Is anyone else entirely unimpressed / bored with this? It's just AI mimicking reddit... I really don't see the big deal or technical innovations, if any.
180 karma · joined February 14, 2025
It's incredibly ironic that the left, originally the party of labor, is so strongly protecting illegal immigration. When you let in 20 million low skilled workers from different cultures into your country, who do you think suffers: capital or labor? Who feels the pressure in rising housing prices, job prospects, rising crime in cities, etc?
The other ironic part to this whole situation is that the current administration goes so hard on their rhetoric and marketing but ultimately are deporting less people than ever before. Everyone is losing here, and the American Empire is fading away, eroding from the inside out.
1. App creators will pass the extra cost over to the iPhone users.
2. Android (and other platforms that can host smartphone apps) will be more competitive and start to look better for both app creators and consumers.
Sure, there's a bit of a context switching cost. Not everyone will just be able to automatically change over to an Android phone tomorrow. But it doesn't need to happen all at once. These phones get updated and replaced every 1-2 years. If iOS users see their app store prices rising too high, and they aren't OK with this, then they will switch to Android eventually, once it's worth it.
Otherwise, I don't see any problem with Apple reaping the benefit of their powerful and well-built walled garden ecosystem.
- This admin is deporting less than Obama was during his first year in office despite promises to the contrary,
- There is now organized harassment and resistance stopping federal agents from removing illegals that are also criminals from our country.
Ironically, you need to take your own advice.
One side is crazier, and it's not mine.
I had a condescending response from a HN mod the other day telling me that HN isn't all that left wing, just a 'slight skew'. Well OK buddy, exhibit A, read through the diversity of opinions that aren't flagged in this thread. I'd go as far to say that HN is basically like Reddit, except more of you happen to have computer science degrees.
And that's fine, it is what it is, but let's not pretend this website doesn't have a heavy bias in a particular direction.
"Slight skew" is just your claim and opinion. We're both equally entitled to them. I'd be happy to look at actual data: try an anonymous poll on HN for political affiliation sometime. We both know that skew wouldn't be "slight".
Please don't make unfounded counter claims without evidence.
They also have proven themselves in other white collar knowledge endeavors as well, as valuable tools that augment human economic output. Marketers can make more copy material, any office worker can improve the quality of their email communications, etc. Easy.
What are humanoids doing exactly? What can they do, that actually makes sense and provides positive economic impact over existing alternatives? Not clear to me.
Because every time I think of something, either an existing industrial setup can or will do it better, or a special-purpose device will beat it.
So general intelligence + general form factor (humanoid) sounds great, if feasible. But what will it do exactly? And then let's do a reality check on said application.
But I really struggle to come up with any other economically viable short-term use cases, even with great hardware...
I don't know much about the biochemistry here, I assume this is not something like GABA that can be directly supplemented. But maybe there are precursor nutritional and supplemental substances that can help these people upregulate how much of the glutamate molecule in question the body can produce.
You wouldn't charge your CNC Machine taxes for the productive labor it produces that could have otherwise been done by a dozen blacksmiths.
By all means have corporate and sales taxes pertaining to the owner of said tools though. Even as a right-leaning individual, it's become pretty clear to me that corporations pay too low in taxes compared to the broad 'middle class'. Corporate tax cuts don't help the common man. An extra few hundred in their pockets each month certainly would though.
I do wonder how a modern revival of Pebble will compete from a product perspective within the current landscape. Obviously there's the high-end Apple Watches, but there's also incredibly cheap and long battery life products from China that you can see on Aliexpress and similar. Fitness tracking is another related niche that seems oversaturated, unless you do something really unique in biometrics sensing.
So it seems like a hard market to get back into, curious where they take things.
To train GPT, all of the training data (the internet of text, scanned books, etc) had already existed, even before the GPT project began. Arguably, the compute required (for GPT-3) also already existed, even before GPT-2.
The GPT project really just came down to investing in all of the pieces to take the ideas from a 2017 research paper to the next level. Nobody knew if X thousand GPUs, plus all of the internet's text, plus neural network transformers, would work out. But somebody took a risk in putting together the existing pieces, and proved that it can.
There's no analogy here to humanoid robotics. Not only is the data required for neural network operated humanoids close to non-existent (at the scale needed), but the nature of the data itself is enormously more complicated that taking a list of tokens in a vocabulary, and outputting 1 more token from the same vocabulary.
That being said, I still applaud the ambition of the Figure team. While I think it's clear they are presenting incredibly cherry-picked examples, they aren't trying to mislead consumers with a product for sale (because... they can't). Instead, they are productizing important research to investors, who would otherwise waste money on less important and less ambitious projects. So overall I find projects of this nature to be a net positive for technical innovation.
Final comment I'll say, it's a weird and tough price point. Actual research labs would rather spend $20,000 on a very high quality and likely larger high-fidelity platform. A random hacker or grad student will need some real convincing to shell out $2,000, sub $1K might better serve them. So what's the target customer profile exactly?
I encountered similar issues developing a $3K plug and play robot research arm in the past. The economics are awkward. You can actually just spend $5K and get a really good second-hand industrial robot (maybe even first-hand now from China). Or you could spend $500 and get a 6 DOF platform at least as good as your current platform's arm and then buy the sensor separately and bolt it to your workspace - bam, done. And no, the software isn't that important, servos are easy to work with...
Therefore my 'in between platform' was stuck in a hard place. I made some one-off sales, but never really scaled the business, which is what would be needed for any fancy "we're the platform where people do AI" vision to manifest to investors. Hardware is tough - they'll see your numbers and easily pass. They'll realize you need sales in quantity to get anywhere meaningful otherwise.
So I wanted to share criticisms and my experience so you can look ahead to likely challenges and hopefully get further. Best of luck.
Pretty lofty claims though, really think you're so above everyone on quality at this price point? I know what dynamixels are capable of, and I see the jitter in the demo videos.
Why aren't the manipulator specs easily accessible on the website? Have you run a real repeatability test? Payload even?
It's a neat high-fidelity garage build platform, but I don't see any reason to assume this price premium is due to hardware quality.
As someone who's dabbled in this before, I guess I'd rather just sit down and plan a BOM and do it myself if that's your markup anyways. Not that it's totally unreasonable for people who just want something super simple out of the box that works.
My general commentary is just that it's sad how much basic servos and what not cost in North America. We've completely ceded this industry to Asia.
You've got a $250 computer, some lidar+camera sensor for maybe $1-200, 6 servos, and cheap plastic. Plus you want to charge a $50/mo software subscription fee for some software product, whatever I guess that's beside the point.
No shade on the idea because low-cost robotics is an unsolved need for the future. But this current iteration is just not competing well with other alternatives. Perhaps this is more of a comment on what we can accomplish in the West vs what's possible in Asia.
Why would I not go for this guy for $1600, and attach an arm? https://www.unitree.com/go2
It's not an apples-to-apples product comparison, but you get the point. There's just so much more raw value offered per dollar elsewhere.
It just shows the stark contrast: China is interested in building and being competitive (through unruly means as well as legitimate ones) while the US is a 'lawfare society' prioritizing paperwork and bureaucracy and not moving to help actual physical industries that matter.
We don't need more of our economy relying on lawyers and paper pushers. We need builders and innovators back at the forefront. China gets this.
Are you being snarky and suggesting that employees deserve the same upside that founders deserve?
I use AI like a scalpel - I go in and figure out exactly what I want, use my prompting experience to get a few functions, or up to 1 script at a time, read it, put it in, and stress-test it immediately.
As a result, I am extremely happy with my AI-generated code about 95% of the time. However, this requires that I still understand my codebase, requirements, failure modes, etc.
My philosophy is that software dev creation speed is certainly important, but durability is even more critical. Currently, it seems like going too deep with these AI tools is sacrificing the former for the latter. If all you're doing is POCs all day I could see it (even then, don't let them get too big...) but it's just not for me, at least not yet.
>wrappers that implement proprietary algorithms can still thrive in the long run.
This is true, but they need to defend from multiple fronts. Do you believe in Perplexity long-term, or a) OpenAI moving into search, or b) Google moving their search into AI.
It's an interesting hybrid product where I suppose the winner is unclear, because it seems Perplexity has executed fast and strong thus far.
Internet (and/or browser) :: website or webapp
is not the same as
OpenAI/Antropic/model company :: GPT wrapper
There is a substantial qualitative difference, at least at this point.
I suppose my interest is more in the long-term durability in such companies.
To a certain extent, yes absolutely. If you programmed more yourself, you'd be better at programming than the version of you that spends any significant amount of time generating AI code.
But that doesn't mean you'll totally atrophy the skill and magically forget your fundamentals.
Very curious, don't leave us hanging! Assuming it's not confidential.