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I think coffee test for robots will be similar to Turing Test for LLMs, which was quietly achieved and forgotten somewhere between gpt-3.5 and gpt-4. Real tests are tasks like cooking or plumbing - I expect that to come in 2-3 years.

I’ve been thinking about this too, and I share your optimism: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47213310

Are you saying they did not use native harnesses like Claude Code or Codex? How did they do it then?

In the last three startups I worked at I didn’t bother exercising my vested equity - even a successful exit would at best triple the price of those shares - not worth the risk. One of those three startups already failed.

I’m forced to do this with claude code: documenting work for context management. Every new agent starts fresh, so everything better be recorded and explained.

I’m observing very similar trends at a startup I’m at. Unfortunately I’m not ready to retire yet.


I think it’s a combination of simulation, YouTube videos, and specially recorded training footage. The last one is expensive, but given the funding these startups receive, I’m pretty sure they can scale their RL methods at least 10x.


For example, I’d like to have a farm. But I don’t have knowledge, skills, or time to maintain it. With a robot I can, right?


we'd need some real fundamental breakthroughs

What sort of breakthroughs are you thinking of?


No idea, and I don't think anyone does, hence the prediction that it won't happen anytime soon. Either we need perfect simulations (seems almost impossible) for training at scale or fundamental algorithmic breakthroughs in learning from very sparse data that we can collect in the real world.


Why can’t it learn from, say, YouTube videos?


How low? Would you consider $50k to be low enough for wide adoption?


I'd say closer to $5000, which is about the cost of a domestic helper for a year or so.

Then again, they don't need sleep, can be jailbroken, they only need closet space, and won't take your money and run. They can do dangerous tasks like fixing the roof too. Menial labor like walking 3 km over to the store to buy me a can of Red Bull. You can have them do pranks at night. They'd probably be valued quite a bit more than a human.


$5000 will still be absolute niche. Cost needs to be close to a phone to get mass adoption. And that might very well never happen.


A robot like that would be far more useful to me than my car (I rarely use a car), and I paid 50k for my car. So for me personally, 50k would be a no-brainer. But of course only if it can do the tasks I mentioned well enough.


No, but for industrial and business uses yes. You'd start to see a lot more robots used for warehouses, deliveries, restocking, cleaning, preparing food, etc.


Honestly I’m not really interested in industrial robots. What price would be reasonable for a humanoid robot that can do common household tasks?


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