[martythemaniak]

Rodney Brooks (of iRobot fame) wrote an essay recently about why humanoids are likely decades and not years away from fulfilling their promise. It is quite long, but even a gpt summary will be quite valuable.

https://rodneybrooks.com/why-todays-humanoids-wont-learn-dex...

In short, he makes the case that unlike text and images, human dexterity is based on sensory inputs that we barely understand, that these robots don't have, and it will take a long time to get the right sensors in, get the right data recorded, and only then train them to the level of a human. He is very skeptical that they can learn from video-only data, which is what the companies are doing.

[app13]

Most companies are using world model simulations for training nowadays, like Issac Gym or Mujoco, not just video data.

[smath]

came here to see if anyone had read Rodney's recent essay - and to ask how does this announcement by Figure square with Rodney's essay.

The essay was long so I cant claim I read it in detail - one q in my mind is whether humanoids need to do dexterity the same way that humans do. yes they dont have skin and tiny receptors but maybe there is another way to develop dexterity?