Yet another Hacker News

101 points GaggiX 2 hours ago 55 comments

measurablefunc 2 hours ago | parent

So looks like generalized actuator planning & control is possible.

Krei-se 1 hour ago | parent

Getting my meals prepped, flat cleaned and laundry folded is getting closer!!

I'm looking forward to robotics a lot because solving menial tasks will have a huge class impact as we can stop looking for ways to keep a portion of society suppressed and dumb.

One can dream, right?

andai 1 hour ago | parent

You mean we can finally ban TikTok?

bigyabai 1 hour ago | parent

Menial tasks and gig workers aren't going away. If home robotics pans out, then those workers will have their wages suppressed which will prevent them from reinvesting into a college education.

jfengel 1 hour ago | parent

Unless the college professors become so comfortable that they can afford to just give away college educations.

I don't like utopianism and I'm certainly not going to plan on a best case scenario. But I can't help a tiny fraction of my brain that says "There are ways in which it could turn out well." Probably not, but the existence of a best case scenario feels like it should mean something.

fhars 1 hour ago | parent

Well, the whole point of the current AI boom is about finding ways to stop keeping a large portion of society employed, so in that sleep what dreams may come must give us pause...

andai 1 hour ago | parent

> Imagine two Microducks folding your laundry, using their beaks as grippers.

gradus_ad 1 hour ago | parent

Their "breaking the flywheel" strategy is predicted on people using their enabled robots in real world tasks. And from the demos it looks like they are unusable for real world tasks.

fn-mote 1 hour ago | parent

The only toroidal bar of soap I have ever seen in one of those demos.

rvz 1 hour ago | parent

This is just going to get acquired by OpenAI for their robotics department.

Yeah I said it. Time to start the countdown timer.

dumberquestions 1 hour ago | parent

Why this and not any of the other robotics startups?

boshalfoshal 51 minutes ago | parent

1. I don't think it'll get acquired by a frontier lab. Frontier labs already focus on robotics with enough effort that acquiring pure-software research IP from a company like this is not very useful. OpenAI has way more compute and researchers than these guys, and there likely isn't very much dream is doing on the model side thats different from OpenAI, or what they are capable of doing.

2. However to argue against basically any other robotics startup, I think they would only be acquired if it was a robotics SW company _with real customer distribution_/revenue, or a robotics company focusing on HW that is worth acquiring the IP for. The problem with the latter is that it is also a huge cost, and that cost is only worth it if the ML side actually catches up to the HW. I don't think a frontier lab would want to sustain a full physical supply chain for a non-revenue additive product. And frankly, most robotics companies have no meaningful distribution/revenue or SW/HW IP that is worth acquiring, considering the cost.

dumberquestions 1 hour ago | parent

Tested one prompt in the playground ("Move the elephant next to the ball") and this is the generated recorded video link:

https://dreamlabs.ai/playground/?play=a05f0e641559490e#sim

ajjenkins 1 hour ago | parent

Interesting. It actually moved the ball next to the elephant, but I guess that accomplishes the goal of the elephant and ball being next to each other. But probably not how must humans would interpret that prompt. And it continued to move both the elephant and ball after that for some reason.

Hopefully this is like the first GPT models and it gets better over time.

wand3r 1 hour ago | parent

Yeah. I didn't want to be rude, because real people building things they are passionate about is a great ideal. However, it is REALLY starting to feel like 1999. There is a new paradigm with clearly amazing potential, but we do not have all the pieces in place to execute on the forward thinking ideas, much less the businesses. Just imagine if that robot arm destroyed a ton of super expensive machinery. It was an extremely fair prompt, very clear and very simple instructions. Also, 90 Million to tweak an AI model to not achieve a task in an unvalidated market? IDK if that is too harsh and I just don't understand? There is 100% chance that myself or Dream-1 is out of touch, but I am concerned I can't tell which is which.

ethanj8011 1 hour ago | parent

Obviously AI written text. At least there is real content here, however I do find the order and the way in which it was written and portrayed to have a heavy AI smell. That is, it's hard to read and follow the clean narrative, it isn't written the way a human who was trying to convince another human would write, and is less effective because of it.

drum55 1 hour ago | parent

It's weird to spend all this time making a product and then just throw up something you had a LLM regurgitate. Any amount of human written content here would have been better, even if scribbled on the back of a napkin to show that the product had anybody care about it. A blog post, post-LLMs, can exist entirely in a vacuum away from anybody believing in it.

fn-mote 1 hour ago | parent

Totally untrue. They have a lot of videos showing robots performing tasks with their system driving. That’s not fake LLM content.

besterman23 1 hour ago | parent

This post feels really weird, DreamLabs isn’t some well known project like Anthropic or OpenAI and Dream-1 wasn’t really an awaited release.

But somehow this was pushed to the front page of HN before receiving a single comment with a title reminiscent of a major LLM release. Like I can only find 1 other reference historically to this lab and nobody noticed it or cared.

tgrowazay 1 hour ago | parent

There are PR agencies that take care of your content to be trending. They do use fake accounts to upvote and manipulate, but you as a customer don’t have to know that.

jelloroll42 1 hour ago | parent

Occam's razor it's more likely the mods or YC has some social or other connection to the project

CamelCaseName 1 hour ago | parent

Occam's razor would suggest that mods simply thought that it would generate insightful discussion, and manually pushed it up, something that dang regularly does and a core feature of HN -- and that is assuming it was pushed up in the first place.

walrus01 1 hour ago | parent

I'm certainly not a mod or affiliated with YC and I've had random things I posted briefly end up on the front page. Then if people keep upvoting it, they sometimes remain there...

computomatic 39 minutes ago | parent

Wouldn’t it just be easier to ask their team to upvote the post? They probably all have legitimate hacker news accounts already and are happy to upvote their work.

bertt 22 minutes ago | parent

Not really.

GaggiX 1 hour ago | parent

I posted it after I discovered the model on https://robocurve.org/

I discovered the Robocurve benchmark after someone on X was saying that Kimi K3.1 Pro was performing particular bad on it.

Anyway I found the model particularly interesting because I think it's the first time I see an API for a random bimanual robot. Also HN removes "Introducing" so it's just the name of the model.

besterman23 1 hour ago | parent

Sorry I don’t mean to specifically point you out, I believe you’re being genuine.

However this comment got me thinking. Whats up with all the YC backed benchmarking companies? I know there’s only a few, but what is the business model for companies like Robocurve exactly?

computomatic 33 minutes ago | parent

I came across this recently and was initially surprised too. It makes sense when you consider that any company trying to build models (or an agent/value-add layer on top of a model) needs benchmarks. The best funded will do the full vertical - build their benchmarks and models together - but many will outsource the benchmark. This is particularly valuable when the dataset is difficult to compile (robotics being a prime example) - it makes more sense to let the benchmark vendor focus on that.

besterman23 24 minutes ago | parent

Sure it’s useful, but I’m asking who actually pays for this. Sort of a conflict of interest if you’re providing public testing for the companies paying you for the tests no?

Perhaps it’s purely for VC so they can judge which model is best? Also seems a little too conflict of interest-y, but that might just be too cynical.

smallerize 1 hour ago | parent

It only takes a few upvotes to get any story to the front page briefly. And on Saturdays there is just less competition.

modeless 1 hour ago | parent

It does seem weird. In my experience HN generally shows little interest in robotics research, so I'm surprised to see this up top. I'm biased but I think Physical Intelligence's recent announcement is more impressive, with greater diversity of robot embodiments and more impressive real-world tasks in real workplaces. https://www.pi.website/blog/api-beta

GaggiX 1 hour ago | parent

This one as I read it is a bit different, the Physical Intelligence API requires finetuning for the task/robot while the Dream-1 model offers an API that can do zero-shot (with great limitations of course but still cool).

modeless 49 minutes ago | parent

If you look at what they actually demonstrate, zero-shot embodiment generalization is limited to controlling two-finger grippers on two stationary arms. The embodiments are all very similar, and when they're slightly different (even just replacing two fingers with five fingers) they can't do zero-shot anymore. But there's no real reason to do zero-shot embodiment generalization in practice, as it's trivial to collect a small amount of data on a new embodiment to get significantly improved performance. Zero-shot embodiment generalization, especially in such a narrow domain of similar configurations, is not an important problem to solve and doesn't necessarily indicate progress on the important problems.

Zero-shot task generalization is more interesting, but has been demonstrated by many other companies at this point, so it's not new. And it only becomes useful with high success rates on long-duration tasks, so demonstrating short zero-shot tasks with low success rates in toy environments is uninteresting.

What's hard and still unsolved in general-purpose robotics is doing real useful tasks end-to-end in real uncontrolled environments with high reliability. I guess there's just a lack of understanding generally about what's actually hard and useful in robotics.

fwlr 1 hour ago | parent

I upvoted it while I ruminated on what I wanted write as a comment. It could have been a “multiple people are typing…” moment.

beernet 21 minutes ago | parent

So essentielly comments from simonw? Sounds like what you describe

jere 5 minutes ago | parent

Random Wikipedia articles make it to the front page all the time. What’s so weird?

Aurornis 1 hour ago | parent

This is all very cool and something I would like to play with. However I also can’t mentally bridge this over to the actual automation, manufacturing, and warehouse work I’ve been involved with throughout my career. Everything about this looks optimized for getting-started tasks to play around with, but I’m left feeling that it’s not the right fit or even a good starting point for real automation work.

Everything about this page strikes me as having been optimized for investors, not customers. Why would they cite a literal toy as a leading example of automation work? It doesn’t make any sense unless they’re maximizing for what investors remember seeing in headlines, not what actual automation customers would be interesting in paying for.

I think the product they’re selling is their equity, and their target customers are acquirers. The demos and the model feel like marketing material for that highly specific goal, but they forgot to include enough about how it could be useful to anyone.

hdz 59 minutes ago | parent

From a consumer standpoint are two arm robots ready to do anything useful yet for us? From your experience.

Folding laundry seems like one but then quickly falls apart the more I think about it. Not sure what else.

prometheus1992 1 hour ago | parent

I don't like the direction this is going in - so a third party is going to be able to control a robot in my house?

we shouldn't aim for economies of scale on this problem as there are massive negative externalities attached to it. Hopefully, a chinese lab will release an open source version soon.

lifeisloving 1 hour ago | parent

how are you going to afford a house when you're competing against $3.00 hr labor?

Unironically there's lots of companies who will clean your house for free right now, but their staff get to wear cameras while they do it. People dont seem to care.

fn-mote 1 hour ago | parent

The $15,000 to get started with the bipedal robot takes a long time to amortize a way.

lifeisloving 57 minutes ago | parent

Thats like one year of payroll taxes for a lot of jobs. And thats just one aspect of burden

Im completely against all of this just fyi, but the capital owners are certainly going to try and cut out as many humans as possible. Get ready for lots of poverty, crime and generally a worse society in <20 years.

p1esk 52 minutes ago | parent

how are you going to afford a house when you're competing against $3.00 hr labor?

You rent a couple of robots who will build it for you for $3/hr.

saretup 1 hour ago | parent

I’m sure once this category has traction and investments coming there will be open source models too.

amelius 1 hour ago | parent

SaaS -> RaaS ?

plutomeetsyou 1 hour ago | parent

What do you mean by "negative externality" in this case?

wolttam 1 hour ago | parent

Xiaomi-Robotics-1

fwlr 1 hour ago | parent

  Once a robot can do everything an IQ 80 human can do, only better and cheaper, there will be no reason to employ IQ 80 humans. Once a robot can do everything an IQ 120 human can do, only better and cheaper, there will be no reason to employ IQ 120 humans. Once a robot can do everything an IQ 180 human can do, only better and cheaper, there will be no reason to employ humans at all, in the unlikely scenario that there are any left by that point.

Machines are making great progress on the IQ 180 front, and now with this it looks like they’ve opened a beachhead from the other direction too. Classic pincer move.

  In the earlier stages of the process, capitalism becomes more and more uncoupled from its previous job as an optimizer for human values. Now most humans are totally locked out of the group whose values capitalism optimizes for. They have no value to contribute as workers – and since in the absence of a spectacular social safety net it’s unclear how they would have much money – they have no value as customers either. Capitalism has passed them by. As the segment of humans who can be outcompeted by robots increases, capitalism passes by more and more people until eventually it locks out the human race entirely, once again in the vanishingly unlikely scenario that we are still around.

https://www.slatestarcodexabridged.com/Meditations-On-Moloch

amelius 1 hour ago | parent

I think this is a bit too ambitious. Let's first have 1 robot reliably do things. And only then generalize.

dmje 1 hour ago | parent

~ whispers quietly ~ I’m not sure of the point…?

amelius 1 hour ago | parent

Looks like they are not solving any hard problems yet, but just want to setup a platform so they can be acquired for big $$$ once a community finds working solutions.

GaggiX 1 hour ago | parent

I feel like robotic tasks by LLM models and similar are very much underexplored, a few new frontier models are now able to do very simple tasks but hopefully there would be more competition in the future, this one was the first one that offers an API for this task specifically, maybe in the future if more models come up there will be a dedicated OpenRouter category, that would be cool.

atleastoptimal 1 hour ago | parent

What happens when robots can perform all manual labor better and cheaper than humans, and AI can perform any task on a computer better and faster than humans? Will everyone politely accept losing their job and hoping that their UBI payments will be enough to preserve their old lifestyle?

arctic360 1 hour ago | parent

So we’re one step closer to Judgment Day then. Nice.

baalimago 55 minutes ago | parent

How is this cheaper than (sadly) one of the 1/1,000,000,000 humans who can do the same?