[HN Gopher] Physical Intelligence's first generalist robotic model
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       Physical Intelligence's first generalist robotic model
        
       Author : lachyg
       Score  : 56 points
       Date   : 2024-10-31 21:34 UTC (1 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.physicalintelligence.company)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.physicalintelligence.company)
        
       | cryptoz wrote:
       | At 1:50, the guy gives the robot a glass to pick up and then
       | immediately nopes out of there. Wonder if previous demos resulted
       | in a broken glass haha.
       | 
       | Also at 2:08 the upside-down container gets flipped quickly. I
       | wonder if that was a known limitation of the robot at the time or
       | if the person just had a desire to flip it right-side up (to be
       | polite? haha).
       | 
       | I'm commenting on these tiny details and laughing a lot because
       | I'm not sure I can handle a more serious approach to this.
       | Doesn't it seem like in < 10 years there will be dozens of
       | autonomous, affordable home-robots? Everything is going to
       | change.
       | 
       | One last note, they call this generalist, but each of the
       | examples is quite specific from a macro perspective. Yes the
       | robot can fold maybe any pile of crumpled laundry now and that is
       | generalist compared to previous efforts, but seems like we
       | shouldn't be trying to train bots how to do billions of tasks in
       | specific detail; rather they should learn to learn and take on
       | new tasks they weren't trained for.
        
         | OrigamiPastrami wrote:
         | > Doesn't it seem like in < 10 years there will be dozens of
         | autonomous, affordable home-robots?
         | 
         | If you buy the hype, sure. I know many startups that have
         | already gone bust working on this. I've also seen lots of
         | similar attempts in laboratories around the world going back
         | well over a decade.
         | 
         | > One last note, they call this generalist, but each of the
         | examples is quite specific from a macro perspective. Yes the
         | robot can fold maybe any pile of crumpled laundry now and that
         | is generalist compared to previous efforts, but it does seem
         | like we shouldn't try to train bots how to do billions of tasks
         | in specific detail; rather they should learn to learn and take
         | on new tasks they weren't trained for.
         | 
         | You are starting to see how difficult the problem is and how
         | limited the solutions are. You're basically saying "let's just
         | give the robots general AI and everything will be so much
         | easier!"
        
           | golol wrote:
           | Idk this is really promising, how many robot foundation
           | models have you seen before that also work very well? I
           | believe this is all quite recent.
        
             | OrigamiPastrami wrote:
             | I'm not saying there isn't progress. I'm saying progress is
             | slow relative to the work that needs to be done. I've also
             | worked at enough robotics companies to be skeptical of
             | anything they publish because there is a _strong_ tendency
             | to cherry-pick results. The disconnect between the research
             | papers being published and the reality of the robots at one
             | company I worked at was pretty egregious.
             | 
             | Robots are super cool. Just be skeptical of the hype.
        
         | edm0nd wrote:
         | I think it would be super awesome. I hate doing laundry so if
         | someone sold a robot that washed + dry + folded all my laundry,
         | I would spend money on it.
         | 
         | I'm talking about I want to throw my dirty clothes into a
         | basket and it takes care of the rest.
         | 
         | The demo from the video gives me hope!
        
       | golol wrote:
       | This is a duplicate thread. Can some mod merge them oO? I don't
       | know how this works on HN.
        
       | lachyg wrote:
       | (I work at p.)
       | 
       | Happy to answer any questions on the model, hardware, etc
        
         | imranhou wrote:
         | First of all - incredible work. Do you guys plan to integrate
         | frameworks like ROS to help manage this robot?
        
         | golol wrote:
         | I saw your foundation model is trained on data from several
         | different robots. Is the plan to eventually train a foundation
         | model that can control any robot zero shot? That is, the effect
         | of actuations on video/sensor input is collected and understood
         | in-context and actuations are corrected to yield intended
         | behavior. All in-context. Is this feasible?
         | 
         | More specifically, has your model already exhibited this type
         | of capability, in principle?
        
         | dr_dshiv wrote:
         | Nearly 2 years ago I bet a roboticist $10 that we'd have "sci-
         | fi" robots in 2 years.
         | 
         | Now, we didn't set good criteria for the bet (it was late at
         | night). However, my personal criteria for "scifi" are twofold:
         | 1. Robots that are able to make peanut butter sandwiches
         | without explicit training 2. Robots able to walk on sand (eg
         | Tatooine)
         | 
         | Based on your current understanding, who won the bet? Also,
         | what kind of physical benchmarks do you associate with "sci-fi
         | robots"?
        
       | owenpalmer wrote:
       | At 2:54, it struggles to pick up the cloth for 10 seconds (100
       | seconds real-time).
       | 
       | This may just be a software fix, but I wonder about the idea of
       | exchanging tools for different tasks. In this case some kind of
       | pincher-vacuum or roller-grip might have done the job better.
        
       | yalogin wrote:
       | This is actually promising. I hope these guys continue to iterate
       | for how much ever time they need to
        
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