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There has been a lot of hype news in robotics + AI lately, as the AI updates just continue to come at a blinding pace. From Tesla/XAI we have the Optimus robot, which I can't tell if this is a major breakthrough or just another marketing splash driven by Elon.
On the other side of the fence, you have Nvidia releasing an open foundational model for robotics and partnering with Disney of all companies to make a droid robot.
You also have Google's I/O, which I haven't had the energy to look into.
With the speed of AI updates and the wars of hype, it's always hard to tell who is actually advancing the frontier. But it does seem that in particular robotics are advancing quite rapidly compared to even a couple of years ago. Personally I think that while automating white collar work is useful and such, AI entering into robotics will be the real game changer. If we can begin to massively automate building things like housing, roads, and mass manufactured goods, all of the sudden we get into an explosive growth curve.
Of course, this is where AGI doomer fears do become more salient, so that's something to watch out for.
Either way, another day, another AI discourse. What do you think of this current crop of news?
When I watched Nvidia's CES(?) presentation it was kind of wild to see all their AI products and/or aspirations. Their concept of having robots tokenize movements to complete tasks the same way LLMs tokenize words to respond to questions was an interesting concept. The part where current laborers have to train the robots was dystopian as hell. But I will derive a sense of deep schadenfreude when some "undocumented worker" or H1B that was trained by his white male predecessor (under duress) then has to train his AI replacement. Hard to imagine AI doing a worse job than 3rd world "elite human capital". And as a share holder of NVDA I'm rooting for it. Even as a nationalist I hope it takes off and is cheaper and has few externalities than the open borders policy our ruling class continually pushes in the interest of cheap labor. It represents a possible means to solving the labor issue that continually undercuts the polity of nations. It at least represents a ray of possible hope over the current status quo where the only solution to the dysfunction of our current society is to feed 6B third worlders through it at the fastest rate possible because "muh gdp".
If I'm not mistaken what they're showing off now -virtual environments training etc was showed off in China months before. Ofc people claim those demos were faked etc.
NVDA's share price might be a bit overvalued. Chinese will likely catch up within a few years. They've got all the TSMC people they need and everyone working on replicating EUV etc. And with US trying to ban foreign installs of Huawei Ascends, people now see that Huawei actually has a useful product..
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