[HN Gopher] Physical Intelligence is building a brain for robots
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Physical Intelligence is building a brain for robots
Author : Osiris30
Score : 52 points
Date : 2024-03-13 13:17 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.bloomberg.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.bloomberg.com)
| Jensson wrote:
| Why is OpenAI investing in startups? They invest 100 million in
| another as well. I thought OpenAI was building their own things
| as a non profit, why are they investing? Is it normal for non
| profits to invest like this? Do they lack confidence in their own
| stuff, do OpenAI have too much money they don't know what to do
| with?
|
| "Norwegian humanoid robot startup 1X Technologies recently raised
| $100 million with backing from OpenAI"
|
| https://www.cnbc.com/2024/02/29/robot-startup-figure-valued-...
| notRobot wrote:
| OpenAI no longer operates as a non-profit. The "OpenAI" name
| has been a joke for years in tech circles for this reason.
| hn_acker wrote:
| I thought the joke was that OpenAI doesn't grant anything
| even resembling an "open" license (whether free as in freedom
| according to the FSF, open as in open source according to the
| OSI, or open as in Open Knowledge's definition [1]) to use
| OpenAI's models. (Tangential reminder: open is not merely
| access to the code and data but also the legal freedom to use
| and modify it for any purpose.)
|
| [1] https://opendefinition.org/od/2.1/en/
| Palmik wrote:
| Yes, it's quite common, see for example:
|
| https://mozilla.vc/
|
| https://www.cff.org/about-us/our-venture-philanthropy-model
| hamoodhabibi wrote:
| this is not even a fair comparison. mozilla isn't using all
| of our data to build a product that will be metered
| Jensson wrote:
| Apparently it is a separate entity and fund, they don't invest
| money from OpenAI but money raised specifically for investing.
| So this doesn't say much about OpenAI, they aren't investing
| money they could use themselves.
|
| https://www.businessinsider.com/openai-vc-fund-raised-10-mil...
| leesec wrote:
| 1. They're not a nonprofit 2. They had shut down their robotics
| wing so now their using investment to get back into the game.
| 3. What's with this negative tone?
| hamoodhabibi wrote:
| Asking this question on a platform pretty much aligned with Sam
| Altman and expecting real nuanced answer is unrealistic.
|
| Remember they shut down the thread regarding Sam Altman's
| sister alleging she was molested by him.
|
| Its just incredibly sad to see how society is quick to overlook
| one's transgressions if it stands to benefit from that
| individual. Artists, CEOs, politicians, celebrities.
|
| Just one sick world and this blatant disregard for "non-profit"
| because bunch of men feel they were chosen.
| kandu wrote:
| Non-paywalled version: https://archive.is/ZtfNh
| apienx wrote:
| A 4 year old child has 16k wake hours x 3600 s/hour x 1^6 optical
| nerve fibers x 2 eyes x 10 bytes/s = 1^15 bytes (approximation by
| Yann LeCun).
|
| Processing visual input is the current bottleneck for robots that
| want to make sense of the physical world. Glad somebody's looking
| into it (no pun intended). I just hope their plan is more
| sophisticated than throwing more computational power at the
| problem.
| gibsonf1 wrote:
| I would say conceptual awareness is a far bigger bottleneck
| than visual perception data.
| smokel wrote:
| There are only a few thousand concepts worthy of thought, but
| there are way more potential pixels even in the current room
| that I am in.
| ben_w wrote:
| I think the state of the art is still bottlenecked on visual
| perception _performance_ , even if there is sufficient data,
| and irregardless of any further questions about conceptual
| awareness.
|
| If we could model visual streams accurately, fast, and at low
| compute cost, I think self-driving cars and autonomous mobile
| robots would be much more widely available.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| LLMs arguably cracked conceptual awareness already, not to
| mention demonstrated that you can bootstrap it unsupervised
| by throwing enough data at it.
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| Is it? What if that 4-year-old child were blind? Obviously
| their concept of the physical world would be different, but is
| it any less accurate? If we remove the need for visual
| perception, thereby removing that bottleneck, how much faster
| would we be able to make progress?
| apinstein wrote:
| I think it would be significantly less accurate. Their error
| rates for performing physical tasks would be different b/w
| they lack the sensors to accurately train decent world
| models. For instance, I don't think they could catch a ball
| at the same skill level as a sighted child no matter how hard
| they tried.
|
| So the lack of that sensor will cause the brain to develop
| poor representations of motion in 3d space.
|
| How lack of those representations would affect other
| representations is less clear; because seeing the fusion
| between the LLM (which similarly doesn't have an embodied
| world model representation) and the robot AI (which
| presumable does) obviously works really well.
|
| Now, it's possible that the 2 models are just inter-
| communicating between their own features (apple the concept
| and apple the image/object) and then being able to connect
| that together. The point of this meaning that there could be
| benefits from separate training and then post-training
| connection to bridge any gaps in learned representations.
|
| However, I'd think that ultimately a model that can train
| simultaneously on more sensory input vs less will have a
| better/more efficient world model with more useful &
| interesting cross-connections between that space and applied
| uses in non-physical domains.
| uoaei wrote:
| Clearly you have never known a blind person.
| phlipski wrote:
| So maybe we should start with building a "pinball wizard". A
| "deaf, dumb, blind" system that plays by sense of touch - or
| in this case some accelerometers and pressure transducers?
| radically reduced bandwidth inputs...
| ben_w wrote:
| If it's just bandwidth reduction you're after, Atari
| pixels?
|
| Even for real world use -- I found I could get a lot out of
| an even smaller resolution for an unrelated (non-AI) real-
| world task.
| hn_acker wrote:
| > A 4 year old child has 16k wake hours x 3600 s/hour x 1^6
| optical nerve fibers x 2 eyes x 10 bytes/s = 1^15 bytes
| (approximation by Yann LeCun).
|
| Unfortunate typo. You meant 10^15 bytes at the end.
|
| Thanks to your citation I was able to find a podcast transcript
| [1] with Yann LeCun's explanation:
|
| > If you talk to developmental psychologists and they tell you
| a four-year-old has been awake for 16,000 hours in his or her
| life, and the amount of information that has reached the visual
| cortex of that child in four years is about 10 to 15 bytes.
|
| The transcript is missing "the" (10 to the 15 bytes). The
| corresponding timestamp in the podcast on YouTube is 4:48.
|
| [1] https://lexfridman.com/yann-lecun-3-transcript
|
| [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5t1vTLU7s40
| iambateman wrote:
| To keep the analogy going, we should be concerned about
| unregulated companies creating robots with superhuman
| capabilities and a four-year-old's sense of the world.
|
| Regulators need to get ahead of this and establish a federal
| framework for safe robotic entrepreneurship.
|
| For example...does the second amendment give me the right to
| have a drone which is capable of autonomously shooting a deer?
| There will be tens of millions of people who disagree on that
| point alone.
|
| And then we need international agreements - much like nuclear -
| governing what is "fair game" for the public to have access to.
|
| We must pursue a robot-enhanced future, carefully.
| anon291 wrote:
| > For example...does the second amendment give me the right
| to have a drone which is capable of autonomously shooting a
| deer? There will be tens of millions of people who disagree
| on that point alone.
|
| IANAL but it seems this would fall under running a human
| controlled robot with a gun, which I believe is illegal
| iambateman wrote:
| Sure, I'm squarely in the "private killer robots are bad"
| camp, but my point is that a _lot_ of people will disagree
| there.
|
| My state passed a law last week saying 18-year-old children
| can open carry a gun without a license. It's very possible
| that the 2A people get energized and the Supreme Court is
| sufficiently out of touch to get this right.
| snuxoll wrote:
| In my state (Idaho), and many others, simply using a
| camera drone to _spot_ game is illegal (even using it to
| locate wounded /downed game, because it provides an easy
| excuse). Drone with a gun is an entirely different level
| and to my knowledge is broadly banned across the country.
| eindiran wrote:
| The 3 things mentioned so far are governed by very
| different regulatory regimes:
|
| - Using a camera drone to spot game will fall under the
| purview of both Federal and state level Fish and
| Game/Wildlife departments, eg https://en.wikipedia.org/wi
| ki/California_Department_of_Fish_... AFAIK this is not
| federally illegal, so there should be plenty of places
| where you can do this in the US.
|
| - Drone (I assume you mean some quadcopter UAV) with a
| gun falls under FAA guidelines. You can't intentionally
| destroy them in flight or attach weapons to them for the
| same reason that you can't do that with planes: they are
| aircraft and the FAA doesn't want to deal with you
| shooting down aircraft. Since the FAA is federal, you
| can't do this anywhere in the US.
|
| - Robot with a gun falls under ATF guidelines,
| specifically ATF letters that indicate certain classes of
| electronic trigger are effectively a machine gun and fall
| under the purview of the NFA. Same as point 2, the ATF
| rules will apply federally. If you have the relevant
| licensing, which I think would fall under a Class 2 SOT
| FFL, you can hook a firearm up to a robot since you are
| legally allowed by the ATF to manufacture machine guns.
| Most (?) of the Youtubers who have given guns to those
| offbrand Spots are doing it legally under the supervision
| of a Class 2 SOT.
|
| - The autonomous robot with a gun would fall under the
| third point, as I am unaware of any rulings about
| specifically autonomous stuff, though someone could
| potentially make the argument that past rulings on booby
| traps could apply.
|
| None of this directly answers the OP question about
| whether the 2nd amendment applies, but broadly federal
| regulation has moved past "shall not be infringed", so
| what the relevant federal agencies actually de facto
| allow is more to the point.
| OkayPhysicist wrote:
| There are no 18 year old children. Those are adults, with
| all the rights and responsibilities that come with that
| title.
| thfuran wrote:
| Not all of them. They can't drink, be a senator, or (in
| some states) rent a car.
| anon291 wrote:
| Well you seemed prone to sensationalism to begin with,
| but this:
|
| > 18-year-old children
|
| just confirmed it. An 18-year-old is an adult with a
| right to own and bear a firearm by the 2nd amendment. A
| person is not a drone, and an 18-year-old is not a child.
| Invictus0 wrote:
| 1^15 bytes huh?
| Jensson wrote:
| You need much less if you are fine with horse level
| understanding of 3d environments. Those get to a working level
| much faster (hours) and are still good enough to navigate
| complex environments safely and not step on children.
|
| Then you realize the limitation isn't the training data but the
| base model that was trained from hundreds of millions of years
| of evolution, and you start to see the real potential hurdle we
| have to clear.
| thfuran wrote:
| Something like half a billion years of pretraining if you
| start counting from the first brain.
| chenxi9649 wrote:
| And 10 or so billion years of preparing the training
| environment
| thfuran wrote:
| Well, we get to use most of that for free.
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