[HN Gopher] Show HN: Shoggoth Mini - A soft tentacle robot power...
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Show HN: Shoggoth Mini - A soft tentacle robot powered by GPT-4o
and RL
Author : cataPhil
Score : 299 points
Date : 2025-07-15 15:46 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.matthieulc.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.matthieulc.com)
| sparrish wrote:
| Hell no! I seen this movie and I don't want any face-hugger
| sitting on my desk.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Hentai enthusiasts, on the other hand...
| dylan604 wrote:
| Hey, what are you watching?
|
| I swear it's work related. You should see the other training
| data I had to use
| 0xEF wrote:
| I was about to say, I think we all know where this is
| going...
| regularfry wrote:
| I seem to remember that the SpiRobs paper behind the (extremely
| neat) tentacle mechanism indicated that they were going for a
| patent.
| lukeinator42 wrote:
| If it's described in a paper doesn't that make it prior art
| though?
| blamestross wrote:
| Not if it is the authors of the paper filing for the patent.
| Otherwise people would never publish papers.
| varispeed wrote:
| This always grinds my gears. For some people "discoveries"
| are so obvious, they don't bother writing a paper let alone
| patenting it. Then someone goes and patents it...
| jameshart wrote:
| Patents are intended to be the form of first public
| disclosure of an idea. Disclosing it before patenting it
| can prevent the patent application being valid.
|
| US has a 1 year grace period. In most countries, any public
| disclosure makes an idea unpatentable.
|
| https://outlierpatentattorneys.com/patent-public-disclosure
| typs wrote:
| This is so sick. I agree that it's a little lame that we have all
| these AI capabilities right now, robotics improving, and all we
| can think of making is humanoid robots. Like I want a
| spider/squid hybrid robot running around my house
| tsunamifury wrote:
| We are looking to make robotics most compatible with a humanoid
| world.
|
| That being said he makes some points that alternate limb types
| could be interesting as well
| dunefox wrote:
| A Lovecraft reference, nice. I'm wondering whether a smaller
| model would suffice as well.
| troyvit wrote:
| Yeah I came here to say the same thing. It seems like it would
| simplify things. They do say:
|
| "I initially considered training a single end-to-end VLA model.
| [...] A cable-driven soft robot is different: the same tip
| position can correspond to many cable length combinations. This
| unpredictability makes demonstration-based approaches difficult
| to scale.[...] Instead, I went with a cascaded design:
| specialized vision feeding lightweight controllers, leaving
| room to expand into more advanced learned behaviors later."
|
| I still think circling back to smaller models would be awesome.
| With some upgrades you might get a locally hosted model on
| there, but I'd be sure to keep that inside a pentagram so it
| doesn't summon a Great One.
| joshuabaker2 wrote:
| I was surprised it pinged gpt-4o. I was expecting it to use
| something like https://github.com/apple/ml-fastvlm (obviously
| cost may have been a factor there), but I can see how the
| direction he chose would make it more capable of doing more
| complex behaviours in the future w.r.t adding additional
| tentacles for movement and so on.
| zkms wrote:
| https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/shoggoth-with-smiley-face-art...
| https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/30/technology/shoggoth-meme-...
| tsunamifury wrote:
| I e been wanting to do this with a basic stuffed animal now for a
| while.
|
| Just basic interactions with a child plus lessons and a voice
| would be game changing for the toy world.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Like using phones as babysitters, just 100x worse.
|
| I don't doubt someone's gonna invent it, but yikes. Imagine
| telling kiddo their beloved sentient toy is dead because mum
| and dad can't afford the ever-rising subscription fees anymore.
| mattigames wrote:
| "Who was your best friend in your childhood?" "The AI teddy
| bear, definitely, I remember every single ad he would tell
| me, then I would nag my mom to buy me those toys, good times"
| ceejayoz wrote:
| "But then my dad lost his job so we had to kill him to save
| money. Sometimes I still snuggle his corpse."
| coolcoder613 wrote:
| Careful with that ambiguity...
| floren wrote:
| A teddy bear is too bulky for convenience. How about
| Tamagotchi but it talks to you. Talkagotchi. Basically that
| horrible Friend necklace but in a cutely-colored egg shape
| that clips to your backpack. I want to not be alive.
|
| edit: when my kid asks for one I'll know it's time to move
| the family to a cabin deep in the woods.
| haiku2077 wrote:
| If you like point and click adventures check out
| https://store.steampowered.com/app/1426010/STASIS_BONE_TOTEM...
| - one of the playable characters is an AI teddy bear and is a
| great character with fantastic writing.
| huevosabio wrote:
| This is so cool! I love the idea of adding expressivity to non
| verbal, non human entities.
| accrual wrote:
| Agreed! I think the Pixar lamp is a great starting point.
| Having the robot be able to flex and bend, shake yes/no, look
| curious or upset, and perhaps even let it control LEDs to
| express itself.
| weikju wrote:
| I've seen this from some Apple research lab recently...
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g3jgCxnlbFY
| lmz wrote:
| That is the lamp being referenced in the article.
| rainingmonkey wrote:
| What a fascinating intersection of technology and human
| psychology!
|
| _" One thing I noticed toward the end is that, even though the
| robot remained expressive, it started feeling less alive. Early
| on, its motions surprised me: I had to interpret them, infer
| intent. But as I internalized how it worked, the prediction error
| faded_ _Expressiveness is about communicating internal state. But
| perceived aliveness depends on something else: unpredictability,
| a certain opacity. This makes sense: living systems track a
| messy, high-dimensional world. Shoggoth Mini doesn't._
|
| _This raises a question: do we actually want to build robots
| that feel alive? Or is there a threshold, somewhere past
| expressiveness, where the system becomes too agentic, too
| unpredictable to stay comfortable around humans? "_
| anotherjesse wrote:
| This feels similar to not finding a game fun once I understand
| the underly system that generates it. The magic is lessened
| (even if applying simple rules can generate complex outcomes,
| it feels determined)
| parpfish wrote:
| Once you discover any minmaxxing strategy, games change from
| "explore this world and use your imagination to decide what
| to do" to "apply this rule or make peace with knowing that
| you are suboptimal"
| dmonitor wrote:
| a poorly designed game makes applying the rules boring. a
| fun game makes applying the rules interesting.
| anyfoo wrote:
| Maybe that's why I like Into The Breach so much, and keep
| coming back to it. It's a turn based strategy game, but
| one with exceptionally high information, compared to
| pretty much all the rest. You even fully know your
| opponent's entire next move!
|
| But every turn becomes a tight little puzzle to solve,
| with surprisingly many possible outcomes. Often,
| situations that I thought were hopeless, do have a
| favorable outcome after all, I just had to think
| _further_ than I usually did.
| floren wrote:
| Furbies spring to mind... They were a similar shape and size
| and even had two goggling eyes, but with waggling ears instead
| of a tentacle.
|
| They'd impress you initially but after some experimentation
| you'd realize they had a basic set of behaviors that were
| triggered off a combination of simple external stimuli and
| internal state. (this is the part where somebody stumbles in to
| say "dOn'T hUmAnS dO ThE sAmE tHiNg????")
| oniony wrote:
| And we should all chip in together to buy that somebody a new
| keyboard.
| tweetle_beetle wrote:
| This ground breaking research pushed the limit of human-Furby
| interactions and interfaces
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GYLBjScgb7o
| ben_w wrote:
| To quote, "if the human brain were so simple that we could
| understand it, we would be so simple that we couldn't".
|
| So...
|
| > this is the part where somebody stumbles in to say "dOn'T
| hUmAnS dO ThE sAmE tHiNg????"
|
| ...yes, but also no.
|
| Humans will always seem mysterious to other humans, because
| we're too complex to be modelled by each other. Basic set of
| behaviours or not.
| Sharlin wrote:
| People have always been ascribing agency and sapience to
| things, from fire and flowing water in shamanistic religions,
| to early automatons that astonished people in the 18th century,
| to the original rudimentary chatbots, to ChatGPT, to - more or
| less literally - many other machines that may seem to have a
| "temperament" at times.
| Bluestein wrote:
| ChatGPT is the new golem.-
| ben_w wrote:
| Robots put the "go" into "golem".
|
| I'd say ChatGPT is more like the eponymous Sorcerer's
| Apprentice: just smart enough to cause problems.
| moron4hire wrote:
| I've noticed the same thing with voice assistants and
| constructed languages.
|
| I always set voice assistants to a British accent. It gives
| enough of a "not from around here" change to the voice that it
| sounds much more believable to me. I'm sure it's not as
| believable to an actual British person. But it works for me.
|
| As for conlangs: many years ago, I worked on a game where one
| of the goals was to have the NPCs dynamically generate dialog.
| I spent quite a bit of time trying to generate realistic
| English and despared that it was just never very believable (I
| was young, I didn't have a good understanding of what was and
| wasn't possible).
|
| At some point, I don't remember exactly why, I switched to
| having the NPCs speak a fictional language. It became a puzzle
| in the game to have to learn this language. But once you did
| (and it wasn't hard, they couldn't say very many things), it
| made the characters feel much more believable. Obviously, the
| whole run-around was just an avoidance of the Uncanny Valley,
| where the effort of translation distracted you from the fact
| that it was all constructed. Though now I'm wondering if enough
| exposure to the game and its language would eventually make you
| very fluent in it and you would then start noticing it was a
| construct.
| SequoiaHope wrote:
| This is adorable! I did some research on tentacle robots last
| year. The official term is "continuum robots" and there's
| actually a great deal of research into their development due to
| their usefulness in medical robotics. This lecture is a great
| overview for the curious: https://youtu.be/4ktr10H04ak
| dvngnt_ wrote:
| I've seen enough media from Japan to know where this is heading
| dylan604 wrote:
| "ah, you hesitated" no more so than on every single other
| question.
|
| the delay for the GPT to process a response is very unnerving. I
| find it worse than when the news is interviewing a remote site
| with a delay between responses. maybe if the eyes had LEDs to
| indicate activity rather than it just sitting there??? waiting
| for a GPT to do its thing is always going to force a delay
| especially when pushing the request to the cloud for a response.
|
| also, "GPT-4o continuously listens to speech through the audio
| stream," is going to be problematic
| accrual wrote:
| > also, "GPT-4o continuously listens to speech through the
| audio stream," is going to be problematic
|
| This seems like a good place to leverage a wake word library,
| perhaps openWakeWord or porcupine. Then the user could wake the
| device before sending the prompt off to an endpoint.
|
| It could even have a resting or snoozing animation, then have
| it perk up when the wake word triggers. Eerie to view, I'm
| sure...
|
| https://github.com/dscripka/openWakeWord
|
| https://github.com/Picovoice/porcupine
| datameta wrote:
| This also saves energy to the point of enabling this device
| to be wireless.
| jszymborski wrote:
| I wonder how well suited some of the smaller LLMs like Qwen
| 0.6B would be suited to this... it doesn't sound like a super
| complicated task.
|
| I also feel like you can train a model on this task by using
| the zero-shot performance of larger models to create a dataset,
| making something very zippy.
| accrual wrote:
| I wondered similar. Perhaps a local model cached in a 16GB or
| 24GB graphics card would perform well too. It would have to
| be a quantized/distilled model, but maybe sufficient,
| especially with some additional training as you mentioned.
| jszymborski wrote:
| If Qwen 0.6B is suitable, then it could fit in 576MB of
| VRAM[0].
|
| https://huggingface.co/unsloth/Qwen3-0.6B-unsloth-bnb-4bit
| otabdeveloper4 wrote:
| 16Gb is _way_ overkill for this.
| justusthane wrote:
| > the delay for the GPT to process a response is very unnerving
|
| I'm not sure I agree. The way the tentacle stops moving and
| shoots upright when you start talking to it gives me the
| intuitive impression that it's paying attention and thinking.
| Pretty cute!
| dylan604 wrote:
| it's the "thinking" frozen state while it uploads and waits
| for a GPT response that is unnerving. if the eyes did
| something to indicate progress is being made, then it would
| remove the desire to ask it if it is working or something.
| the last thing I want to be is that PM asking for a status
| update, but some indication it was actually processing the
| request would be ideal. even if there was a new animation
| with the tail like having it spinning or twirling like the
| ubiquitous spinner to show that something is happening
|
| the snap to attention is a good example of it showing you
| feedback. the frozen state makes me wonder if it is doing
| anything or not
| lsaferite wrote:
| Back when Anki (the robotics company) was building Cosmo, a
| *lot* of thought was put into making it expressive about
| everything that was going on. It really did a good job of
| making it feel "alive" for lack of a better word.
| tetha wrote:
| It clearly needs eyebrows like Johnny 5.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l0zmCUVB0Yw
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| beyond the prototyping phase, which hosted models make very
| easy, there's little reason this couldn't use a very small
| optimized model on device... it would be significantly
| faster/safer in an end product (but significantly less flexible
| for prototyping)
| zhyder wrote:
| Beautiful work! I appreciate how this robot clearly does NOT try
| to look like any natural creature. I don't want a future where we
| can't easily distinguish nature from robotics. So far humanoid
| robots look clearly robotic too: hope that trend continues.
| KaoruAoiShiho wrote:
| Time to live out my dreams of that guy from spiderman.
| krunck wrote:
| That would be Doctor Octopus. Yes I would love A wearable suit
| with a number of tentacles for locomotion and subduing... I
| mean interacting.. with people.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| oh no I just saw a future where LLMs are the new wifi and
| touchscreens in appliances, we're going to let my refrigerator
| cry aren't we
| ge96 wrote:
| Get 4, Doc Oc
|
| Also was thinking of Oogie Boogie Tim Burton
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| Optimus robots can do anything without actually indians?
| therealbilliam wrote:
| I am both super impressed and creeped out
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