So the line of reasoning I’m taking is that current ai is just a statistical model. It’s useful for plenty of stuff, but it just doesn’t do things well that don’t lend themselves to a statistical approach, for instance it can kinda “luck” it’s way through basic math problems because there’s a lot of examples in its training set but it’s fundamentaly not doing the kind of forward reasoning/chaining that is required to actually solve problems that aren’t very commonly seen.

In the case of a robot body, where are they going to get the training set required to fully control it? There isn’t a corpus of trillions of human movements available to scrape on the web. As mentioned in this thread, you can get certain types of a ai to play video games but that’s relatively easy because the environment is simple, virtual, and reproducible. In the real world you have to account for things like sample variation between actuators, forces you didn’t expect, and you don’t have infinite robots if it breaks itself trying to learn a motion. Boston dynamics uses forms of ai but they’re not strictly the types that are exploding right now and don’t necessarily translate well.

This…isn’t how the current paradigm of ai works at all. We’ve built glorified auto-complete bots, not something that can make a physical robot behave at a human level. Best case, they build something that can carry on a conversation long enough to excite a tech journalist and aimlessly meander like the Boston dynamic bots but without the pre-programmed tasking (assuming they don’t cheat and add canned routines).

So that leaves one option: it’s a moonshot project to convince the tech illiterate public to take them and their stock price to the moon long enough for a few people to make an obscene amount of money.

Please god I hope so. I don’t see a path to anything significantly more powerful than current models in this paradigm. ANNs like these have existed forever and have always behaved the way current LLMs do, they just recently were able to make them run somewhat more efficiently with bigger context windows and training sets which birthed GPT3 which was further minimally tweaked into 3.5 and 4 among others. This feels a whole lot like a local maxima where anything better will have to go back down through another several development cycles before it surpasses the current gen.

Buy a large computer monitor

They likely would for the kind of stuff they’re planning.

There are about half a dozen small companies working on this but apparently the government is more interested in spending money on a company with zero experience with earth imaging. Dunno how I feel about the USG just putting all their eggs in Elon’s batshit insane basket

Yeah, a surprising number of people don’t want these hyper complex cars with thousands of microchips and millions of lines of code operating them. Give me an electric 2012 Honda fit/Toyota matrix equivalent that just fucking works and costs $20k or less new.