Jason Fox
4.7K posts
@JasonGFox
Founder at Noumenal Labs. Building Physical AI.
Why humanoid robots, why not? A rant. The humanoid form is the right form if you want generalized “physical AI”. As the method to train it will be human data, into a human-like robot. Then economies of scale will make humanoids cheaper than specialized robots due to mass production. Thus making it lucrative to get generalized AI. But there are four main issues: economics, data, hardware and distribution. Economics are a problem because unlike ChatGPT that can be a pocket lawyer (thus saving you $1000 an hour) most blue collar labor is much cheaper. Replacing a $15 an hour job with a $50,000 robot (that will perform more poorly) is not economical. Data estimates are Humanoid robot training data ≈ 0.000001% to 0.00000001% of LLM training data. The only way we bridge this gap is a massive data collection effort or very robust life like simulators burning through GPU farms all day. Hardware: Humans have around 250 DOF while the top of the line humanoids have around 40 DOF. Although we don’t need all this degrees of freedom that a human has to solve most tasks. Humanoids now only last about 1-2 hours on battery life, most aren’t water proof, and still far from parity with the human body. Distribution: Say we solve all the above 3 issues, we still need to mass produce the robots. “Physical AI” isn’t something we can simply access with a browser or a phone. You need to ship millions of robots in excess of 100-150 pounds that are more complex than cars all over the world. With huge raw materials and rare earth requirements. This will take time. So while everyone knows the future is humanoid, it will take longer than people realize to become disruptive. So don’t worry about those blue collar jobs being taken by robots for a while. But you know what will be lucrative in the meantime? Entertainment. That is why at @rek we are aware of the limitations of humanoids, and will bridge that AI gap with entertainment. Entertainment that will set the framework for a product category that will forever change our world. To become the next F1, with humanoids.
US vs CN robotics part II: K-Scale x.com/i/broadcasts/1…
I’m thrilled to share a blog post by @noumenal_labs: “From Natural Intelligence to Physical AI”: noumenal.ai/post/from-natu… Here’s the tl;dr: • Physical AI is the next big wave of research and development in the field of artificial intelligence. Its proponents claim that Physical AI holds the promise of revolutionizing industry. • But state of the art AI will not deliver on these promises, because it is not capable of understanding the structure, variability, and complexity of the physical world that we inhabit. • Noumenal Labs is a newly formed deep tech company that is laser focused on building digital brains for Physical AI — so it can be deployed profitably, efficiently, safely, and at scale. • We are using our unique, proprietary macroscopic physics discovery technology to build object centered world models that will power the brains of autonomous systems — unlocking machines that can act in intelligent and situationally appropriate ways in the real world, and that can adapt to a changing world in real time. • Driven by key insights from statistical physics and cognitive science, in particular by Karl Friston’s active inference framework, the approach pioneered at Noumenal Labs unlocks the capability of machines to represent the physical world in the same way we do, enabling them to act safely and in alignment with human values — and thereby, to deliver on the promise of Physical AI.
