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Comment by besterman23 | Hacker News Reader

This post feels really weird, DreamLabs isn’t some well known project like Anthropic or OpenAI and Dream-1 wasn’t really an awaited release.

But somehow this was pushed to the front page of HN before receiving a single comment with a title reminiscent of a major LLM release. Like I can only find 1 other reference historically to this lab and nobody noticed it or cared.

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It only takes a few upvotes to get any story to the front page briefly. And on Saturdays there is just less competition.

I posted it after I discovered the model on https://robocurve.org/

I discovered the Robocurve benchmark after someone on X was saying that Kimi K3.1 Pro was performing particular bad on it.

Anyway I found the model particularly interesting because I think it's the first time I see an API for a random bimanual robot. Also HN removes "Introducing" so it's just the name of the model.

Sorry I don’t mean to specifically point you out, I believe you’re being genuine.

However this comment got me thinking. Whats up with all the YC backed benchmarking companies? I know there’s only a few, but what is the business model for companies like Robocurve exactly?

I came across this recently and was initially surprised too. It makes sense when you consider that any company trying to build models (or an agent/value-add layer on top of a model) needs benchmarks. The best funded will do the full vertical - build their benchmarks and models together - but many will outsource the benchmark. This is particularly valuable when the dataset is difficult to compile (robotics being a prime example) - it makes more sense to let the benchmark vendor focus on that.

Sure it’s useful, but I’m asking who actually pays for this. Sort of a conflict of interest if you’re providing public testing for the companies paying you for the tests no?

Perhaps it’s purely for VC so they can judge which model is best? Also seems a little too conflict of interest-y, but that might just be too cynical.

> Robocurve raises $10M to independently evaluate frontier AI in the physical world

that would be an interesting business to run.

It does seem weird. In my experience HN generally shows little interest in robotics research, so I'm surprised to see this up top. I'm biased but I think Physical Intelligence's recent announcement is more impressive, with greater diversity of robot embodiments and more impressive real-world tasks in real workplaces. https://www.pi.website/blog/api-beta

This one as I read it is a bit different, the Physical Intelligence API requires finetuning for the task/robot while the Dream-1 model offers an API that can do zero-shot (with great limitations of course but still cool).

If you look at what they actually demonstrate, zero-shot embodiment generalization is limited to controlling two-finger grippers on two stationary arms. The embodiments are all very similar, and when they're slightly different (even just replacing two fingers with five fingers) they can't do zero-shot anymore. But there's no real reason to do zero-shot embodiment generalization in practice, as it's trivial to collect a small amount of data on a new embodiment to get significantly improved performance. Zero-shot embodiment generalization, especially in such a narrow domain of similar configurations, is not an important problem to solve and doesn't necessarily indicate progress on the important problems.

Zero-shot task generalization is more interesting, but has been demonstrated by many other companies at this point, so it's not new. And it only becomes useful with high success rates on long-duration tasks, so demonstrating short zero-shot tasks with low success rates in toy environments is uninteresting.

What's hard and still unsolved in general-purpose robotics is doing real useful tasks end-to-end in real uncontrolled environments with high reliability. I guess there's just a lack of understanding generally about what's actually hard and useful in robotics.

Random Wikipedia articles make it to the front page all the time. What’s so weird?

There are PR agencies that take care of your content to be trending. They do use fake accounts to upvote and manipulate, but you as a customer don’t have to know that.

Occam's razor it's more likely the mods or YC has some social or other connection to the project

I'm certainly not a mod or affiliated with YC and I've had random things I posted briefly end up on the front page. Then if people keep upvoting it, they sometimes remain there...

I'm not accusing you of anything. It's well known that the front page is heavily curated and not purely the result of upvotes.

Occam's razor would suggest that mods simply thought that it would generate insightful discussion, and manually pushed it up, something that dang regularly does and a core feature of HN -- and that is assuming it was pushed up in the first place.

This is the place where dark triad sam altman got his start; let's not be pollyannas about how things work around here.

Wouldn’t it just be easier to ask their team to upvote the post? They probably all have legitimate hacker news accounts already and are happy to upvote their work.

Not really.

I upvoted it while I ruminated on what I wanted write as a comment. It could have been a “multiple people are typing…” moment.

1. Well funded 2. Cool idea that hasn't been widely tackled yet. Most action models are accompanied by hardware, Like Figure's Helix

3. Probably a investment vehicle by a HN admin

Yeah, from my experience HN must be pushing "trending" topics to front page and not pushing others.

There are huge numbers of new posts - the ones that reach front page are definitely not the only ones with that amount of upvotes.

Is the story worthy of being on the front page? I assume that being already famous is not a prerequisite.

So essentielly comments from simonw? Sounds like what you describe

You think that claims of an actual honest to god working robot is somehow so out of sync with this audience that we need to be so cynical we call it a conspiracy? Am i literally the only one who's wanted a Robbie of my own since i read i, robot as a kid?

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