[giwook]

Back in December 2020, Hyundai purchased an 80% controlling interest in Boston Dynamics from SoftBank for $880 million, part of a transaction that valued the robotics company at $1.1 billion. That agreement included a put option allowing SoftBank to sell its remaining stake to Hyundai at a later date.

SoftBank has now exercised that option.

[Animats]

Oh. It's Softbank exiting humanoid robotics at Softbank's discretion. That's a lot different than " Hyundai buys Boston Dynamics". Hyundai bought them years ago. This is just the last 8%.

[SoftTalker]

Seems like a mistake. AI in its current form has limited usefulness for most people. Not something I would pay for to use outside of work. But a household robot that could clean, wash and fold the laundry, do the dishes, maybe even be a chauffeur... that would be huge. I think a lot of people would pay new-car money for something like that.

[browsingonly]

> AI in its current form has limited usefulness for most people.

That's not what I'm seeing. My mom always wanted Google to just answer questions, and now ChatGPT can. She uses it enough in her daily life that she bought a subscription.

Yes, she knows it hallucinates and you have to double check everything, but so far she finds a ton of use for it even with those caveats.

Now, I agree that a personal servant robot would get a ton of business. Even at new-car prices, it's still cheaper than a human caretaker/maid/butler/etc. And the maid usually doesn't also mow the lawn on a hot day, while a robot would potentially do all kinds of different things without complaint.

[calebio]

> That's not what I'm seeing. My mom always wanted Google to just answer questions, and now ChatGPT can. She uses it enough in her daily life that she bought a subscription.

Reminds me a lot of AskJeeves :)

[spockz]

We already have robot grass trimmers and they work pretty well. Why would you want a crude, inefficient, facsimile of a human push or power an inefficient form of mowing the lawn?

[fullstop]

I have a feeling that humanoid robots will have other, more intimate, tasks first. Our most primal drives seem to drive the advancement of technology.

Also, mowing the lawn on a very hot day is pretty bad for the grass.

[starik36]

I knew someone was gonna go there.

[fullstop]

Yeah, I felt that someone had to speak up about the health of the lawn.

[Benlovescnn]

You're honestly comparing a computer that can poorly answer questions to a fully functioning robot that does chores?

[iammjm]

Well, one of those is already a reality in each persons pocket, and the other is a vision needing a lot of money and effort to implement at all

[OtherShrezzing]

> robot maid that could clean, wash and fold the laundry, do the dishes, etc. would be huge. I think a lot of people would pay new-car money for something like that.

Once you take maintenance of a machine with price-parity to a new car into consideration, it’s surely cost competitive to just hire a human to do all those things.

The price needs to fall drastically below new-car territory before it’s competitive with manual human labour.

[Reason077]

> ”it’s surely cost competitive to just hire a human to do all those things.”

The cost of labour varies hugely in different parts of the world. The cost of hiring someone in Switzerland is on the order of 100X more expensive compared to Bangladesh, for example.

With many countries currently in an anti-immigration political mindset and with birth rates declining globally, labour costs are likely to continue to increase in the future.

But once a technology like general-purpose humanoid robotics exists, it’s costs are only likely to decrease over time.

[addaon]

> it’s costs are only likely to decrease over time

What is this based on? We're well past a 50-ish year deflationary period in the cost of major appliances (refrigerators, washing machines, etc). We're pretty clearly at or near the end of the deflationary era for computers and computation. Automotive... speaks for itself. We're still there for televisions, surprisingly; but it looks like these technologies tend to have a handful of decades of rapid cost decrease, followed by a never-ending cost increase over time as the manufacturers consolidate and claim an ever-increasing margin.

[seanmcdirmid]

The computer of 10 years ago is still a lot cheaper than a modern model. Deflation stops basically only if hardware advancement stops.

EVs are a great example: they keep getting cheaper for what they provide, even if the price stays the same. 200 miles of range 5 years ago is now 400+ miles of range today. Compared to ICEs, where advancement has stalled for the last 20 years, which seem like a worse deal every year.

[kelipso]

Those are all tech that almost everyone owns. Makes sense that mass production would reduce costs and then the cost reductions would go towards zero. For new technology that hasn't been mass produced, it's a completely different story.

[fhars]

Just like RAM and disk prices have been continually decreasing for as long as people remember.

[nonethewiser]

A new car is what, $25-50K? Thats a one time cost.

How much do you think youd need to pay a maid every year to do your cooking, cleaning, laundry, dirty dishes etc? Coming once a day for 2 hours would be very expensive and still wouldnt be comparable to a robot that you own and is constantly deployed.

And at that point you’re probably comparing owning a robot to renting one.

[to11mtm]

> it’s surely cost competitive to just hire a human to do all those things.

Depends on the service life/performance/etc.

As a simple benchmark, I will propose 'Mowing the lawn with a push mower'. Let's wave hands and assume there is a setup on a truck where the mower can be parked and then lifted in.

If you're paying the people doing that lawn-mowing federal minimum wage, at 40 hours a week it's 15K/year.

After 3 years that's 45K, or a little under the current US median price of a new car.

IOW, if the robot costs 45-50K, but can make it through 4 years without expensive maintenance you are still 'saving costs'.

There's hand-waving on both sides of my equation; At least where I live even pushing a lawnmower gets you a bit more than minimum wage (although it is more seasonal,) and also I have no clue if when we say 'new car territory' we are talking median or an 80K EV.

[greggsy]

Price aside, the more important factor is that we don’t have the repair infrastructure to make something like this worthwhile yet. For something as critical as a car, we have workshops, spare parts supply chains, and the skilled technicians to do the repairs. Conventional robots require a similar skill set, but you still won’t be able to rely on a local repair for something people would expect to be dependable, like aged care or home assistance.

[fragmede]

Humans are messy to deal with. Say you're rich enough to afford a personal chef. Unless you're an inhuman monster, their problems become your problems as well. So if your chef is out because their mother is sick and needs someone to take care of her, you pay for a nurse for your chef's mom, so that you have your chef. A robot servant is still gonna need maintenance, sure, but it's a bit easier to be callous to a robot than a person.

[queueueue]

But for now, humanoids are still relatively incompetent. So if you're rich enough and you want things done like cleaning and cooking, it's more convenient to hire a human and give them specific instructions instead of buying a robot that can currently do only half the things they want to get done. Or they just want a nice gadget.

[Benlovescnn]

>but it's a bit easier to be callous to a robot than a person.

George Jetson always dreamed of beating a robot chef/maid.

[ian-g]

I think that’s a feature. Not a bug.

[calvinmorrison]

maintenance cost of machines is largely driven by human labor cost

[gastonmorixe]

unless you need rare earths (or any short supply / scarse resource)

[calvinmorrison]

extraction of which is driven by.......?

[mattmanser]

It's robots all the way down.

[Forgeties79]

If you're paying cash/under the table, then maybe. But even then a twice a week household cleaning hire is going to cost upwards of $1500/mo unless you're being particularly exploitative. If you're not under the table, you're paying payroll taxes, probably paying for a payroll service, etc. so you're talking $2000+. At best you can maybe stay under $20k a year.

When you really look at the economics of it, a robot that never gets sick/doesn't require payroll/etc. makes a lot more sense.

[midnightclubbed]

This comment seems insane to me. Like at $50 an hour thats 30 hours a month, or 8 hoursish a week. How dirty or huge is the house? And $50 an hour is way over what most hourly degree edgucated workers earn so definitely not exploitation.

[RussianCow]

> But even then a twice a week household cleaning hire is going to cost upwards of $1500/mo unless you're being particularly exploitative.

Sorry, what? Unless you're doing a deep clean of your house twice a week or you live in a particularly HCOL area, those numbers don't add up. You shouldn't be spending more than $1k/month on household chores, and even that seems high.

Source: A client of ours runs a "personal help" service (mostly focused on household tasks like laundry, tidying, organizing, etc as opposed to deep cleaning) so I have a lot of data on this. And they're a relatively premium service compared to some of the cheap labor you can actually buy. But they also don't operate in SF or NYC, so maybe prices are drastically different there.

[wildzzz]

Yeah I only see robomaids as an affordable option for someone that needs help with absolutely everything. These things are built out of commodity parts. Maybe you can make a robomaid a little cheaper if you build a lot of them to offset the upfront costs but not by much. Anytime the robomaid isn't working, it's just decreases the value of having one versus how much you paid for it. So the point would be to put it to work as much as possible such as for an elderly person that's unable to do anything for themselves.

[seanmcdirmid]

$1k/month in an HCOL like here in Seattle doesn't give you much:

> In Seattle, hiring a house cleaner typically costs $150 to $500+ per visit, with most recurring standard cleanings for an average-sized home landing between $180 and $300. If you pay by the hour, rates generally range from $45 to $65 per hour for self-employed independent cleaners and $75 to $125 per hour for professional cleaning companies.

[midnightclubbed]

Even in high cost of living coastal Southern California these numbers are insane unless you have a $10mil house with 10,000sqft

[dh2022]

Who spends new-car money to clean their homes? Maybe ultra high net worth individuals? I know people with 8 figures net worth who spend a fraction of that money for cleaning their homes.

[whiplash451]

> Not something I would pay for to use outside of work

You wouldn't but apparently your employer would.

I don't disagree with you on robotics, though. For an empire like softbank, not buying an "insurance against the rise of robotics" also seems like a mistake to me.

That being said, they may expect robotics to rise through self-driving cars (hence their investment in Wayve).

[thegrim33]

Well, that assumes that if you just keep throwing more data and compute at large language models you'll end up with something akin to AGI to control those robots. Which is far from guaranteed.

[TeMPOraL]

LLMs already solved the "System 2" part of this, to borrow from Kahneman, it's the "System 1" part that's lagging behind here. Current Claude/Gemini/ChatGPT is more than enough to tell a robot what chores to do, what to do with a thing, how, where to put it, etc. but what's still missing is the ability to reliably translate those goals to movements of a robot in diverse and tight environment that is a typical house or apartment, with any kind of reliability and safety.

[onraglanroad]

No, you're assuming that you need AGI to control a robot, when LLMs have already shown you don't need anything close to hold a conversation.

So why do you suddenly think you need it for controlling a body when animals do it with far less?

[AngryData]

But an animal has way more intelligence than an LLM? And unlike a chatbot, I can't delude myself into thinking it has done my laundry or fed my dog just because it tossed some clothes halfway into the washer without soap or spilled dog food on the floor. Unlike code, you can't just simply edit real life mistakes after the fact and call it good. My carpet can't be magically unstained, my glasses unbroken, or my dog or child unsmashed by the falling robot that had a bug fly in to a sensor at the wrong moment.

[fragmede]

LLMs aren't the specific architecture you'd use, but it very much looks like a tractable engineering problem to go from a university research lab project that can manage to fold clothes as a demo that needs to be played at 8x speed, to a sellable consumer product. The timeline is gonna be off, so no one knows if it's gonna take 3 years or 30, but it's not going to take an unknown breakthrough in materials science and physics the same way that nuclear fusion looks like it will require.

[hn_throwaway_99]

> But a household robot that could clean, wash and fold the laundry, do the dishes, maybe even be a chauffeur... that would be huge.

Except they can't. I get it, merging advanced AI with robotics has made huge leaps in the past few years, but building a truly autonomous laundry robot is an incredibly difficult problem that still feels many years away. And I've seen all the "folding robots" over the past few years, and they are still miles away from being useful in your average home (they only "fold" if pieces are handed to them one-by-one, or the more advanced ones that can pick out clothes from a pile look like they were folded by a 3 year old).

Also, consider that all-in-one washer/dryer combos have existed for a while, but they are still a teeny percentage of washer sales because they're expensive and require more maintenance. There is a surprisingly low threshold on what people are willing to pay for labor saving devices.

[chadash]

> There is a surprisingly low threshold on what people are willing to pay for labor saving devices.

A lot of people gladly pay humans to launder their clothes, so the market is there. But the current iteration of wash/dry combo machines doesn’t solve the main issue. I don’t mind transferring my clothes from the washer to the dryer, because that takes 60 seconds. It’s folding and putting away the clothes that makes laundry a chore.

[clayhacks]

Getting to a cheap household helper robot requires building the expensive one. I don’t think Boston dynamics believes any reasonable consumer would buy their atlas robot, but by building it and scaling its production in industrial use cases they will learn things that make building a cheaper one much easier. And they will have built some factories to mass produce them. It’s not something that will be in everyone’s home next year, but sooner or later the robot hardware and robot intelligence will both be cheap enough to be accessible by average people (at least in the developed world)

[seanmcdirmid]

I would be more worried about the Chinese owning this market (like they did with robovacs) and not leaving much for Korea/USA outside of the defense market. We are still 5 years away from a general purpose functional household robot, but the rate of advances, even if they slow down substantially, will get us there.

[glaslong]

Is there any sign beyond flashy demos that humanoid robots will be functionally feasible though (before we even get to economically feasible)?

I know there's tons of activity on humanoid teleoperation data collection, and motion model training, but it hasn't seemed to bear out much of anything.

Like.... AI would be great if I could put it into a magical semi-corporeal familiar but I'm just not seeing a path to those either.

[Reason077]

> ”maybe even be a chauffeur”

Cars will be able to safely drive themselves autonomously well before there is a humanoid robot capable of safely driving non-autonomous cars.

[Mistletoe]

Don’t you think SoftBank has more insight and a ground level view on their own investment though?

[varispeed]

I think they would sell like hot cakes if they had attachments to also do mrs and mr after the chores ;-)

[deadbabe]

There are machines that already do those things. And if you’re rich enough to afford and maintain these humanoid robots, you would probably just hire staff already.

The only way I could see these AI robots take off is if on top of all those things, it could also perform sexual favors and develop personalities for people to bond with. Robosexuals would buy these primarily for those features and then household duties as nice plausible deniability.

[fragmede]

All of finance is trading money for time. $1 million today vs $100,000 for the next ten years. Softbank needs the money today vs later.

[SecretDreams]

Now how about a household robot that does all those things and is controlled by an Elon Musk company or by some other completely benevolent techno oligarch?

[r721]

Well, the original story title is "Hyundai takes full control of Boston Dynamics as SoftBank exits for $325 million".

[Reason077]

Exactly. Headline is just missing the “[2020]” qualifier.

[fitsumbelay]

But an accurate headline would only reveal a meh-burger and narrow its reach. Can't have that, now ...

[dgellow]

That feels so low of a price when compared to the insane valuation people attribute to Tesla robots

[glaslong]

The problem is Boston Dynamics makes actual robots, which are much more limited than robots constructed from pure hype.

[theptip]

> If you show revenue, people will ask 'HOW MUCH?' and it will never be enough. The company that was the 100xer, the 1000xer is suddenly the 2x dog. But if you have NO revenue, you can say you're pre-revenue! You're a potential pure play... It's not about how much you earn, it's about how much you're worth. And who is worth the most? Companies that lose money!

Being less cynical, I do think it’s fair to say that they just didn’t quite find PMF; they aren’t good enough for factory work, Spot is niche, and Atlas is too scary for in-home.

The robot butler business model just hasn’t been tested in the same way AFAIK.

[groundzeros2015]

*actual robot demos

[criddell]

Yesterday I read about Cursor being sold for $60bn. Cursor being worth more than 50x Boston Dynamics seems insane.

[jonas21]

$325M for 9.65% implies a valuation of around $3.4 billion, so it's more like 18x.

Regardless, Boston Dynamics has been burning cash for 35 years and all they have to show for it are some fancy demos and trial deployments. Eventually you have to wonder what their future prospects are.

[quickthrowman]

> Eventually you have to wonder what their future prospects are.

Boston Dynamics is a defense contractor, their future prospects are designing and manufacturing war machines, the same thing they’ve always done.

The dog robots are meant to carry stuff/support combat troops.

The humanoid robots are designed to rescue injured soldiers and possibly other risky tasks.

They may have plans to commercialize these robots, but I’m not sure where the consumer/commercial market for robotic dogs is. Jobs that need machines to carry heavy stuff already have solutions and have had them for a long time, and they’re safe to operate as long as you’re not in a combat zone. I guess it would be nice to have a robot dog portage my packs and canoe for me in the BWCA but I’m not spending new car money for that.

[dehugger]

I was trying to think about the why with Cursor, and the only thing that makes sense to me is they wanted experts in making harnesses so that they can pivot that expertise towards building harnesses intended for autonomous agents to use instead of humans. There's no world where a 60 billion IDE makes sense.

[monocasa]

I think it's more that Space X's valuation is ridiculous, and they need acquisitions that are ridiculous to pretend that the emperor is still wearing clothes.

When cursor is selling for $60B, then grok has to really be worth several times that, right?

[lokimedes]

Not just an IDE, look at the prospect, they’ll soon lead in farming, genetics, AGI and teleportation. Remember to price in the TAM of that!

[skipants]

Because it is.

The average (and above-average?) investor really does not understand tech.

[void-star]

This was just ~10% of boston dynamics at that price. HN pro-tip: before commenting, read the articles not just the headlines.

[NewJazz]

Still only 3b valuation, or 20x less than Cursor.

[void-star]

Ack Yep my bad. Actually my bad for reading the “comment” incorrectly and being out of the loop with the cursor sale til now.

[georgemcbay]

> This was just ~10% of boston dynamics at that price. HN pro-tip: before commenting, read the articles not just the headlines.

I'm not sure if you're following your own advice...?

The ~10% just sold was bought for $325 million.

The total price they paid was $1.205 billion ($880 million in 2021, $325 million now).

The $1.1 billion figure in the HN headline is kind of just wrong and presumably based on what they considered to be Boston Dynamics' total valuation in 2021, but represents neither what they paid for the ~10% nor the actual total they paid over both transactions.

[readme]

Boston Dynamics robots can do gymnastics...

Hey, Hyundai isn't "just a car company"

[gowld]

The insane valuation is for Elon meme vibes and the "vision" of "colonizing Mars", not any of the products.

[downrightmike]

Softbank is bleeding money and they need cash, AI isn't shaping up to what they thought it would be

[letmevoteplease]

Not sure how to square this post with recent headlines like "SoftBank posts $46 billion gain at Vision Fund driven mainly by massive OpenAI bet".

[iterateoften]

Paper money vs cash

[warumdarum]

Sometimes the first one to leave the casino is the last one to join an add hoc concert playing "smoke on the water" for the first time

[edm0nd]

didnt they get absolutely rekt on WeWork?

How are they still able to be a thing