Oh. It's Softbank exiting humanoid robotics at Softbank's discretion. That's a lot different than " Hyundai buys Boston Dynamics". Hyundai bought them years ago. This is just the last 8%.
Oh. It's Softbank exiting humanoid robotics at Softbank's discretion. That's a lot different than " Hyundai buys Boston Dynamics". Hyundai bought them years ago. This is just the last 8%.
Seems like a mistake. AI in its current form has limited usefulness for most people. Not something I would pay for to use outside of work. But a household robot that could clean, wash and fold the laundry, do the dishes, maybe even be a chauffeur... that would be huge. I think a lot of people would pay new-car money for something like that.
> AI in its current form has limited usefulness for most people.
That's not what I'm seeing. My mom always wanted Google to just answer questions, and now ChatGPT can. She uses it enough in her daily life that she bought a subscription.
Yes, she knows it hallucinates and you have to double check everything, but so far she finds a ton of use for it even with those caveats.
Now, I agree that a personal servant robot would get a ton of business. Even at new-car prices, it's still cheaper than a human caretaker/maid/butler/etc. And the maid usually doesn't also mow the lawn on a hot day, while a robot would potentially do all kinds of different things without complaint.
I have a feeling that humanoid robots will have other, more intimate, tasks first. Our most primal drives seem to drive the advancement of technology.
Also, mowing the lawn on a very hot day is pretty bad for the grass.
You're honestly comparing a computer that can poorly answer questions to a fully functioning robot that does chores?
Well, one of those is already a reality in each persons pocket, and the other is a vision needing a lot of money and effort to implement at all
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> robot maid that could clean, wash and fold the laundry, do the dishes, etc. would be huge. I think a lot of people would pay new-car money for something like that.
Once you take maintenance of a machine with price-parity to a new car into consideration, it’s surely cost competitive to just hire a human to do all those things.
The price needs to fall drastically below new-car territory before it’s competitive with manual human labour.
> ”it’s surely cost competitive to just hire a human to do all those things.”
The cost of labour varies hugely in different parts of the world. The cost of hiring someone in Switzerland is on the order of 100X more expensive compared to Bangladesh, for example.
With many countries currently in an anti-immigration political mindset and with birth rates declining globally, labour costs are likely to continue to increase in the future.
But once a technology like general-purpose humanoid robotics exists, it’s costs are only likely to decrease over time.
> it’s costs are only likely to decrease over time
What is this based on? We're well past a 50-ish year deflationary period in the cost of major appliances (refrigerators, washing machines, etc). We're pretty clearly at or near the end of the deflationary era for computers and computation. Automotive... speaks for itself. We're still there for televisions, surprisingly; but it looks like these technologies tend to have a handful of decades of rapid cost decrease, followed by a never-ending cost increase over time as the manufacturers consolidate and claim an ever-increasing margin.
The computer of 10 years ago is still a lot cheaper than a modern model. Deflation stops basically only if hardware advancement stops.
EVs are a great example: they keep getting cheaper for what they provide, even if the price stays the same. 200 miles of range 5 years ago is now 400+ miles of range today. Compared to ICEs, where advancement has stalled for the last 20 years, which seem like a worse deal every year.
Just like RAM and disk prices have been continually decreasing for as long as people remember.
> it’s surely cost competitive to just hire a human to do all those things.
Depends on the service life/performance/etc.
As a simple benchmark, I will propose 'Mowing the lawn with a push mower'. Let's wave hands and assume there is a setup on a truck where the mower can be parked and then lifted in.
If you're paying the people doing that lawn-mowing federal minimum wage, at 40 hours a week it's 15K/year.
After 3 years that's 45K, or a little under the current US median price of a new car.
IOW, if the robot costs 45-50K, but can make it through 4 years without expensive maintenance you are still 'saving costs'.
There's hand-waving on both sides of my equation; At least where I live even pushing a lawnmower gets you a bit more than minimum wage (although it is more seasonal,) and also I have no clue if when we say 'new car territory' we are talking median or an 80K EV.
Price aside, the more important factor is that we don’t have the repair infrastructure to make something like this worthwhile yet. For something as critical as a car, we have workshops, spare parts supply chains, and the skilled technicians to do the repairs. Conventional robots require a similar skill set, but you still won’t be able to rely on a local repair for something people would expect to be dependable, like aged care or home assistance.
Humans are messy to deal with. Say you're rich enough to afford a personal chef. Unless you're an inhuman monster, their problems become your problems as well. So if your chef is out because their mother is sick and needs someone to take care of her, you pay for a nurse for your chef's mom, so that you have your chef. A robot servant is still gonna need maintenance, sure, but it's a bit easier to be callous to a robot than a person.
But for now, humanoids are still relatively incompetent. So if you're rich enough and you want things done like cleaning and cooking, it's more convenient to hire a human and give them specific instructions instead of buying a robot that can currently do only half the things they want to get done. Or they just want a nice gadget.
>but it's a bit easier to be callous to a robot than a person.
George Jetson always dreamed of beating a robot chef/maid.
I think that’s a feature. Not a bug.
maintenance cost of machines is largely driven by human labor cost
unless you need rare earths (or any short supply / scarse resource)
It's robots all the way down.
If you're paying cash/under the table, then maybe. But even then a twice a week household cleaning hire is going to cost upwards of $1500/mo unless you're being particularly exploitative. If you're not under the table, you're paying payroll taxes, probably paying for a payroll service, etc. so you're talking $2000+. At best you can maybe stay under $20k a year.
When you really look at the economics of it, a robot that never gets sick/doesn't require payroll/etc. makes a lot more sense.
This comment seems insane to me. Like at $50 an hour thats 30 hours a month, or 8 hoursish a week. How dirty or huge is the house? And $50 an hour is way over what most hourly degree edgucated workers earn so definitely not exploitation.
Who spends new-car money to clean their homes? Maybe ultra high net worth individuals? I know people with 8 figures net worth who spend a fraction of that money for cleaning their homes.
> But even then a twice a week household cleaning hire is going to cost upwards of $1500/mo unless you're being particularly exploitative.
Sorry, what? Unless you're doing a deep clean of your house twice a week or you live in a particularly HCOL area, those numbers don't add up. You shouldn't be spending more than $1k/month on household chores, and even that seems high.
Source: A client of ours runs a "personal help" service (mostly focused on household tasks like laundry, tidying, organizing, etc as opposed to deep cleaning) so I have a lot of data on this. And they're a relatively premium service compared to some of the cheap labor you can actually buy. But they also don't operate in SF or NYC, so maybe prices are drastically different there.
$1k/month in an HCOL like here in Seattle doesn't give you much:
> In Seattle, hiring a house cleaner typically costs $150 to $500+ per visit, with most recurring standard cleanings for an average-sized home landing between $180 and $300. If you pay by the hour, rates generally range from $45 to $65 per hour for self-employed independent cleaners and $75 to $125 per hour for professional cleaning companies.
Even in high cost of living coastal Southern California these numbers are insane unless you have a $10mil house with 10,000sqft
I would be more worried about the Chinese owning this market (like they did with robovacs) and not leaving much for Korea/USA outside of the defense market. We are still 5 years away from a general purpose functional household robot, but the rate of advances, even if they slow down substantially, will get us there.
> Not something I would pay for to use outside of work
You wouldn't but apparently your employer would.
I don't disagree with you on robotics, though. For an empire like softbank, not buying an "insurance against the rise of robotics" also seems like a mistake to me.
That being said, they may expect robotics to rise through self-driving cars (hence their investment in Wayve).
> But a household robot that could clean, wash and fold the laundry, do the dishes, maybe even be a chauffeur... that would be huge.
Except they can't. I get it, merging advanced AI with robotics has made huge leaps in the past few years, but building a truly autonomous laundry robot is an incredibly difficult problem that still feels many years away. And I've seen all the "folding robots" over the past few years, and they are still miles away from being useful in your average home (they only "fold" if pieces are handed to them one-by-one, or the more advanced ones that can pick out clothes from a pile look like they were folded by a 3 year old).
Also, consider that all-in-one washer/dryer combos have existed for a while, but they are still a teeny percentage of washer sales because they're expensive and require more maintenance. There is a surprisingly low threshold on what people are willing to pay for labor saving devices.
> There is a surprisingly low threshold on what people are willing to pay for labor saving devices.
A lot of people gladly pay humans to launder their clothes, so the market is there. But the current iteration of wash/dry combo machines doesn’t solve the main issue. I don’t mind transferring my clothes from the washer to the dryer, because that takes 60 seconds. It’s folding and putting away the clothes that makes laundry a chore.
Getting to a cheap household helper robot requires building the expensive one. I don’t think Boston dynamics believes any reasonable consumer would buy their atlas robot, but by building it and scaling its production in industrial use cases they will learn things that make building a cheaper one much easier. And they will have built some factories to mass produce them. It’s not something that will be in everyone’s home next year, but sooner or later the robot hardware and robot intelligence will both be cheap enough to be accessible by average people (at least in the developed world)
Is there any sign beyond flashy demos that humanoid robots will be functionally feasible though (before we even get to economically feasible)?
I know there's tons of activity on humanoid teleoperation data collection, and motion model training, but it hasn't seemed to bear out much of anything.
Like.... AI would be great if I could put it into a magical semi-corporeal familiar but I'm just not seeing a path to those either.
Well, that assumes that if you just keep throwing more data and compute at large language models you'll end up with something akin to AGI to control those robots. Which is far from guaranteed.
LLMs already solved the "System 2" part of this, to borrow from Kahneman, it's the "System 1" part that's lagging behind here. Current Claude/Gemini/ChatGPT is more than enough to tell a robot what chores to do, what to do with a thing, how, where to put it, etc. but what's still missing is the ability to reliably translate those goals to movements of a robot in diverse and tight environment that is a typical house or apartment, with any kind of reliability and safety.
No, you're assuming that you need AGI to control a robot, when LLMs have already shown you don't need anything close to hold a conversation.
So why do you suddenly think you need it for controlling a body when animals do it with far less?
LLMs aren't the specific architecture you'd use, but it very much looks like a tractable engineering problem to go from a university research lab project that can manage to fold clothes as a demo, to a sellable consumer product. The timeline is gonna be off, so no one knows if it's gonna take 3 years or 30, but it's not going to take an unknown breakthrough in materials science and physics the same way that nuclear fusion looks like it will require.
> ”maybe even be a chauffeur”
Cars will be able to safely drive themselves autonomously well before there is a humanoid robot capable of safely driving non-autonomous cars.
There are machines that already do those things. And if you’re rich enough to afford and maintain these humanoid robots, you would probably just hire staff already.
The only way I could see these AI robots take off is if on top of all those things, it could also perform sexual favors and develop personalities for people to bond with. Robosexuals would buy these primarily for those features and then household duties as nice plausible deniability.
All of finance is trading money for time. $1 million today vs $100,000 for the next ten years. Softbank needs the money today vs later.
Now how about a household robot that does all those things and is controlled by an Elon Musk company or by some other completely benevolent techno oligarch?
Well, the original story title is "Hyundai takes full control of Boston Dynamics as SoftBank exits for $325 million".
Exactly. Headline is just missing the “[2020]” qualifier.
But an accurate headline would only reveal a meh-burger and narrow its reach. Can't have that, now ...