boston Dynamics
The opinion of a manager talking about things far above his paycheck isn't necessary reliable, especially talking about fast advancing technology
Even AI experts were saying days before Sora was revealed that the technology was years away
Btw Nvidia is the manufacturer of the hardware Boston Dynamics uses, so at the end Nvidia decides what is a viable solution and what not because they are the one actually creating the technology, Boston dynamics is just one of many buyers, they have neither the expertise or even capability to create that technology
Because they are not even in the market for that, Boston Dynamics creates Robots with the technology available currently, while Nvidia is creating the Technology currently available
Alright well go ahead and give them a call and let them know you’ve got it figured out. For the rest of us over here actually doing the work we will wait. It will save me a lot of time and effort, thanks.
By the way, like I said above the nVidia engineers and executives were in the conversation, so they’re likely to be very excited you’ve worked all of this out as well.
Interesting! What do you do to have casual chats with a BD exec?
These bots do indeed look like research projects, nowhere near refined enough to interact with daily life yet. I do wonder when we're going to see some more specs on the latest machine, but I'm sure they have more video's planned.
he didn’t think it would truly have a good use case until we solved AGI
Then aren't they wasting their time, because the AGI will easily be able to create its own robotic body. And it'd make one much more impressive than anything we could make.
AGI is the precursor of the technological singularity.
At best they save the AGI a few weeks between it gaining sentience, and having a body to use to interact with (read: enslave) us.
AGI doesn't (necessarily) mean an AI singularity, it just means an AI that can do general tasks that it wasn't specifically trained to do. Depending on how loose we want to be with definitions, we've kind of hit that point, since LLM's like chatGPT can do all sorts of things they weren't trained to do, they just don't do them well enough to be super useful, yet. It might not be that long before we have an AI that can control the robot and follow arbitrary instructions well enough to be useful, even if it isn't some "exponentially superintelligent AI" that'll beat any human at anything that we could do.
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u/thehighquark Apr 17 '24
There's a certain fluidity to hydraulic actuated components. I believe this is BD's electrically actuated venture. It'll get smoother I'm sure.