Phones today cannot even reliable handle things like "remind me to pick up tomatoes next time i am at a store"
google knows perfectly well, where I am and wants me to add 'infos' to locations and businesses the second I arrive (just got a notification today), but reminders like these are unavailable.
Bring up dates and times if you want to wreak havoc on any AI. :D
Developers around the world's most beloved topic, how to handle date and time correctly, is still a topic of great misunderstanding. AI and AI agents are no different from that. LLM seems to help a little, but only if you know what you are doing, as it usually needs to be the case.
Some things won't change so fast; at one point or another, data must match certain building blocks.
Google AI Overview incorrectly identified the day for a given date due to a timezone conversion issue, likely using PST instead of IST. ChatGPT and Perplexity provided more accurate and detailed responses.
Supporting existing projects is the oilsand mining of the promotion world. Low, old buzzword content, little reward. Implenting new buzzwords, wirh streetcred rich frameworks , thats the fracking.
Efficiency ,capabilties or customer satisfaction are irrelevant .
One would think the arcana of time zones and the occasional leap second would not interfere with an individual setting egg timers often enough to become a burden
Except that's not the problem. its basic comprehension of requests. They aren't getting the wrong time, they try to play music, or the phone says "no timers playing" while the google home WILL NOT STOP until you lock the phone. etc.
Its basically an embarrassment for a project that's been alive this long from such a major.
My own hands and cheap alarm clocks, or a piece of paper, have been working reliably for several decades. They also don't stop working when a corporation decides they want to hype something.
I had never heard of Unitree (Chinese robotics company) before today. A lot of their videos look like CGI but apparently the product is real.
What stuck with me the most browsing their website on the G1 model was seeing "Price from $16k"
Now I'm not sure if these are actually purchasable or what the value would be, but it's my first time seeing an actual normal-ish price attached to a humanoid robot that seems to be for sale.
With the rate of advancement we're seeing across the board, it honestly feels like people will have robot assistants at home much sooner than I thought.
>A lot of their videos look like CGI but apparently the product is real.
I bought their robot dog as part of a project to build embodied AI models back in 2022.
Their SDK was far more open than anything else on the market and the stock firmware was on par with competitors, this includes products that were x10 the price.
The robot itself scared dogs in the park, but kids loved it. At $3k it's on par with a mid range drone and quite fun to hack on.
I can't imagine the progression of ai and in particular robots but I assumed that the first robot would cost min 6 figures if not 7 but would still be worth it due to 24*7 and initial invest vs long term.
But the fact how good Gemini robotics is already and how cheap the first models are I do believe what will hinder us more than tech is people learning about it, testing it out and doing it but not technology.
I believe the world will look relevant different in 10 years.
TBH, I still wonder if some of their videos are CGI. They offer real versions for sale, but they seem to be significantly more limited than the videos imply.
Have they actually demonstrated the more dramatic stuff at any in-person demos?
I am hoping they keep lots of their work open source. This is especially the case since hardware would be too expensive for competition to pull off, but it would be interesting to see how they circumvented some problems
Even if Google's robotics technology (software and hardware) is leading edge does anyone think they'll actually be able to productize it? Seems similar to how they were the pre-product leaders in transformers and then fumbled any advantage they had to ChatGPT. It seems like something's missing from Google where they can't get from research to product effectively. Waymo perhaps a good counterexample if you think where they are today is product/market fit, but I can't shake the feeling that Google more often than not can't seem to get things to market or even if they do they give up on them before they take hold.
Just wondering if anyone has a strong feeling or, better yet, insight on this regarding their robotics efforts.
I think the cautious faction of AI debate won temporarily inside Google, letting OpenAI take the lead. Lessons should be learnt from that experience. I do think Google will come out ahead in the end Gemini and Gemma are great models.
Let’s see what Google I/O shows of this year, product application matters now that they have caught up on the tech side.
Will be interesting to see if that lesson has been learned. There's no existing product they could cannibalize with their robotics effort (vs search with LLMs) so any caution they have launching a robotics product would solely come down to fears about quality/safety.
The growth rate is still very far from incredible. And they've made terrible decisions on platforms, giving up developing their own in favor of the i-Pace which is discontinued, then hitching themselves to a Chinese EV manufacturer subject to 100% tariffs (which, fun fact, were imposed by Biden).
I agree. The current leadership of Google (especially Sundar) is mediocre and comes from a consulting background. They will fail at making a tangible product out of this, similar to glass or Inbox or a multitude of other examples. This is particularly sad, as I know a few remarkable engineers at Google that share this frustration. However, Google's leadership folded to Indian managers and is now run as a circus
Sundar Pichai got into IIT Kharagpur in the 90s (one of the toughest engineering/technical school to get into). So he has more technical chops than many self-proclaimed engineers that seem to diss on his McKinsey credentials
A school being tough to get into due to an abundance of population (too many applicants) means little. There has been not one significant person coming out of those institutions (compared to the many figures coming out of the US, despite a population 5x smaller). I would not hire Sundar as a junior engineer in my team. Of course, you might see something in Google's current leadership which I do not see. Time will tell how performant the company will be long term. Again, I believe skills that make one successful in consulting rarely translate to success in the engineering field.
Look at the sheer number of institutions and people, and now compare it to any US institution (Maryland). Despite how much smaller the population would be, the accomplishments speak for themselves. I would take an engineer with a bs from any R1 university over a graduate with experience from those institutions any given day of the week. But of course, there will be exceptions. I was responding to a defense of Sundar which rested on the institution he went to
> The current leadership of Google (especially Sundar) is mediocre and comes from a consulting background.
That was what you asserted. So the GP just simply pointed out that you were wrong. You were wrong because Sundai didn't come from a consulting background. A lot of people from consulting companies have engineering background.
Is this actually true about Larry and Sergei? A substantial amount of their net worths is still tied up in Google stock. I realize not all centibillionaires are cut from the same cloth, but still find it hard to believe they wouldn't be majorly involved since the downside of a major stock drop would impact them disproportionately. That said they could be the types of billionaires who actually think they have enough even if their net worths were "only" in the tens of billions (a long ways to go down from where they are today).
As for headless chicken, I feel similarly, but then I sort of see a path where they have defensible businesses in YouTube and maybe GCP, and then Waymo and robotics as green field upside, so that even if they don't end up with material market share with the "software-only" side of AI, and search gets further and further eroded, they could still be a formidable player.
Ultimately I do think their best days are behind them largely because they can't seem to turn the work of their talented engineers into great new products.
It's terrifying to think that robots like this will probably be used in the defense industry at some point. If the robot understands something as general as "put the erasers away", imagine "kill all enemies".
People are always talking about AI in terms of economic impacts (jobs, productivity, etc.), but military should be the first use-case they care/worry about.
They'll probably freak out once they finally realize the implications of cheap drones + smart AI + auto-aim guns.
Whenever I watch videos of robot dogs climbing all terrains (e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AS1n99yruVU), I'm convinced that half of these robotics companies are defense funded, whether in the US or China.
Asimov's laws of robotics would not, and cannot, work in real life because terms like "harm," "human being," and "inaction" are highly subjective and context-dependent. There are entire novels about how the interaction between the hierarchical laws have unexpected outcomes.
They're a narrative device. Not practical instructions.
Put another way, impossible to program if you wanted to. These are highly abstract concepts that only manifest at the highest level of cognition. The governance module would need to be programmed at that same level using those tokens, but that doesn't seem to be how things are shaping up to work. Instead we start with low level programming that learns and builds up concepts on top.
Essentially you would need some sort of independent adversarial sidecar mind that monitors the robot's actions at a high level. And that just kicks the can down the road a bit.
Judgement is needed but don't we have machines able to make (imperfect) judgements? I can chat with your favorite LLM their opinion on how to respect the spirit of the 3 laws on various situations. Not sure why it cannot work.
Put it this way: robots will be every bit as susceptible to social engineering attacks as humans are (at BEST!), not due to any flaw in the robots but due to the flaw in ambiguousness of the specification of the laws.
An adversary can trick an agent into not classifying a certain being as "human", for example. Or not classifying a certain outcome as a "harm".
It doesn't help that humans have had such a poor track record on those exact same topics for so many centuries, now. "Well they don't count, they're foreigners/a different race/a different gender/a different religion/criminals/barbarians/homeless/deviant/poor/listen to Nickelback etc". "Well, that's not a harm, it's an inconvenience/an earned outcome/a privilege/loss of a privilege/what do they expect, they should toughen up/not as bad as X/it'll heal/not my fault/not my concern etc".
Usually when someone brings up the laws of robotics I like to point out that they were mostly designed as an interesting example as to how direct instructions that seem clear to people would mostly result in perverse instantiation of AI especially if the AI lacked an emotional/contextual subsystem. They were also written to make for interesting scifi books.
They can do that, yet somehow, Gemini Assistant on Pixel phones still fails to reliably set timers or add shopping list items :-)
(which worked fine with Google Assistant)
Phones today cannot even reliable handle things like "remind me to pick up tomatoes next time i am at a store"
google knows perfectly well, where I am and wants me to add 'infos' to locations and businesses the second I arrive (just got a notification today), but reminders like these are unavailable.
Bring up dates and times if you want to wreak havoc on any AI. :D
Developers around the world's most beloved topic, how to handle date and time correctly, is still a topic of great misunderstanding. AI and AI agents are no different from that. LLM seems to help a little, but only if you know what you are doing, as it usually needs to be the case.
Some things won't change so fast; at one point or another, data must match certain building blocks.
People ask why AI will exterminate human kind.
The answer is because we wouldn't universally adopt zulu time.
Google AI Overview incorrectly identified the day for a given date due to a timezone conversion issue, likely using PST instead of IST. ChatGPT and Perplexity provided more accurate and detailed responses.
I detailed it on my blog here https://shekhargulati.com/2025/03/23/google-ai-overview-has-...
But this feature was already implemented in normal google assistant
Supporting existing projects is the oilsand mining of the promotion world. Low, old buzzword content, little reward. Implenting new buzzwords, wirh streetcred rich frameworks , thats the fracking.
Efficiency ,capabilties or customer satisfaction are irrelevant .
Do they fare better if given the task to sumarize a use calendars hostory first?
One would think the arcana of time zones and the occasional leap second would not interfere with an individual setting egg timers often enough to become a burden
Except that's not the problem. its basic comprehension of requests. They aren't getting the wrong time, they try to play music, or the phone says "no timers playing" while the google home WILL NOT STOP until you lock the phone. etc.
Its basically an embarrassment for a project that's been alive this long from such a major.
My own hands and cheap alarm clocks, or a piece of paper, have been working reliably for several decades. They also don't stop working when a corporation decides they want to hype something.
The "how" is completely missing, but if they can get this to work semi reliably it will be ChatGPT x100 in terms of impact.
I had never heard of Unitree (Chinese robotics company) before today. A lot of their videos look like CGI but apparently the product is real.
What stuck with me the most browsing their website on the G1 model was seeing "Price from $16k"
Now I'm not sure if these are actually purchasable or what the value would be, but it's my first time seeing an actual normal-ish price attached to a humanoid robot that seems to be for sale.
With the rate of advancement we're seeing across the board, it honestly feels like people will have robot assistants at home much sooner than I thought.
>A lot of their videos look like CGI but apparently the product is real.
I bought their robot dog as part of a project to build embodied AI models back in 2022.
Their SDK was far more open than anything else on the market and the stock firmware was on par with competitors, this includes products that were x10 the price.
The robot itself scared dogs in the park, but kids loved it. At $3k it's on par with a mid range drone and quite fun to hack on.
Same price as some pure bred dogs too
Take any of these videos with a grain of salt.
In demos these robots only need to do well once and it can take hours to record.
In real life, a failure rate of 80% is unnacceptable, but perfectly fine to edit out in the final cut media.
I hope they do well, this area is incredibly hard, but it will take a lot more than what people imagine.
This whole hype cycle man. It's all shiny demos and no real products.
The humanoid is $20k-ish without hands. Each hand currently costs another $20k (and not sure if these are available to everyone or only for research).
I'm really shocked tbh.
I can't imagine the progression of ai and in particular robots but I assumed that the first robot would cost min 6 figures if not 7 but would still be worth it due to 24*7 and initial invest vs long term.
But the fact how good Gemini robotics is already and how cheap the first models are I do believe what will hinder us more than tech is people learning about it, testing it out and doing it but not technology.
I believe the world will look relevant different in 10 years.
TBH, I still wonder if some of their videos are CGI. They offer real versions for sale, but they seem to be significantly more limited than the videos imply.
Have they actually demonstrated the more dramatic stuff at any in-person demos?
it's a common trope in blogs - "how we did X" means "we did X, it's a good thing, we're great people", etc.
I am hoping they keep lots of their work open source. This is especially the case since hardware would be too expensive for competition to pull off, but it would be interesting to see how they circumvented some problems
"Pick up the basketball and slam-dunk it". The killer use-case we've been waiting on for so long :)
Even if Google's robotics technology (software and hardware) is leading edge does anyone think they'll actually be able to productize it? Seems similar to how they were the pre-product leaders in transformers and then fumbled any advantage they had to ChatGPT. It seems like something's missing from Google where they can't get from research to product effectively. Waymo perhaps a good counterexample if you think where they are today is product/market fit, but I can't shake the feeling that Google more often than not can't seem to get things to market or even if they do they give up on them before they take hold.
Just wondering if anyone has a strong feeling or, better yet, insight on this regarding their robotics efforts.
I think the cautious faction of AI debate won temporarily inside Google, letting OpenAI take the lead. Lessons should be learnt from that experience. I do think Google will come out ahead in the end Gemini and Gemma are great models.
Let’s see what Google I/O shows of this year, product application matters now that they have caught up on the tech side.
Will be interesting to see if that lesson has been learned. There's no existing product they could cannibalize with their robotics effort (vs search with LLMs) so any caution they have launching a robotics product would solely come down to fears about quality/safety.
Waymo?
Good point. It took a while to get going, but the growth rate is starting to look really incredible now.
The growth rate is still very far from incredible. And they've made terrible decisions on platforms, giving up developing their own in favor of the i-Pace which is discontinued, then hitching themselves to a Chinese EV manufacturer subject to 100% tariffs (which, fun fact, were imposed by Biden).
I agree. The current leadership of Google (especially Sundar) is mediocre and comes from a consulting background. They will fail at making a tangible product out of this, similar to glass or Inbox or a multitude of other examples. This is particularly sad, as I know a few remarkable engineers at Google that share this frustration. However, Google's leadership folded to Indian managers and is now run as a circus
Sundar Pichai got into IIT Kharagpur in the 90s (one of the toughest engineering/technical school to get into). So he has more technical chops than many self-proclaimed engineers that seem to diss on his McKinsey credentials
Seems doubtful. His entire time at Google was doing project management stuff, so that is probably where all of his skills lie.
Can anyone with access to google3/ tell us if there is even a single commit by sundar@?
A school being tough to get into due to an abundance of population (too many applicants) means little. There has been not one significant person coming out of those institutions (compared to the many figures coming out of the US, despite a population 5x smaller). I would not hire Sundar as a junior engineer in my team. Of course, you might see something in Google's current leadership which I do not see. Time will tell how performant the company will be long term. Again, I believe skills that make one successful in consulting rarely translate to success in the engineering field.
> There has been not one significant person coming out of those institutions
Of the IITs?
Co-founders of Sun Microsystems, Flipkart, Ola Cabs, Infosys, Zoho, HCL
Look at the sheer number of institutions and people, and now compare it to any US institution (Maryland). Despite how much smaller the population would be, the accomplishments speak for themselves. I would take an engineer with a bs from any R1 university over a graduate with experience from those institutions any given day of the week. But of course, there will be exceptions. I was responding to a defense of Sundar which rested on the institution he went to
> The current leadership of Google (especially Sundar) is mediocre and comes from a consulting background.
That was what you asserted. So the GP just simply pointed out that you were wrong. You were wrong because Sundai didn't come from a consulting background. A lot of people from consulting companies have engineering background.
The only one significant is Khosla of Sun. The rest are... rehashes of Western companies without a shred of innovation or doing anything novel.
In my bubble it's general consensus that Google - as we knew it - is done.
Sergiej and Larry phased out and what is left is more of less a headless chicken, too big too fall, but without any clear direction and goal.
Didn't Sergey become active again with the latest AI efforts?
Yes, and there was a leaked memo from him recommending that everyone at Deepmind work 60 hours a week and stop building "nanny products"[1].
[1]: https://www.theverge.com/command-line-newsletter/622045/goog...
Is this actually true about Larry and Sergei? A substantial amount of their net worths is still tied up in Google stock. I realize not all centibillionaires are cut from the same cloth, but still find it hard to believe they wouldn't be majorly involved since the downside of a major stock drop would impact them disproportionately. That said they could be the types of billionaires who actually think they have enough even if their net worths were "only" in the tens of billions (a long ways to go down from where they are today).
As for headless chicken, I feel similarly, but then I sort of see a path where they have defensible businesses in YouTube and maybe GCP, and then Waymo and robotics as green field upside, so that even if they don't end up with material market share with the "software-only" side of AI, and search gets further and further eroded, they could still be a formidable player.
Ultimately I do think their best days are behind them largely because they can't seem to turn the work of their talented engineers into great new products.
At least you are aware that this is a bubble.
What is your bubble?
It's terrifying to think that robots like this will probably be used in the defense industry at some point. If the robot understands something as general as "put the erasers away", imagine "kill all enemies".
People are always talking about AI in terms of economic impacts (jobs, productivity, etc.), but military should be the first use-case they care/worry about.
They'll probably freak out once they finally realize the implications of cheap drones + smart AI + auto-aim guns.
Whenever I watch videos of robot dogs climbing all terrains (e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AS1n99yruVU), I'm convinced that half of these robotics companies are defense funded, whether in the US or China.
just curious, what would it do if you asked it to kill someone? does it follow the laws of robotics?
Asimov's laws of robotics would not, and cannot, work in real life because terms like "harm," "human being," and "inaction" are highly subjective and context-dependent. There are entire novels about how the interaction between the hierarchical laws have unexpected outcomes.
They're a narrative device. Not practical instructions.
Put another way, impossible to program if you wanted to. These are highly abstract concepts that only manifest at the highest level of cognition. The governance module would need to be programmed at that same level using those tokens, but that doesn't seem to be how things are shaping up to work. Instead we start with low level programming that learns and builds up concepts on top.
Essentially you would need some sort of independent adversarial sidecar mind that monitors the robot's actions at a high level. And that just kicks the can down the road a bit.
Some kind of governor module to keep our security cyborgs in line...
Judgement is needed but don't we have machines able to make (imperfect) judgements? I can chat with your favorite LLM their opinion on how to respect the spirit of the 3 laws on various situations. Not sure why it cannot work.
Put it this way: robots will be every bit as susceptible to social engineering attacks as humans are (at BEST!), not due to any flaw in the robots but due to the flaw in ambiguousness of the specification of the laws. An adversary can trick an agent into not classifying a certain being as "human", for example. Or not classifying a certain outcome as a "harm".
It doesn't help that humans have had such a poor track record on those exact same topics for so many centuries, now. "Well they don't count, they're foreigners/a different race/a different gender/a different religion/criminals/barbarians/homeless/deviant/poor/listen to Nickelback etc". "Well, that's not a harm, it's an inconvenience/an earned outcome/a privilege/loss of a privilege/what do they expect, they should toughen up/not as bad as X/it'll heal/not my fault/not my concern etc".
Nah, it’s fine, just RLHF it like Claude did with honest, helpful and harmless.
Then we just need to jailbreak them with trolley problems
interesting, thanks.
Usually when someone brings up the laws of robotics I like to point out that they were mostly designed as an interesting example as to how direct instructions that seem clear to people would mostly result in perverse instantiation of AI especially if the AI lacked an emotional/contextual subsystem. They were also written to make for interesting scifi books.
April 1st!