NewUser76312

In particular, I mean the research and intelligence vision these companies have been pushing for doing general and specialized physical labor.

I'm completely open to the possibility of having good telepresence in reliable hardware be a valuable addition to our economies. The hardware really is getting good these days, at useful payloads.

But what I'm particularly pessimistic about is seeing academic-type research try to fold clothes and put screws into holes with humanoid-like systems, raise 10s of $Mils, and form a company out of it. Ditto for existing humanoids.

One of the major humanoid companies (you can google/guess who) recently claimed that their humanoids will be doing surgeries in hospitals within 5 years? This is egregious, there is zero chance that becomes the platform of choice for doing surgery, over a special purpose-built bed + multi-arm platform specialized for said tasks. This is perhaps even worse that Rosie from the Jetsons vacuuming our homes before the Roomba is invented.

Showing another example, I have to get into specifics - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WlUFoZstcWg But I want to know, how could this possibly be better than setting up arms for this task, assuming it is to be done thousands of times? Is the change to the factory layout the main issue that makes this worth it? Even if it is... a single arm on a mobile platform certainly does this more economically.

Anyways, I see all this stuff, there's tons of money and hype and optimism, and I feel crazy being pessimistic, as I'm usually the techno optimist. So, do others feel similarly? Are there things I'm missing that could fuel some optimism perhaps?

Looking forward to the discussion.

It seems a common pattern that a business gets big enough, dominate through network effects and/or regulations and high barriers to entry, and then their services and customer support deteriorate to awful levels. But they end up being the only major game in town, so consumers begrudgingly use them.

That's the common pattern I see, at least.

So I'm curious about the opposite - are there any businesses that are relative monopolies in their industries that you're happy to use / do business with?

I'm struggling to come up with an example myself. Are monopolies doomed to become awful to consumers?

It surprised me to learn that 'China's industrial robotics market holds approximately 40% of the global market share and accounted for 54% of all new industrial robot installations worldwide in 2024.'

We understand that China's (and other countries) low wages and high population lead to the US losing large portions of its manufacturing base, starting in the early 2000s.

But with robotics and engineering expertise, which the US definitely has, or can afford to have, why isn't more 'reshoring' happening via industrial robotics? Shouldn't this be our way "back into the game" vis-a-vis manufacturing? How is China outpacing us so much? Do we not care, are there technical barriers, lack of skilled workers in automation, too much of a head start with our competitors?

Curious to hear your thoughts.

Vision Language Models that is. Does anyone make extensive use of them? I don't mean the occasional image upload to ChatGPT per se, but rather some automated flow that involves taking constant visual input and getting language output.

What type of application is it for, how have you found the results/quality?

Do you use a stock model or do you finetune something for a custom dataset?

If you haven't used VLMs yet but are curious or interested, what would you try using them for?