Furbies spring to mind... They were a similar shape and size and even had two goggling eyes, but with waggling ears instead of a tentacle.

They'd impress you initially but after some experimentation you'd realize they had a basic set of behaviors that were triggered off a combination of simple external stimuli and internal state. (this is the part where somebody stumbles in to say "dOn'T hUmAnS dO ThE sAmE tHiNg????")

This feels similar to not finding a game fun once I understand the underly system that generates it. The magic is lessened (even if applying simple rules can generate complex outcomes, it feels determined)

People have always been ascribing agency and sapience to things, from fire and flowing water in shamanistic religions, to early automatons that astonished people in the 18th century, to the original rudimentary chatbots, to ChatGPT, to – more or less literally – many other machines that may seem to have a "temperament" at times.

I've noticed the same thing with voice assistants and constructed languages.

I always set voice assistants to a British accent. It gives enough of a "not from around here" change to the voice that it sounds much more believable to me. I'm sure it's not as believable to an actual British person. But it works for me.

As for conlangs: many years ago, I worked on a game where one of the goals was to have the NPCs dynamically generate dialog. I spent quite a bit of time trying to generate realistic English and despared that it was just never very believable (I was young, I didn't have a good understanding of what was and wasn't possible).

At some point, I don't remember exactly why, I switched to having the NPCs speak a fictional language. It became a puzzle in the game to have to learn this language. But once you did (and it wasn't hard, they couldn't say very many things), it made the characters feel much more believable. Obviously, the whole run-around was just an avoidance of the Uncanny Valley, where the effort of translation distracted you from the fact that it was all constructed. Though now I'm wondering if enough exposure to the game and its language would eventually make you very fluent in it and you would then start noticing it was a construct.

I wonder how well suited some of the smaller LLMs like Qwen 0.6B would be suited to this... it doesn't sound like a super complicated task.

I also feel like you can train a model on this task by using the zero-shot performance of larger models to create a dataset, making something very zippy.

> also, "GPT-4o continuously listens to speech through the audio stream," is going to be problematic

This seems like a good place to leverage a wake word library, perhaps openWakeWord or porcupine. Then the user could wake the device before sending the prompt off to an endpoint.

It could even have a resting or snoozing animation, then have it perk up when the wake word triggers. Eerie to view, I'm sure...

https://github.com/dscripka/openWakeWord

https://github.com/Picovoice/porcupine

> "ah, you hesitated" no more so than on every single other question.

It was longer. I think almost twice as long. Took about 2 seconds to respond generally, 4 seconds for that one.

> the delay for the GPT to process a response is very unnerving

I'm not sure I agree. The way the tentacle stops moving and shoots upright when you start talking to it gives me the intuitive impression that it's paying attention and thinking. Pretty cute!

It clearly needs eyebrows like Johnny 5.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l0zmCUVB0Yw

beyond the prototyping phase, which hosted models make very easy, there's little reason this couldn't use a very small optimized model on device... it would be significantly faster/safer in an end product (but significantly less flexible for prototyping)

All this concern about AI safety, and this nice person wants a spider-squid hybrid robot running around!

We are looking to make robotics most compatible with a humanoid world.

That being said he makes some points that alternate limb types could be interesting as well

Hentai enthusiasts, on the other hand...

But if its tentacle was longer and you can program it to harass your coworkers, then it could be fun!

Thankfully it has a flared base for safety.

Agreed! I think the Pixar lamp is a great starting point. Having the robot be able to flex and bend, shake yes/no, look curious or upset, and perhaps even let it control LEDs to express itself.

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/shoggoth-with-smiley-face-art... https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/30/technology/shoggoth-meme-...

Yeah I came here to say the same thing. It seems like it would simplify things. They do say:

"I initially considered training a single end-to-end VLA model. [...] A cable-driven soft robot is different: the same tip position can correspond to many cable length combinations. This unpredictability makes demonstration-based approaches difficult to scale.[...] Instead, I went with a cascaded design: specialized vision feeding lightweight controllers, leaving room to expand into more advanced learned behaviors later."

I still think circling back to smaller models would be awesome. With some upgrades you might get a locally hosted model on there, but I'd be sure to keep that inside a pentagram so it doesn't summon a Great One.

If it's described in a paper doesn't that make it prior art though?

That would be Doctor Octopus. Yes I would love A wearable suit with a number of tentacles for locomotion and subduing... I mean interacting.. with people.

If you like point and click adventures check out https://store.steampowered.com/app/1426010/STASIS_BONE_TOTEM... - one of the playable characters is an AI teddy bear and is a great character with fantastic writing.

Like using phones as babysitters, just 100x worse.

I don't doubt someone's gonna invent it, but yikes. Imagine telling kiddo their beloved sentient toy is dead because mum and dad can't afford the ever-rising subscription fees anymore.