Ask HN: Does anyone else think that humanoid robots is a bubble?

5 pointsby NewUser763127 hours ago4 comments

4d4m7 hours ago
+100. The money burned on this will be in the trillions by the end of the decade. I still feel like humanity will benefit from general humanoid robots, but the timeline is underestimated. You are right that specialty robotics and general arms are the right choice for commerce and repeatable actions today and that these will be superior for speed/quality for the foreseeable future until software and power storage catches up to what is needed for untethered humanoid form robots.
- sinenomine6 hours ago
  Humanoids are much cheaper than a car or an ev to manufacture at scale - the economics for humanoids is potentially very scalable and efficient. The solid state batteries are remarkably dense too, and battery replacement via dockstations has already been implemented in some models.
  - NewUser763126 hours ago
    The hardware is great and can definitely scale. That's why as a caveat I think teleoperation is a good general purpose application cluster for these.
    But I really struggle to come up with any other economically viable short-term use cases, even with great hardware...
sinenomine7 hours ago
It's a hard problem, but deep learning is very scalable and general and the pressure for general robotics to be solved is very strong in China and US, given the demographic shifts. I think the proliferation of humanoids is a near certainty over the next 8 years, ofc it won't be uniform and licensed labor won't be replaced.
Note that we are only starting to see the (much smaller compared to llms) DL data scaling in robotics - almost entire previous research has been achieved with very small robot fleets.
I think scaling data from industrial-sized robot fleets will lead to quick solution of various general robotics capabilities.
- NewUser763126 hours ago
  Ok but can we get into the nuts and bolts of what we actually want these robots to do?
  Because every time I think of something, either an existing industrial setup can or will do it better, or a special-purpose device will beat it.
  So general intelligence + general form factor (humanoid) sounds great, if feasible. But what will it do exactly? And then let's do a reality check on said application.
wmf4 hours ago
Obviously we don't need 100 companies developing identical robots. 95% of them will fail.
damnitbuilds6 hours ago
Some companies invested in the young internet. That created "The Internet Bubble". We still had the internet after that bubble burst.
Some companies are investing trillions in LLM AIs. It is probably a bubble. But we will still have LLM AIs if that bubble bursts.
Some companies are investing billions in humanoid robots. It may be a bubble. But we will still have humanoid robots if that bubble bursts.
- NewUser763126 hours ago
  LLMs have already proven themselves to be economically valuable. At a bare minimum, they can help people develop most low-mid level software considerably faster, at a good enough quality.
  They also have proven themselves in other white collar knowledge endeavors as well, as valuable tools that augment human economic output. Marketers can make more copy material, any office worker can improve the quality of their email communications, etc. Easy.
  What are humanoids doing exactly? What can they do, that actually makes sense and provides positive economic impact over existing alternatives? Not clear to me.