And trained on data of humans moving, at least partially. It makes total sense for a humanoid. I look forward to when they start advancing non-human capabilities (like the BD bot that can swivel 360 degrees at the torso) and optimize travel and movement around those new capabilities.
Then we will start to see some wild alien-like super-human movements. I can’t wait!
Yup, once they figure out the efficient training blocks, they will train from scratch with reinforcement learning in simulator to come up with weirder yet more efficient moves (like alpha zero for Go).
I always thought we will never have the cyborgs from scifi movies capable of doing what humans can and more because while the software side progressed pretty good, the robotic hardware seemed to stay pretty shitty over the years. I don’t think that anymore.
The fact that the robots can actually do all these movements is insane. The perception AI stuff will catch up soon and then these bots will be doing this course in 30 seconds
People don't realize that we're actually making faster progress on the robotics/physical AI side (VLA or JEPA than we do on the intelligence side of AI.
It's because the general public can easily access digital AI services and see how far things have gotten but don't have access to robots to see the progress. So a lot of people hold this outdated idea that robots are lagging behind, or are only progressing as fast as LLMs.
In reality robots are having the fastest growth in capability out of all areas and my guess is they will be on par with humans in almost all physical metrics by 2028 and be superior to humans in every physical task, including very niche ones by 2030. And all physical labor globally will be done by machines by 2035, not because there is something special about 2035 or because of a lack of capability, but simply because it takes some years to build and retool factories to build a fleet of humanoid robots numbering in the tens of billions necessary to automate all physical tasks away.
To give you some indication on the digital AI capability front. I expect my own job as an AI researcher building these very models to be made redundant sometime in 2028 and for essentially all human intellectual work to be made redundant before 2030.
I think all human labor of any form, of any kind, including extremely niche ones like sex workers, athletes, priests to be made redundant well before the 2040s.
Reinforcement learning. It's a computer algorithm for creating an AI system. It works by successively tweaking a known base set of actions to perform a given task. In robotics, that base set of actions is typically created by recording a person's actions.
With the amount of resources being spent on physical AI, In a few years they will able to do anything their little limbs and hands are capable of. Little burger flippers, then soldiers. It's gonna get weird for a while.
How was it that Honda‘s Asimo was state of the art for what felt like decades and in the last 3 years we got to this? Is it the same technology as LLMs? Isn’t half of the challenge having good artificial joints, motors, etc? Why did this develop in parallel with chat AI? Was it just a confidence boost for the industry?
I suspect there is still a lot of off-body sensing of robot position and mechanics and environment, etc and also a lot of off-body processing of what moves to make. Still crazy impressive but I think the main “brain” is still remote off-body and very large and not mobile
Nvidia developed something called the Omniverse which allow robots and self driving cars to learn in a simulated universe. It uses similar chips as LLMs but configured differently.
I'm far from an expert on any of this, but I believe there have been great strides in RL which enables a lot more effective autonomous training to be done.
It should also be noted that you can just "embody" an LLM directly, without it ever been trained on controlling a robot, sensor and actuator input-output and modern intelligent LLMs like Anthropic Mythos can "just control the robot". They figure out the sensor readings and actuators on their own, calibrate the robot on its own and is then able to just control the robot. Sure it would be more clunky than in the video, but the fact that this intelligence exclusively trained on internet text, predicting the next token and reasoning through math issues is capable of doing this out of spontaneous generalization is really mind blowing.
The general public doesn't realize just how generalized LLMs already are and I genuinely think if they did, they would label them AGI already.
People in general also doesn't realize that the progress we're making in robots is faster than the progress we're making in LLMs, which is already extremely fast and faster than most people realize.
Most people have not internalized yet that all human labor, including physical labor, will not exist just a decade from now.
Another (oversimplified) way to think of this is that asimo was largely humans figuring out how to code what it did. Now we have different 'brains' that are learning and figuring it out.
That was part of the initial magic with chatgpt for me. The realization that nobody coded that and nobody could code that.
It’s easy to look at this and think, “What a cool novelty.” But in my layman opinion, this is how expertise in robotics gets built. These funny games are creating experienced engineers, pushing the technology forward, and helping establish an entire industry.
I wish we treated developments like this a little more seriously in the US, rather than mostly sharing clips of robots falling over or running into walls.
Even in just the last six to twelve months, the conversation seems to have shifted from laughing at robots falling over to being amazed by how fast, agile, and capable they’ve become.
Exactly. Those that didn't get it would say "okay, but normal people have no use for racing robots, therefore it is dumb and the concept is busted and people that spend money on these including the development are dumb!"
Well they are true, people have no use for robots whose sole purpose is to race, but they would want a robot that can walk, run, crawl, climb over things perfectly. You wouldn't want your robots to stumble do you?
Then they'd counter with but "legs are stupid. Use wheels, duh! You're just reinventing the wheel!" and it shows that they don't know what they are talking about. Wheels are awesome...on perfect roads and level surfaces. On bad roads or with large bumps, you'd see how terrible wheels can be. People that glaze wheels so much have not spend a day using wheelchairs to get around. It's freaking hard.
Not to mention that they also missed the point that having robots that can walk perfectly means the data can be used for other things such as full set leg prosthetics. Or really, a new type of wheelchair, the legchair where you used legs instead of wheels. Sounds stupid until you realize that legchair have no weakness of wheelchair. It can go over bumps easily, can climb stairs and the like.
A lot of people like to think they saw the surface of something and think that's all there is to it when in reality it's not.
Are these robots doing this in real time or are they aligning themselves to perform motion captured or teleoperated instruction captures that were recorded and then loaded in at the appropriate times? Or a mix of both maybe?
My guess is that they've been trained on these specific obstacle types and the person with the controller is doing some basic steering as well as mode switching. You see clear pause as they move on and out of different obstacles. That could also be them autonomously figuring it out, but I don't know that you would really need someone with a controller there if that were the case.
Extremely impressive! I understand we're still far from perfection, but the progress that have been made in the last 15 years is out of this world. What a time to be alive!
Honestly, the past 3 years have been the most impressive. The application of AI to modern robotics kind of rest how we approached it and it's stunning how well it's worked in such a short period of time.
I don't think people realise how big of a risk this is for common people. The billionaire class is increasing their relative wealth and power every year and will soon have frightening tech at their disposal.
If I was a billionaire and wanted to get a murder machine, would I go for the clumsy, expensive humanoid bot with a limited range of movement? Or would I prefer a drone which can move anywhere, is relatively cheap so I can get a lot more of them, and it's literally available and being used right now like the ones being spotted in use on the Ukraine conflict?
The answer is neither, because we don't live in a movie, by the way. You really have to jump through a lot of logical hoops if you want to go with the "billionaire's robot army" angle. Genuinely making the flat earthers seem reasonable in comparison.
ive always thought the whole rich people culling the poors with robots or automation was a schizo meme. you have the same approach that I agree with, which is prompting people to actually think through the logistics.
it falls apart really fast once you actually start taking it remotely seriously. it's more realistic imo to assume rich people will level up everyone else so that they have more people to compete with and vie for more meaningful feats of achievement and glory. it's not like wealth makes you actualized, you still need to do things that bring you meaning.
the way most redditors think about rich people is like a cartoon.
the way most redditors think about rich people is like a cartoon
It pretty much starts there, with all logic out the window from the getgo because apparently the world operates in the same logical rules as Gotham City, and therefore anything is possible.
I mean… it wouldn’t literally be the billionaires. It would be the military and the police departments. Saying “the billionaires” is because the billionaires are the ones who manufacture the robots, lobby the government to pressure them into using their product for military and police applications, profit from the sales, and then have their domestic and overseas wealth protected by the military. It’s the exact thing they’ve been doing since at least 1940, “crazy conspiracy radical” Republican president and veteran Dwight Eisenhower warned that it was already happening in the 1950s. Why would the billionaires suddenly stop doing this? As far as drones/robotics tech specifically, It’s also already happening in real time with flock cameras, police drones, and drone warfare. Saying “that could never happen” while it’s already happening is just because you have an overly simplistic view of the world.
Bro it could have any eye it wants so usually they add depth laser type map measurements so no this won’t work ! Only known QR codes work to prompt it !
This is actually a huge misunderstanding. Exposed ports will be sealed. Many modern phones can be dropped in water and still operate. Cars are basically big computers now and splish splash in big puddles.
Yeah but after a robot has torn through enough human entrails to turn the seas red like a ravenous megalodon, one sharp broken femur could've scratched past the water proofing barrier surrounding the vulnerable electronics and that robot will be in big trouble
Everyone knows the deepest water possible is only a few inches. It's madness to suggest otherwise, like those fools that insist there are pools of water that are hundreds of miles deep. Insanity !
That'd be cool to watch. They could really up the danger factor of many of the stunts since they don't have to care about survivability for the contestants.
I liked how the arms moved in a natural way too. For the balancing section with the S-curve, they could try to have arms extended horizontally for balance.
What happened in like the past 3 years? It seems like Asimo was state of the art until 2022. Is it the same tech as LLMs? Or did LLMs give the robot industry a confidence boost? Some of that must be motors, artificial joints, etc. Why is it suddenly so good?
It costs money for not any real return. It's something that requires a state to do as a promotional non-profit thing.
And as you know, we're busy spending those resources growing new colonies of algae in the reflection pool and the like. While China builds things like ship elevators in their canals that elevate ships above hills and valleys.
I guess the easy way of saying it is because we're moving more into being an outright mob state like Russia. A country in decline. The amount of pessimism fostered from that fact would make an event like this much less popular in our country... (If this were the 90's, the peak of human affluence, people here would have loved something like this.)
That doesn't mean we'll lose the race to AGI, we're still favored to win that one. This is still simply a public exhibition at the end of the day.
People in China see cool shit that is useful in life and they embrace it and use it.
People in the west are karens and redditors that just want to complain about everything and pretend they're in a position of moral superiority on everything.
I have never seen anybody who hates America more than maga. America IS doing this. Boston dynamics has been doing it for years. Nobody is confused about how many genders there are but you
Pre-trained to recognize how to handle different types of obstacles, and from there the AI onboard decides how to adjust to each on the fly. The people with the controllers are there to keep the bots on track. Just in case, you know, one of them happens to looks to the side after finishing an obstacle, and it decides that the stands are the next thing to climb.
One is tempted to initially dismiss these robots, but some of the performance characteristics are seriously impressive if not indicative of rapid progress in the field of robotics.
It’s interesting. I feel like the decision making on the black robot was faster and the execution on the white robot was faster. In the beginning that gave white an advantage, but black caught up and overtook.
If you were to take the best of both, it would fly through that course.
We'll be watching them complete more advanced obstacle courses with superhuman speed and agility in a few years. The human controller is another weak link here that will eventually be replaced with onboard general intelligence.
Beating a human in a flat out sprint vs the speed it does it when encountering basic obstacles is a perfect example for the state of AI and robotics right now
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u/Affectionate_Bee6434 Aug 24 '26
That climbing on the cube action was uncannily natural, I cant imagine the amount of tasks these things can do in a few years time