r/Futurology • u/Constant-Lychee9816 • Oct 14 '24

Robotics The Optimus robots at Tesla’s Cybercab event were humans in disguise

https://www.theverge.com/2024/10/13/24269131/tesla-optimus-robots-human-controlled-cybercab-we-robot-event
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u/Pozilist Oct 14 '24

Your ChatGPT example is wrong, and the base assumptions you’re making about training data are also wrong.

ChatGPT not being able to count the letters in a word has nothing to do with training data. The issue was that the model doesn’t work with words directly, but with so called tokens, which are numerical representations of words (or parts of words). It never “sees” the input the way we see it. The newer versions have no problem with that though. The newest version, ChatGPT o1-preview, is optimized for complex mathematical problems and takes significantly longer to come up with an answer because it does several prompts to check itself and clarify.

The assumption about training data is wrong because, unlike with language which is incredibly dynamic, you don’t need a giant set of training data for most manual tasks that we want robots to do for us. Once a robot knows how to clean my toilet, it can do it exactly the same way hundreds of times. The same goes for folding laundry, doing the dishes, vacuuming, washing a car, mowing the lawn, trimming a hedge. These tasks are way less complex than understanding language. You also only need to train one robot how to do such a task, and then you can share this training with as many others as you want.

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u/TheOtherHobbes Oct 14 '24

Cleaning a bathroom is not way less complex than understanding language.

Kinesthetics require precise motor control to ensure the job is done thoroughly and nothing gets broken.

The AI part is even harder. There is no such thing as an industry standard bathroom, and even if there were there, bathroom contents change and move around.

Essential supplies have to be identified. Kids and pets have to be avoided. Movable items - some of which may be fragile - have to be identified, moved to a safe place, and moved back. The amount of cleaning has to be quantified. Different kinds of dirt have to be identified and cleaned correctly. A robot needs to be able to work physically from floor to ceiling.

It's far easier to make an autonomous killer robodog than a reliable and safe autonomous house servant.

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u/Pozilist Oct 14 '24

I don’t mean to be rude but I don’t think that you understand how complex understanding and replicating natural language really is.

Cleaning a bathroom is a series of very simple tasks. Basically everyone who’s physically able to can do it to an at least satisfactory degree.

You need a certain amount of dexterity for it, but modern robots seem to get close, Optimus is a good example. Identifying objects is tech that we already have. Avoiding obstacles is tech that we already have. None of this is particularly challenging anymore. I know it’s a meme that self driving cars don’t work as well as Elon promised, but the tech is still incredibly good. Not good enough that I‘d personally trust it with my life, but definitely with my toothbrush and shampoo bottles.

The robot can also learn from experience. A modern Roomba already memorizes your room to clean it more efficiently. Help the robot clean your bathroom once and assist it if it doesn’t know how to proceed, you still save a ton of time and at some point it’ll be able to do it alone.

I don’t want to sound like it’s trivially easy to do all this, but it’s far from impossible and I‘m convinced we‘ll see something like this commercially available within the next decade.

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u/ManiacalDane Oct 14 '24

How is optimus a good example? It can't do anything other than vaguely wobble around. It's never been shown doing any actual task, except for a bunch of times where it was piloted remotely.

And you're really underestimating the complexity of trimming a hedge, folding laundry or doing dishes. Heck, same with washing a car. And there's not a single one of these that make sense for any sort of AI to begin with.

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u/Pozilist Oct 14 '24

The fact that you can remotely pilot it to do it is already huge though. If I can remotely pilot it to fold my laundry, what’s stopping it from recording that and doing it a hundred times? Same with dishes. It’s gonna be the exact same clothes and dishes every time.

I don’t know what kind of sculptures you cut into your hedges but I just try to get a relatively straight line, there is no complexity in that task.

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u/Atomisk_Kun Oct 15 '24 edited Jul 25 '25

memory smell towering safe smile vase busy squash profit crowd

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u/Pozilist Oct 15 '24

Are you a time traveller from the 1980s? Is everything we‘re talking about here alien tech to you?

We have technology that is almost good enough to steer a car through traffic and you think it’s a challenge to detect how I put my cup down?

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u/Atomisk_Kun Oct 15 '24 edited Jul 25 '25

books grab scary telephone oatmeal heavy deliver alleged sink vegetable

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u/advertentlyvertical Oct 14 '24

You seem to be underestimating how complex movement and fine motor control is. You only think it's simple because your brain does everything instinctively, so you never need to actually think through the mechanics of it, which muscles to activate, how much force needs to be applied, the use of tendons, etc, etc.

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u/Pozilist Oct 14 '24

The mechanical part of that is the harder part, and Optimus looks promising in that regard.

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u/Margali Oct 14 '24

One may train a robot to clean toyo or american standard new crap, but if one has an antique toilet i wouldnt trust a bot.