[HN Gopher] How Google built its Gemini robotics models
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How Google built its Gemini robotics models
Author : simonpure
Score : 102 points
Date : 2025-04-02 14:47 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.google)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.google)
| dachworker wrote:
| The "how" is completely missing, but if they can get this to work
| semi reliably it will be ChatGPT x100 in terms of impact.
| WXLCKNO wrote:
| I had never heard of Unitree (Chinese robotics company) before
| today. A lot of their videos look like CGI but apparently the
| product is real.
|
| What stuck with me the most browsing their website on the G1
| model was seeing "Price from $16k"
|
| Now I'm not sure if these are actually purchasable or what the
| value would be, but it's my first time seeing an actual normal-
| ish price attached to a humanoid robot that seems to be for
| sale.
|
| With the rate of advancement we're seeing across the board, it
| honestly feels like people will have robot assistants at home
| much sooner than I thought.
| jsight wrote:
| TBH, I still wonder if some of their videos are CGI. They
| offer real versions for sale, but they seem to be
| significantly more limited than the videos imply.
|
| Have they actually demonstrated the more dramatic stuff at
| any in-person demos?
| Balmbli wrote:
| I'm really shocked tbh.
|
| I can't imagine the progression of ai and in particular
| robots but I assumed that the first robot would cost min 6
| figures if not 7 but would still be worth it due to 24*7 and
| initial invest vs long term.
|
| But the fact how good Gemini robotics is already and how
| cheap the first models are I do believe what will hinder us
| more than tech is people learning about it, testing it out
| and doing it but not technology.
|
| I believe the world will look relevant different in 10 years.
| DoctorDabadedoo wrote:
| Take any of these videos with a grain of salt.
|
| In demos these robots only need to do well once and it can
| take hours to record.
|
| In real life, a failure rate of 80% is unnacceptable, but
| perfectly fine to edit out in the final cut media.
|
| I hope they do well, this area is incredibly hard, but it
| will take a lot more than what people imagine.
| namaria wrote:
| This whole hype cycle man. It's all shiny demos and no real
| products.
| noosphr wrote:
| >A lot of their videos look like CGI but apparently the
| product is real.
|
| I bought their robot dog as part of a project to build
| embodied AI models back in 2022.
|
| Their SDK was far more open than anything else on the market
| and the stock firmware was on par with competitors, this
| includes products that were x10 the price.
|
| The robot itself scared dogs in the park, but kids loved it.
| At $3k it's on par with a mid range drone and quite fun to
| hack on.
| SirYandi wrote:
| Same price as some pure bred dogs too
| ecesena wrote:
| The humanoid is $20k-ish without hands. Each hand currently
| costs another $20k (and not sure if these are available to
| everyone or only for research).
| MPSFounder wrote:
| I am hoping they keep lots of their work open source. This is
| especially the case since hardware would be too expensive for
| competition to pull off, but it would be interesting to see how
| they circumvented some problems
| exe34 wrote:
| it's a common trope in blogs - "how we did X" means "we did X,
| it's a good thing, we're great people", etc.
| cozyman wrote:
| just curious, what would it do if you asked it to kill someone?
| does it follow the laws of robotics?
| cannonpr wrote:
| Usually when someone brings up the laws of robotics I like to
| point out that they were mostly designed as an interesting
| example as to how direct instructions that seem clear to people
| would mostly result in perverse instantiation of AI especially
| if the AI lacked an emotional/contextual subsystem. They were
| also written to make for interesting scifi books.
| LeoPanthera wrote:
| Asimov's laws of robotics would not, and cannot, work in real
| life because terms like "harm," "human being," and "inaction"
| are highly subjective and context-dependent. There are entire
| novels about how the interaction between the hierarchical laws
| have unexpected outcomes.
|
| They're a narrative device. Not practical instructions.
| cozyman wrote:
| interesting, thanks.
| anon84873628 wrote:
| Put another way, impossible to program if you wanted to.
| These are highly abstract concepts that only manifest at the
| highest level of cognition. The governance module would need
| to be programmed at that same level using those tokens, but
| that doesn't seem to be how things are shaping up to work.
| Instead we start with low level programming that learns and
| builds up concepts on top.
|
| Essentially you would need some sort of independent
| adversarial sidecar mind that monitors the robot's actions at
| a high level. And that just kicks the can down the road a
| bit.
| sdenton4 wrote:
| Some kind of governor module to keep our security cyborgs
| in line...
| lugu wrote:
| Judgement is needed but don't we have machines able to make
| (imperfect) judgements? I can chat with your favorite LLM
| their opinion on how to respect the spirit of the 3 laws on
| various situations. Not sure why it cannot work.
| harmmonica wrote:
| Even if Google's robotics technology (software and hardware) is
| leading edge does anyone think they'll actually be able to
| productize it? Seems similar to how they were the pre-product
| leaders in transformers and then fumbled any advantage they had
| to ChatGPT. It seems like something's missing from Google where
| they can't get from research to product effectively. Waymo
| perhaps a good counterexample if you think where they are today
| is product/market fit, but I can't shake the feeling that Google
| more often than not can't seem to get things to market or even if
| they do they give up on them before they take hold.
|
| Just wondering if anyone has a strong feeling or, better yet,
| insight on this regarding their robotics efforts.
| MPSFounder wrote:
| I agree. The current leadership of Google (especially Sundar)
| is mediocre and comes from a consulting background. They will
| fail at making a tangible product out of this, similar to glass
| or Inbox or a multitude of other examples. This is particularly
| sad, as I know a few remarkable engineers at Google that share
| this frustration. However, Google's leadership folded to Indian
| managers and is now run as a circus
| meta_ai_x wrote:
| Sundar Pichai got into IIT Kharagpur in the 90s (one of the
| toughest engineering/technical school to get into). So he has
| more technical chops than many self-proclaimed engineers that
| seem to diss on his McKinsey credentials
| MPSFounder wrote:
| A school being tough to get into due to an abundance of
| population (too many applicants) means little. There has
| been not one significant person coming out of those
| institutions (compared to the many figures coming out of
| the US, despite a population 5x smaller). I would not hire
| Sundar as a junior engineer in my team. Of course, you
| might see something in Google's current leadership which I
| do not see. Time will tell how performant the company will
| be long term. Again, I believe skills that make one
| successful in consulting rarely translate to success in the
| engineering field.
| cma wrote:
| > There has been not one significant person coming out of
| those institutions
|
| Of the IITs?
|
| Co-founders of Sun Microsystems, Flipkart, Ola Cabs,
| Infosys, Zoho, HCL
| financltravsty wrote:
| The only one significant is Khosla of Sun. The rest
| are... rehashes of Western companies without a shred of
| innovation or doing anything novel.
| seatac76 wrote:
| I think the cautious faction of AI debate won temporarily
| inside Google, letting OpenAI take the lead. Lessons should be
| learnt from that experience. I do think Google will come out
| ahead in the end Gemini and Gemma are great models.
|
| Let's see what Google I/O shows of this year, product
| application matters now that they have caught up on the tech
| side.
| harmmonica wrote:
| Will be interesting to see if that lesson has been learned.
| There's no existing product they could cannibalize with their
| robotics effort (vs search with LLMs) so any caution they
| have launching a robotics product would solely come down to
| fears about quality/safety.
| zeroq wrote:
| In my bubble it's general consensus that Google - as we knew it
| - is done.
|
| Sergiej and Larry phased out and what is left is more of less a
| headless chicken, too big too fall, but without any clear
| direction and goal.
| jeffbee wrote:
| At least you are aware that this is a bubble.
| cma wrote:
| Didn't Sergey become active again with the latest AI efforts?
| harmmonica wrote:
| Is this actually true about Larry and Sergei? A substantial
| amount of their net worths is still tied up in Google stock.
| I realize not all centibillionaires are cut from the same
| cloth, but still find it hard to believe they wouldn't be
| majorly involved since the downside of a major stock drop
| would impact them disproportionately. That said they could be
| the types of billionaires who actually think they have enough
| even if their net worths were "only" in the tens of billions
| (a long ways to go down from where they are today).
|
| As for headless chicken, I feel similarly, but then I sort of
| see a path where they have defensible businesses in YouTube
| and maybe GCP, and then Waymo and robotics as green field
| upside, so that even if they don't end up with material
| market share with the "software-only" side of AI, and search
| gets further and further eroded, they could still be a
| formidable player.
|
| Ultimately I do think their best days are behind them largely
| because they can't seem to turn the work of their talented
| engineers into great new products.
| fumar wrote:
| What is your bubble?
| lima wrote:
| They can do _that_ , yet somehow, Gemini Assistant on Pixel
| phones still fails to reliably set timers or add shopping list
| items :-)
|
| (which worked fine with Google Assistant)
| _the_inflator wrote:
| Bring up dates and times if you want to wreak havoc on any AI.
| :D
|
| Developers around the world's most beloved topic, how to handle
| date and time correctly, is still a topic of great
| misunderstanding. AI and AI agents are no different from that.
| LLM seems to help a little, but only if you know what you are
| doing, as it usually needs to be the case.
|
| Some things won't change so fast; at one point or another, data
| must match certain building blocks.
| droopyEyelids wrote:
| One would think the arcana of time zones and the occasional
| leap second would not interfere with an individual setting
| egg timers often enough to become a burden
| pixl97 wrote:
| People ask why AI will exterminate human kind.
|
| The answer is because we wouldn't universally adopt zulu
| time.
| namaria wrote:
| My own hands and cheap alarm clocks, or a piece of paper, have
| been working reliably for several decades. They also don't stop
| working when a corporation decides they want to hype something.
| otherayden wrote:
| It's terrifying to think that robots like this will probably be
| used in the defense industry at some point. If the robot
| understands something as general as "put the erasers away",
| imagine "kill all enemies".
| umeshunni wrote:
| Whenever I watch videos of robot dogs climbing all terrains
| (e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AS1n99yruVU), I'm
| convinced that half of these robotics companies are defense
| funded, whether in the US or China.
| free652 wrote:
| April 1st!
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