Physical Intelligence is building a brain for robots

[apienx]

A 4 year old child has 16k wake hours x 3600 s/hour x 1^6 optical nerve fibers x 2 eyes x 10 bytes/s = 1^15 bytes (approximation by Yann LeCun).

Processing visual input is the current bottleneck for robots that want to make sense of the physical world. Glad somebody's looking into it (no pun intended). I just hope their plan is more sophisticated than throwing more computational power at the problem.

[Jensson]

You need much less if you are fine with horse level understanding of 3d environments. Those get to a working level much faster (hours) and are still good enough to navigate complex environments safely and not step on children.

Then you realize the limitation isn't the training data but the base model that was trained from hundreds of millions of years of evolution, and you start to see the real potential hurdle we have to clear.

[hn_acker]

> A 4 year old child has 16k wake hours x 3600 s/hour x 1^6 optical nerve fibers x 2 eyes x 10 bytes/s = 1^15 bytes (approximation by Yann LeCun).

Unfortunate typo. You meant 10^15 bytes at the end.

Thanks to your citation I was able to find a podcast transcript [1] with Yann LeCun's explanation:

> If you talk to developmental psychologists and they tell you a four-year-old has been awake for 16,000 hours in his or her life, and the amount of information that has reached the visual cortex of that child in four years is about 10 to 15 bytes.

The transcript is missing "the" (10 to the 15 bytes). The corresponding timestamp in the podcast on YouTube is 4:48.

[1] https://lexfridman.com/yann-lecun-3-transcript

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5t1vTLU7s40

[HeyLaughingBoy]

Is it? What if that 4-year-old child were blind? Obviously their concept of the physical world would be different, but is it any less accurate? If we remove the need for visual perception, thereby removing that bottleneck, how much faster would we be able to make progress?

[iambateman]

To keep the analogy going, we should be concerned about unregulated companies creating robots with superhuman capabilities and a four-year-old’s sense of the world.

Regulators need to get ahead of this and establish a federal framework for safe robotic entrepreneurship.

For example…does the second amendment give me the right to have a drone which is capable of autonomously shooting a deer? There will be tens of millions of people who disagree on that point alone.

And then we need international agreements - much like nuclear - governing what is “fair game” for the public to have access to.

We must pursue a robot-enhanced future, carefully.

[gibsonf1]

I would say conceptual awareness is a far bigger bottleneck than visual perception data.

[Invictus0]

1^15 bytes huh?

[kandu]

Non-paywalled version: https://archive.is/ZtfNh

[Jensson]

Why is OpenAI investing in startups? They invest 100 million in another as well. I thought OpenAI was building their own things as a non profit, why are they investing? Is it normal for non profits to invest like this? Do they lack confidence in their own stuff, do OpenAI have too much money they don't know what to do with?

"Norwegian humanoid robot startup 1X Technologies recently raised $100 million with backing from OpenAI"

https://www.cnbc.com/2024/02/29/robot-startup-figure-valued-...

[Palmik]

Yes, it's quite common, see for example:

https://mozilla.vc/

https://www.cff.org/about-us/our-venture-philanthropy-model

[Jensson]

Apparently it is a separate entity and fund, they don't invest money from OpenAI but money raised specifically for investing. So this doesn't say much about OpenAI, they aren't investing money they could use themselves.

https://www.businessinsider.com/openai-vc-fund-raised-10-mil...

[leesec]

1. They're not a nonprofit 2. They had shut down their robotics wing so now their using investment to get back into the game. 3. What's with this negative tone?

[notRobot]

OpenAI no longer operates as a non-profit. The "OpenAI" name has been a joke for years in tech circles for this reason.

[hamoodhabibi]

Asking this question on a platform pretty much aligned with Sam Altman and expecting real nuanced answer is unrealistic.

Remember they shut down the thread regarding Sam Altman's sister alleging she was molested by him.

Its just incredibly sad to see how society is quick to overlook one's transgressions if it stands to benefit from that individual. Artists, CEOs, politicians, celebrities.

Just one sick world and this blatant disregard for "non-profit" because bunch of men feel they were chosen.