from the tiipping-points-are-just-around-the-corner dept.
Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:
A report by The Financial Times has revealed Nvidia's plans to achieve this future. It highlights how Deepu Talla, Nvidia's VP of robotics, believes the robotics market has reached an inflection point where physical AI and robotics are about to take off in a big way.
"The ChatGPT moment for physical AI and robotics is just around the corner," Talla told the publication, adding that he believes the market has reached a "tipping point."
To capitalize on this, Nvidia wants to position itself as the go-to platform for robotics. The company already offers a full robotics stack. This includes the software for training foundational AI models on DGX systems, its Omniverse simulation platform, and the Jetson hardware.
However, things are set to accelerate next year, with Nvidia planning to launch its latest robot brain called Jetson Thor. This will be the newest addition to the company's Jetson platform, which is a line of compact computers designed for AI applications. Jetson Thor will be a model focused specifically on robotics, though.
Talla says that there are currently two key breakthroughs driving Nvidia's robotics optimism. First is the rise of powerful generative AI models. The second is the ability to train robots in these foundational models using simulated environments.
He stated that in the past year alone, this 'sim-to-real gap' has progressed enough to enable the combination of simulations with generative AI in powerful new ways that were not feasible two years ago.
[...] The robotics push comes as Nvidia faces increasing competition in AI chips from the likes of AMD. While AI still accounts for a massive 88% of Nvidia's $35 billion in quarterly revenue, the company is wise to explore new frontiers. After all, the robotics market is projected to soar from $78 billion currently to $165 billion by the end of 2029, per BCC Research.
(Score: 2, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 02 2025, @08:24AM
AI singularity around the corner or H1B visa for foreign "robots"?
I know which of the two Elon would prefer, so maybe NVidia would be wise to open its robotics platform to Japan and Korea market first.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 02 2025, @02:21PM (4 children)
Isn't anything constructed to help do any given task a robot of sorts .. even if it's a simple hand tool?
(Score: 3, Informative) by VLM on Thursday January 02 2025, @04:49PM (3 children)
I think they're trying to redefine the word "robot" to mean traditional robot but using a LLM instead of, or maybe alongside, a PID controller.
A 3-d printer is kind of a robot. What little I can find online about 3-d printing and LLMs seems to mostly be chatbot UI side not servo control side or g-code slicer generation side, so instead of clicking the "start" button on a web page you'd have a long slow verbal chat conversation to start your print.
In theory I think a LLM could generate openscad code, perhaps, although it would be painfully tedious to type all that is required compared to like "click in three different places in a CAD program". I suppose if you refuse to learn CAD it's better to do it with a LLM chatbot in hours than to not do it at all, even if you could do it in seconds with CAD.
Note how this is different than IoT where a sensor is just a sensor unless it has a wifi interface then its "IoT" not a sensor anymore. That did not go so well and perhaps that is why they're trying to redefine the word "robot" instead of creating a new word, maybe LLMoT for LLM of Things or similar.
Imagine the agony of trying to drive a RC car via a text chat session, instead of a steering wheel and throttle lever.
(Score: 2) by aafcac on Thursday January 02 2025, @05:34PM (2 children)
Robots are basically just tools that can operate on their own within some sort of a domain. So, your dishwasher is a robot. Those robovacs are robots, but a regular vacuum cleaner isn't nor is a typical coffee maker. The upper end probably is advancing due to technology allowing things to be done that weren't previously possible. I remember when I was a kid and a bipedal robot was just not something that you could do at home. Now, with enough knowledge you can design and build one at home, even if it's not as sophisticated as those ones that Boston Dynamics had doing basic parkour years ago.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Thursday January 02 2025, @07:55PM
It's certainly true that a lot of people use "robot" that way, but the original meaning (from RUR by Karel Capek) was an artificial human. Even in stuff written up through the 1940's it seemed to retain that meaning (with the variation of changing from meaning something based around advanced chemistry to meaning something based around electronics and metal working). It was only in the 1950s that ad men started changing the meaning to "any automatic machine". Even so, I rarely encountered it meaning "automatically operating machine" except in ad copy. Certainly Hollywood kept the original meaning, and shared it with the public. And Asimov's robots are the main encounter many have had with the word.
It's not correct to talk about the "true meaning" of a word, but I believe that the most common meaning of robot, up through the early 2000's was an essentially human shaped machine that could follow verbal directions and be left to operate independently. That non-"human shaped" machines should be called robots is quite plausible, but it was rare.
And I THINK that this is the meaning that NVIDIA is speaking towards...i.e. a non-"human shaped" machine that can operate independently from verbal instructions. AFAIK, the human shaped machines are a few years off, but I can easily see "usuform robots" being ready in a month or two. You just need to train them to only understand language that relates to their particular function.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 03 2025, @12:04AM
Does that mean anything that uses the Newton Raphson concept of deciding an action based on a previous attempt is "learning", hence "intelligent"?
This includes everything from a successive-approximation digitizer to the latest multivariable Kalman filters.
Are "filters" intelligent? I'll go as far as call my garden pruner "intelligent" as it makes a decision on which mechanical leverage it will use based on how wide it's jaws are open when I attempt to trim a branch with it.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Sourcery42 on Thursday January 02 2025, @02:36PM (6 children)
WTF are their marketing droids thinking with Jetson Thor? I don't need a robot to battle frost giants, but I might value one capable of tidying up the kitchen and cleaning the pet hair off the sofa. How is Jetson Rosie not the obvious choice? I feel like I've spent an inordinate amount of my adult life cleaning the damn kitchen. I've got machines to help with washing/drying clothes and dishes, but they still require quite a bit of manual labor to use. The robot that vacuums my floors does do a pretty great job on its own; I'd like more things like that.
They don't exactly say what the target market is here, but TFA does have a nice photo of a device that looks like Apple weighed in on aesthetics parked on a fast-food counter. Of course, NVIDIA just sells the platform. The rest is building devices that interact with the real world in a useful manner - that's the easy part, right? This surely isn't jazzy hands to juice their stock in the face of an already wild P/E ratio. We've had industrial robots, or at least highly automated assembly lines, for decades. Bridging that gap to the household or commercial settings...maybe I'm wrong, but I just don't feel like software is the only thing holding it back.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Thursday January 02 2025, @04:58PM
I think the ultimate hyperconsumer / startup idea to "disrupt clothing" would be to use spy cams to submit numerous pix of yourself in clothes and the contents of your clothes closet, and then the process would be Amazon delivers what the AI thinks you should wear every day and you put your dirty clothes in the trash compactor every day. I could see this selling to the type of people who live and work in startupLand. Crazy, but not as crazy as the Juicero and they got funded. I wonder about prior art on this obvious idea.
The dishes idea would be similar. Connect an LLM to multiple restaurant and grocery delivery services and perhaps a spy cam in your fridge and accelerate the delivery to trash compactor pipeline to max speed.
Possibly the best way to disrupt the waste of time would be to make it fun. I listen to audiobooks or music when I do housework, yardwork, work out at the gym, etc. Its my fun time not my work time. Possibly AI could gamify those experiences. Sext time with an AI GF if I fold my laundry fast enough to get enough laundry points. I'd rather get it from my wife for doing housework, although I suppose the AI GF would be appealing to singles.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Rich on Thursday January 02 2025, @05:42PM (3 children)
And you'd pay a grand or so. Someone else might value one capable of tidying up the Russians and cleaning the Arabs off the desert (under which whatever natural resources might be craving for Freedom and Democracy™). That someone else would pay a million or so. And order a million units as well. Which is about the only single source of money in the order of Nvidia's market cap, and they'll need that much revenue to maintain the stock value.
As with other early Silicon Valley products, the consumer market might get its spinoffs once the military is saturated or moves on to newer things, so one day you'll be amazed how tidy your kitchen can be.
(Score: 2) by Sourcery42 on Thursday January 02 2025, @06:42PM (2 children)
And there it is. You're on to something. That sweet, sweet military money. Killbots explains naming it after a violent Aesir versus a humble maid robot nicely as well. As far as the hardware side goes, I bet it is far easier to turn your enemies into red mist than to dry the dishes, fold the laundry, and get it put away in the right spots.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by looorg on Friday January 03 2025, @11:54AM (1 child)
I would, as previous commentator, much prefer a household bot that does chores for me. But I guess there is as noted that sweet sweet tax/military money for the killbots. If they wanted to see equal money tho -- sexbots. But somehow that would tarnish their brand ... Which is where the cleaning bot comes in again ..
(Score: 2) by Rich on Friday January 03 2025, @06:49PM
Looking beyond us nerds marveling over the amazing HD63C09E, I sense a market opportunity for Hitachi. It might have a vibration function to ... er ... loosen dirt crusts.
(Score: 5, Funny) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Thursday January 02 2025, @06:10PM
It's probably copyrighted until the 2363.