Figure 03, our 3rd generation humanoid robot

I feel like we're entering the era of general and inefficient solutions to problems.

Like LLMs being used to pick values out of JSON objects when jq would do the job 1000x more efficiently.

This is what this whole field feels like right now. Let's spend lots of time and energy to create a humanoid robot to do the things humans already decided humans were inefficient at and solved with specialised tools.

Like people saying "oh it can wash my dishes for me". Well, I haven't washed dishes in years, there's a thing called a dishwasher which does one thing and does it well.

"Oh it can do the vacuuming". We have robot vacuums which already do that.

have you ever googled a simple maths question? I often come back to that and realise we've been in this era for quite a while. Calculator would probably be 1000x more efficient!

Sure, but I have to launch the calculator, instead of just typing it into the ever present search bar of my persistent open browser.

If I could just type it into my shell, that would be nice. I’m sure there’s some command (or one could be trivially made) to evaluate an equation, but then you get to play game with shell expansions and quotes.

In emacs I have to convolute the equation into prefix.

All minor stuff but it adds up.

Human form robots are a case of Jake of all trades and master of none. Sure I have a dishwasher thats more efficient at doing the job than me but I still end up doing dishes because the cast iron frying pan can't going in there without ruining the polymerised layer of oils that have been baked into it and i would have to repeatedly oil and reheat it and stink up the house with smoke reseasoning it afterwards, and I have hand wash the thermos and travel mugs, and dishwasher arent good for the sharp knives and etcetera etc etc... sure the rumba can vacume very efficiently but it suck at gating around furniture leg or gaps to small for a 14'' diameter circle to fit through so I have to vacume all of the bits it can't get to. Sure the a robot lawn mower can do my yard very efficiently but it cant move the childrens toys out of the grass or open the gate to the front yard or close the gate to keep the dogs from running out the gate once its open. Specialized tools suck at edge cases. Human form robots if they ever works (big if) can do all of the edge cases and take advantage of all the tools made for humans I already have to do all of the those other jobs.

> I’m sure there’s some command (or one could be trivially made)

bc

https://www.gnu.org/software/bc/manual/html_mono/bc.html

There were plenty of digital circuit engineers back in the 90s that said microprocessors were general and inefficient solutions to problems.

And if you needed it programmable, well an FPGA was still almost as general and far more efficient than a microprocessor.

Guess what won.

As a hardware engineer I hear this a lot from software/electrical folks.

It's Moore's law that largely drove what you describe.

Moore's law only applies to semiconductors.

Gears, motors and copper wire are not going to get 10x faster/cheaper every 18 months or whatever.

10 years from now gears will cost more, they will cost what they cost now plus inflation.

I've literally heard super smart YC founders say they just assume some sort of "Moore's law for hardware" will magicallyake their idea workable next year.

Computing power gets, and will continue to get, cheaper every day. Hardware, gears, nuts, bolts, doesnt.

The real question, is whether the humanoid robot will ever be cheaper than hiring immigrant labour. Because that's a pretty damn low threshold

Isn't the entire point that LLMs are unreasonably better at even specific things that you would naively think a purpose build system would be good at.

The problem is that human immigrant labor is, well, human. Cost isn't the only metric being considered.

Think about cars. Their manufacturers work really hard on efficient (cost and performance). And what people do with them is a very different story. It could see the same happening with robots.

There isn't enough migrant to do all labor east asia will need as its population gets quickly older. Plus the societal aspiration of culture dissemination isn't there.

This unoptimizing has been going on since the start of time. Why are the values in json to start with? At somepoint the bad slow generalized version will overtake the specialized ways of doing things.

From the demo videos on the site... it seems now that people have dishwashers they want a robot to load the dishwasher for them

The nuts and bolts won't change much but the software/compute controlling the thing likely will.

It is not the gears, motors and copper wire that are bottlenecking robots. It is the software and computing. We can already build a robot hand that is faster, stronger, more dexterous, etc. than a human hand. What we can't do right now is make the software to perceive the world around it and utilize the hand to interact with it at human levels. That is something that needs computing power and effective software. Those are things that get, and will continue to get, cheaper every day.

>We can already build a robot hand that is faster, stronger, more dexterous, etc. than a human hand

Can you attach it to a humanoid body that isn't wired?

> It is not the gears, motors and copper wire that are bottlenecking robots.

It is those things that are bottlenecking the price of robots.

The price of something tends towards the marginal cost, and the marginal cost of software is close to $0. Robots cost a lot more than that (what's the price of this robot?).

Edit: In fact Figure 03 imply marginal costs matter:

  Mass manufacturing: Figure 03 was engineered from the ground-up for high-volume manufacturing

Yes, but the two (software and hardware) scale very differently.

Once software is "done" (we all know software is never done) you can just copy it and distribute it. It is negligiblehow much it costs to do so.

Once hardware is done you have to manufacture each and every piece of hardware with the same care, detail and reliability as the first one. You can't just click copy.

Often times you have to completely redesign the product to go from low volume high cost manufacturing to high volume low cost. A hand made McLaren is very different than an F-150.

The two simply scale differently, by nature of their beasts.

But the nuts and Bolts need to be paid for and manufactured for each robot. The software needs to be done once and then they can just click copy.

I dont follow

China has shown that they don't scale all that differently. Yes the tooling is hard to build but after that you hit go and the factory makes the copies for you.

It's not quite startrek replicator but much closer to that than the US view of manufacturing where you have your union guy sitting in front of the machine to pull the lever.

This isn't true. They've showed that slave (or nearly) labor is cheap or even free.

> LLMs being used to pick values out of JSON objects

Or the often-trumpeted "I had Claude do a killer refactor" that an IDE can do locally for zero power faster and 100% reliably

That's not that weird, even if it is pretty pathetic. I don't understand it now but I used to dread "doing the dishes" when I was younger even though it was 95% just filling a dishwasher. Laziness drives technology an awful lot, at least from a product POV.