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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?
It’s true that robotics is getting renewed attention, but this seems to be more the result of increased investment rather than any foundational sea change in knowledge or theory. The fixation on a bipedal and human-ish one is also just that, a fixation, and still leads to some difficulty even moving around consistently - see for example the robot marathon and of course claims that the Tesla robots have been somewhat relying on human controllers last I heard. No new paradigms yet there.
There continues to be progress on the LLM front but this is actually, maybe contrary to the impression you are getting, slowing. I wouldn’t call it a plateau at all but there’s a real sense of struggle out there. Most of the focus in the last six months has been tool use of various kinds, rather than fundamental improvements, though there are some theoretical ideas kicking around that might prove fruitful. On the contrary the major research labs have started to see some diminishing returns. Meta notably can’t even catch fully up to the front players and most of the team quit in frustration. Anthropic has been stuck in a bit of a rut with 3.7 only a mixed improvement over 3.5 and in some ways a regression. OpenAI has had trouble getting the so-called “version 5” off the ground that’s an impressive enough improvement to deserve the name. Google is catching up and adding some neat things. Context windows are going up. “Agent” systems are being experimented with more. Video generation is showing some sparks of brilliance but the compute required is pretty steep. Deepfake video and voice, even real time stuff, is the biggest issue right now, more than any AGI crap.
The fixation on humanoids is understandable: a humanoid robot is a drop-in replacement for a human worker. When I use a food delivery service I often select a courier robot. It's a cute box on six wheels that drives to my apartment block entrance. But the delivery company can use them because I live in a sizable neighborhood between a railroad and a stroad that is both flat and full of restaurants.
A wheeled box can't cross the stroad because it can't use an underpass. A wheeled box can't cross the railroad either because there's an overpass. A wheeled box can't get to my front door as there are a few insurmountable obstacles even in the apartment complex: the first door leading to the lobby has an anti-hobo lock that you need three fingers to open, the second door has an intercom and is quite heavy, then there's a small flight of stairs leading to the elevator (there's a ramp, but you have to unlock and lower it), the robot then has to call the elevator and ring my doorbell.
In a country like the US that has ADA-compliant everything it's probably easier to build a useful delivery robot that can get around on wheels with a single button-pressing finger, but this is still quite limiting. You can't put a hundred of them into a warehouse or a sweatshop without rebuilding it to be robot-accessible. Everything in our lives is designed for human bodies, it's a very obvious target for the robotics industry.
I can honestly say this is the first time seeing that word ever used. But then again, I don't think I've ever really made a distinction between a "street" and a "road" before, let alone thought of something in between.
It's a term recently coined by people who want to eliminate cars.
The term was coined by Chuck Marohn at Strong Towns, who absolutely does not want to eliminate cars - at the point where he founded Strong Towns he lived in a suburb of Brainerd MN (micropolitan area population 99k) which even urbanists don't think is going to be a transit city. It is also geographically small enough (the contiguous built-up area around Brainerd proper is <10 miles across) that slowing the traffic in the city and inner suburbs to 30MPH isn't going to add more than a few minutes to anyone's journey. If you live in a town the size of Brainerd, there is no need for anything intermediate between city streets and the main road from Brainerd to the next town over.
Given Marohn's published views on stroad repair, I suspect he sees the Texas solution - use part of the right-of-way for a limited-access road and part for "frontage roads" (which are actually streets in Marohn's taxonomy) and only allow access between them every few miles - as the correct one if you have enough traffic to justify that much tarmac. US-19 north of Tampa Bay - identified by various people as the worst stroad in America - looks like an example where there is enough space to do this.
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