We accidentally solved robotics by watching 1M hours of YouTube

This is interesting for generalized problems ("make me a sandwich") but not useful for most real world functions ("perform x within y space at z cost/speed"). I think the number of people on the humanoid bandwagon trying to implement generalized applications is staggering right now. The physics tells you they will never be as fast as purpose-built devices, nor as small, nor as cheap. That's not to say there's zero value there, but really we're - uh - grasping at straws...

I wonder if a generalized machine would have an advantage from scale, and then putting all the specialized stuff into software. We have seen this play out before.

Well, there’s a middle ground, kinda. Using more specialized hardware (ex: cobots) but deploy state-of-art Physical AI (ML/Computer Vision) on them. We’re building one such startup at ko-br (https://ko-br.com/) :))

Very good point! This area faces a similar misalignment of goals in that it tries to be a generic fit-all solution that is rampant with today's LLMs.

We made a sandwich but it cost you 10x more than it would a human and slower might slowly become faster and more efficient but by the time you get really good at it, its simply not transferable unless the model is genuinely able to make the leap across into other domains that humans naturally do.

I'm afraid this is where the barrier of general intelligence and human intelligence lies and with enough of these geospatial motor skill database, we might get something that mimics humans very well but still run into problems at the edge, and this last mile problem really is a hinderance to so many domains where we come close but never complete.

I wonder if this will change with some sort of computing changes as well as how we interface with digital systems (without mouse or keyboard), then this might be able to close that 'last mile gap'.

Quite a few startups in your space. Many deployed with customers. Good luck finding a USP!

Note that the username here is a Korean derogatory term for Chinese people.

analogy: a CPU is more expensive, more complicated, more energy demanding than custom made circuitry, in most cases.

It's an interesting comment, it has the same "compliment the OP, elaborate, raise a further question" format I've seen used by apparently LLM-generated spam accounts on HN. But, the second paragraph is so incoherently structured that I have a hard time thinking an LLM produces it.

As the vendor you can sell it with the promise that awesomeness is coming "just around the corner" with the next software update.

You can also seek investment without committing to an actual concrete business model.

The value is in the generalisation.

For a single example, in any factory watch how humans are added as ad-hoc machines wherever a problem occurs. Machine N outputting faster than machine N+1 can accept? Have a human stack, and destack, the product between them. No matter the size, shape, it within reason the weight of the product. But most importantly: the process can begin within seconds of the problem occurring. No need for a programmer, developer, or maintenance worker to get involved. Just a clear order from the shift manager.

A general purpose robot with physical interfaces similar to a human would be very valuable for such environments. If it had the software to be as easy to instruct as a human.

Your assumption set: conventional factory space, idle humans, traditional management, ad-hoc process with skilled managers. This is similar to the "job shop" mentality in (dying) manufacturing. You additionally assume general purpose magic hardware that can usefully do anything.

Reality: Most value is in shrinking things, excluding humans, automating management, carefully designed process, and specialist hardware that does a subset of things very well. Relying on human(oid)s is a sure-fire way to suck.

Correct, I'm talking about the 98% of factories in the world today and in the near future. Obviously the far future will see changes in manufacturing, just as manufacturing has seen changeds every decade since we've been manufacturing things at scale.