There are a lot of guys with garages that have a $40k CNC mill in it. If you've got the money -- and in America, a LOT of people have the money -- $30k to be able to experiment with a fairly open platform that may play, as a category, a pivotable role in humanity for the next 15+ years is not very crazy.

New trucks optioned out cost $80k+ and plenty of people pay for that without having much justification of any kind for it.

Hacking into what exactly? It's entirely up to the user if they want to connect their robot to an insecure webserver control hub.

The difference between you and most professionals is that we don't play. Groceries weren't playing with their refrigerators, they were attacked, the government can find and punish or kill the criminals if they continue their pattern of failure to bring justice the world will move past them.

The one in that video is the G1, which is a bit taller and comes with more sensors, but there's a trick and it is the dexterous hands, which can easily cost 10k each.

Based on my very limited knowledge... if you would have dexterous hands with sensitivity on them you could theoretically train a VLA model to do that task, planned by a high-level model like Argon 4, that orchestrates everything. That would as well require in first place a VLA that has similar tasks in its training set and fine-tune it by means of recording hundreds of examples performing teleoperation of the robot hand and arms movements.

Not easy, but definitely getting more and more doable these days.

PS: Didn't spend 20k on hands for my 6k robot, but can confirm it has the cable harness to support them :D

The LLM right now tells a much lower level neural network controlling the legs, arms and head what and how to move at a ~ 500Hz freq, which controls thing like the stumbling. All motor joints and IMU inputs are given to an ONNX-based RL-trained NN which then outputs motor movements (scary since its works well for the scenarios where its has been trained, but it goes in unexpected ways for untrained scenarios).

In any case latency is acceptable for navigation I guess, but avoiding moving obstacles is definitely a no-go right now.

Around 5.9k euros in Germany for the R1 Pro.

It's 1.23 and weights ~30kg. Even though only the R1 Edu can be in theory programmed, it can be easily modded to enable SSH and root access to deploy custom movement policies and interact with the different on-board daemons to control the movements, grab the video data, etc.

I bought a second-hand Intel DeepSense camera and plugged it on one of the spare USB ports available in the main board to have 3D sensing (even though I really need to play a bit more with it). Right now I am playing with MuJoCo for RL training of new policies, integration with VLAs like NVIDIA Isaac GR00T and integration with LLMs.

I have to say its being a wild ride, and despite the small size of the robot, I have already injured myself with it when playing with the walking policies (If you activate a policy while its hanging, it starts literally kicking and punching you...) I cannot image those owning with the bigger brother of it, the G1...

What video are you looking at, because I can't see any AI generated ones

Of course (the watermark is in the lower right), it's just a visualization. I'm spending my money buying parts for the prototype instead of professional renders.

Enshittification right from the start...

This looks fun.

Unfortunately the price when including shipping and taxes is fro me 455 EUR, which is twice my budged :(

I can see some liability issues with that approach.

They said the same thing for transistor density in new chip nodes. It took 40 years of doubling every 2 years to finally hit a wall.

And although the industry hit a wall in density/area, they switched to scaling in 3D or glueing chiplets together. Moore's Law is still working if you change the definition to transistors/integrated circuit.

That doesn’t help the RAM situation

That's only bringing up the horizon maybe 1 year. At industrial scale - I guess something like an Amazon warehouse could start to be interesting with a local datacenter IN the warehouse within 2-3 years.

From a cost perspective, I just can't imagine that heavily, heavily specialized models wouldn't crush a general model, though - which Amazon already does.

I don't disagree.

It just seems like jumping the shark a little bit.

It's basically completely unviable for a few years still.

Hah, I had basically the idea your company is based on :) It's a neat thing to try out, it makes me hopeful for the future.

We've always have been. The engineer is simply a misaligned AI that views all humans as unintelligent creatures on the planet.