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20 September
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Their words
The fact that we don't have swarms of drones prefabbing houses in the relatively benign atmosphere of our planet should be evidence that maybe these claims aren't quite matched with reality.
17 September
16 September
15 September
14 September
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Their words
The greater lesson I think we will learn is that a general humanoid robot is not going to be that useful.
12 September
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Their words
a recognition that AI is powerful (and will reshape power relations among humans) but that the consequences will flow messily through multiple complex processes that we really need to start mapping and understanding
How should social science think about AI?programmablemutter.com
8 September
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korrents.com
Neural networks do not have a one-to-one mapping between individual neurons and concepts.Their words
researchers started by seeking a 1:1 mapping between neurons and concepts, like a neuron that always fired when the AI was thinking about cats, but quickly learned that nothing like that existed.
6 September
4 September
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Their words
There is also a very important step called randomization. Is that you have to take the same environment and then randomize the conditions. So, the cable doesn't literally only, you know, uh bend this way. It can bend a different way or the box can have different sizes, colors, different lids, and all that.
2 September
31 August
29 August
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Their words
But there is a downside to being very precise about a prescription: the prescription can start to sound more important than the objective it was designed to serve.
28 August
25 August
12 August
From one piece Chelsea Finn: This is the State of the Art in Robotics 5 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
Now maybe this isn't completely out of the question but this would be quite challenging uh to do and that's because the calculus is a little bit different. We're not just running compute to optimize for a use case. We're actually running the robot in the real world and using the hardware and attempting the task in the real world.
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Their words
we see that the across the board the single PIO like pre-trained PIO7 model matches or outperforms the fine-tuned specialists that were developed with reinforcement learning post-training for those downstream tasks.
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Their words
without metadata prompting when you add lower quality data from 80% data to 100% data the performance actually decreases which is perhaps not too surprising because you're adding lowquality data to your data mixture whereas with the metadata prompting the performance actually increases when you add that lowquality data
+ 2 more
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Their words
and trying to fold two boxes together isn't useful data that will teach the model how to get better at the task. And so that would be kind of wasting a lot of time on the robot attempting to go down the wrong path for solving the problem. And so instead of spending a lot of time trying to do that task, what we'll do is we'll actually have a human intervene and show the robot what to do and how to recover from that situation.
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Their words
kind of going back to this reliability question, we took this policy and we ran it not just once, but we ran it for 13 hours straight. Uh and we basically wanted to evaluate is this policy not only good at making a latte once, but can it do so reliably to the extent that it would be needed to be useful in the real world?
10 August
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Their words
It will probably be economically shrewd to lose money on early robot models in anticipation that the data they gather will be worth more later in improving newer versions.
6 August
3 August
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Their words
Given the high cost of errors, you need to have a very high level of safety and a very high level of confidence on day one before you deploy your first robot, before you drive your your first autonomous mile.
2 August
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Their words
rather than mapping PMs to teams where you kind of assume that the PM will always do that, we tend to map them to kind of problems or kind of like core projects.
27 July
12 July
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Their words
Another example is Bitcoin. It’s the Unix of money. You can send millions with a keystroke or rm your entire fortune. That’s more upside and more downside, by making people power users, and taking away the system administrator.
8 July
4 June
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Their words
It might be that every robot now can turn into, you know, 100 robots next year, right? So, in units of robots the interest rate is 10,000%.
30 May
13 May
12 February
From one piece Speed Can Reindustrialize America 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
The robot arm base case saves some hourly labor at the expense of adding more skilled labor, and can easily be negative if it needs reprogramming more than a few times per year.
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korrents.com
An industrial robot does not replace labour, it shifts labour from hourly workers to scarce skilled ones.Their words
The key is that robot arms are not labor-replacing, but labor-shifting.
1 January
18 December 2025
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Their words
There is a close mapping between government ideal types and corporate governance structures given their shared origins in transaction costs.
12 September 2025
From one piece Fully autonomous robots are much closer than you think – Sergey Levine 5 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
But the reason why it's not the most important thing for the kind of skills that you saw when you visited us, it at some level I think it comes back to Moravik's paradox. So Morovik's paradox is basically that it's like you know if you know one thing about if you want to know one thing about robotics it's like that's that's the thing. Morovik's paradox says that basically uh in AI the easy things are hard and the hard things are easy.
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Like now, like basically learning is not for these systems is not just learning from raw actions. It's also learning from words eventually be learning from observing what people do from the kind of natural feedback that you receive when you're doing a job together with somebody else.
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And I think we'll see the same thing with automation where uh basically robot plus human is much better than just human or just robot. Uh and and that just like makes total sense. It also makes it much easier to get all the technology bootstrapped because when it's robot plus human, now there's a lot more potential for the robot to like actually learn on the job, acquire new skills.
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Their words
And when you make a mistake and correct it, well, first you you've achieved the task because you've corrected, but you've also gained knowledge that allows you to avoid that mistake in the future. With driving, because of the dynamics of how it's set up, it's very hard to make a mistake, correct it, and then learn from it because the mistakes themselves have significant ramifications.
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Uh but it uh I think we kind of like know like roughly the puzzle pieces and it's something that we need to work on and I think if we work on it and we're a bit lucky and everything kind of goes as planned I think single digit is reasonable.
11 September 2025
10 September 2025
23 July 2025
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Their words
But it seems like you can understand it through passive observation, which is pretty surprising to me. And again, I think hints at something underlying about the nature of reality in my opinion, beyond just the cool videos that it generates.
9 July 2025
29 May 2025
14 May 2025
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Likedrcmnd.app
Google MapsTheir words
Google Maps — preferred mapping app over Apple Maps or Waze.
6 April 2025
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korrents.com
A humanoid robot is the wrong tool on a factory floor, because a machine specialised in the task beats it.Their words
They are not useful in industrial environments where, if a humanoid robot can do it, an industrial machine which is specialized in the task can do it even better.
22 December 2024
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korrents.com
Large language models will not get to real agency, because a mind has to be embedded in a world through a body.Their words
But they said, "Look, in the end, actually the only way to actually get a real brain in the VAT is actually to have a brain in a body." And it could be a robot body, but you still need a brain in the body. So I don't think LLMs will get there because they can't. You really need to be embedded in a world, at least that's the E-four idea.
8 November 2024
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Their words
The downside is that synthetic quartz is much more expensive, perhaps on the order of 5–10 times the cost of natural high-purity quartz.
16 October 2024
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Their words
I don’t think that makes sense. I think somebody was mapping the world during the last ice age, but that doesn’t mean that they had our kind of tech.
14 July 2024
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Usesrcmnd.app
ObsidianTheir words
Obsidian for quick notes, mind-mapping and managing my newsletter
9 November 2023
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Their words
Because you think of how many electric motors are made in the world. There’s like tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of electric motor designs. None of them were suitable for a humanoid robot, literally none.
5 July 2023
22 March 2022
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korrents.com
Oil demand will fall mainly because petrol cars get driven less, not because they are replaced by electric ones.Their words
Falling consumer oil demand looks much more like driving the Camry 6000 miles per year instead of 12,000 miles rather than a shiny new electric car in every garage or robot taxis swarming everywhere.
30 June 2021
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Their words
The upside of any given project is usually a single-digit profit margin. But the downside is “whatever your company is worth”
Why It's Hard to Innovate in Constructionconstruction-physics.com
28 May 2021
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Recommendsaffiliate linkrcmnd.app
Gaia GPSTheir words
And for your mapping, I highly recommend instead the Gaia GPS or CalTopo apps.
14 December 2020
15 July 2020
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