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ilaksh | on: Learning athletic humanoid tennis skills from imperfect human motion data
We have just started ramping up practical use of imitation learning from human demonstrations in humanoids. A bigger development is that one or two projects are working on training foundational vision action language models based on large video datasets.

I think before the end of summer general purpose physical knowledge and capabilities will start to be demonstrated by one or more humanoid AI or robotics groups.

Maybe 18 months at the absolute latest.

I'm guessing by next year or 2028 there will be services where you can order a robot to come cook and or clean for you. By 2029 it should be quite affordable to get a humanoid on a short term rental.

Do we have any standard benchmarks for humanoids to do domestic tasks?

mplappert | parent | next
That seems like quite an extrapolation and an extraordinary statement. This is a single task, in a lab setting. What your describing are extremely open-ended tasks in people’s homes.

What is informing these timelines?

ilaksh | root | parent
Look at recent developments/announcements involving novel increasingly generalizable learning capabilities from projects like 1X/Neo, Figure 03, Skild AI. Also see open published work like MimicDroid, HDMI, GenMimic, Humanoid-Union Dataset, RoboMirror, Being-H0

Figure 03:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e-31-KBBuXM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZUTzuhkDG3w

1X Neo:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lS_z60kjVEk

Skild AI

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YRmjBdKKLsc (Learning by Watching Human Videos)

nmaley | parent | next
" Do we have any standard benchmarks for humanoids to do domestic tasks?" The answer is yes. Steve Wozniak proposed the Coffee Test. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MowergwQR5Y

It's actually very clever. Despite the apparent simplicity, no current model could pass it.

Re your forecasts, I think they are optimistic in terms of timing but not ridiculously so.

p1esk | root | parent
I think coffee test for robots will be similar to Turing Test for LLMs, which was quietly achieved and forgotten somewhere between gpt-3.5 and gpt-4. Real tests are tasks like cooking or plumbing - I expect that to come in 2-3 years.
andai | parent | next
The "AGI" (-ish) moment for AI was shoving Common Crawl into a transformer.

What's the animal intelligence (physical int.) equivalent of that? I don't think such a dataset exists? (e.g. NVidia is trying to compensate for that with simulated worlds, i.e. synthetic data)

vasco | parent | next
Hey guys I rooted my humanoid and it killed my mom when I disabled the "slow limb motion" mode. It just wacked her in the head as she walked in the kitchen and she's not moving what do I do??
SiempreViernes | root | parent
You should @linustechtips and hope he picks it up, then you have a good chance of getting a voucher for the funeral and getting a shout out in the manufacturers next demo when they talk about their new safety features.
impossiblefork | parent | next
I think that's a bit too optimistic, but I still think the direction is right-ish. It feels hard to give a timeline though. Robotics is hard.
auggierose | parent | next
>I'm guessing by next year or 2028 there will be services where you can order a robot to come cook and or clean for you.

Bullshit.

ohyoutravel | parent | next
omg Elon Musk posts here! Are we also going to get full self driving, no interventions from NYC to LA within this timeframe, sir???
p1esk | parent
I’ve been thinking about this too, and I share your optimism: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47213310