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CleanThroughMyJorts t1_iqqg1ds wrote

Reply to comment by Midori_Schaaf in Why I am optimistic about the Optimus bot by Effective-Dig8734

No, based on what Musk was describing, I really thought they'd go the route of LLM conditioned robots like what Google is doing which would be more general, but their tech stack looks to be going very much in the "preprogrammed" direction

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-ZeroRelevance- t1_iquh9w1 wrote

I didn’t really get the impression that they were going for a pre-programmed approach. If I remember correctly, the three systems they showed regarding controlling the robot were:

  1. The vision system, which used cameras to build a voxel-based rendering of the world around it, based on a computer-vision ML model
  2. The movement system, which they said they trained using simulations iirc
  3. The interaction systems, which they trained using body-tracked recordings of people doing ordinary factory work

All three of these systems used machine learning and were not pre-programmed. The closest thing to pre-programmed that I can think of is the hard-coded emergency commands, but I doubt you were talking about them.

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CleanThroughMyJorts t1_iquymsb wrote

Yes "preprogrammed" definitely is the wrong word here on my part. I'm talking about narrow AI Vs more general AI.

With Optimus, it looks like for each task it has to do must be explicitly preprogrammed. Eg user command: "pick up that ball", it needs to have an explicit navigation task it's trained on, and explicit "grabbing" tasks which then need to be composed by hand and preprogrammed into a routine for retrieving an object. This is as opposed to projects like Google's SayCan where the language of interpreting the task, and the compositionality of prior skills learned to synthesize a policy for solving a problem are all learned.

To me this puts Optimus much closer to Atlas than it does the vision that Musk described last year for robots that can handle highly unstructured environments and custom user tasks

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-ZeroRelevance- t1_iquyxvs wrote

Yeah, fair enough. Right now, it seems like it’s mostly aimed at factory use, so it’s not too important, but they’ll definitely need to think about implementing that in the near future. I imagine it will be pretty trivial to release a SayCan-like system by the planned release date though, so it’s probably not a huge concern.

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