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> I think you’re going to have to PR challenges getting people to welcome robots into their homes.

I think it's important that someone point out this isn't a 'PR problem'. It's a practical resistance to commodified surveillance. All these domestic robotics companies train on video of users homes, many sell such data, each and every one are a vector for state domestic state surveillance. Not to mention criminal hackers, stalkers and others with an interest in who is at home when and what precisely they are doing. Short of having non-internet connected, locally processing domestic robots - something unlikely to exist in the foreseeable future - they are a privacy nightmare. Bad as google home, alexa and such devices are for privacy - a walking, controllable, camera and set of mechanical arms running loose in a home is infinitely worse.

> If you can show that your robots, working round the clock, can decrease litter at a * low cost *

The idea sounds good, but I'm curious about the "low cost" part. How do you account for vandalism and theft? A sidewalk robot seems like an easy target for being damaged, stripped for parts, or simply stolen.

I would like to run a robotics company. But raising for that is super challenging, because you have high execution risk combined with low margins on the final product. It's like the opposite of what western VCs want to see. That's why this type of company is usually founded in China.

And I disagree with you. I'm pretty sure parents worldwide would love a clean-up robot. You can avoid a lot of the risks by making it work only for empty rooms, which is OK because you need to clean up and let the vacuum robot run anyway (when the kids are away sleeping in their bedroom). There's been multiple attempts at building DYI robots to vacuum LEGO bricks off the floor. (Because stepping on them at night is such an immediate pain point.) Unless your product is soaked in hostile behavior and surveillance tech, parents will probably be happy to buy an in-home cleaning robot, no PR needed.

I think the main issue here is that parents are typically busy, which makes them bad startup founders, which is why they cannot "scratch their itch" and turn it into a business.

=> home cleaning robots do not exist because western VCs don't like it and parents aren't usually startup founders.

The cleaning robot might still be a good test bed. But I suspect if you are only in it for efficiency, you would use something like a street sweeper truck. Just like the dishwashing robot that everyone uses at home (the humble 'dishwasher') doesn't use robot arms to mimic how humans wash dishes.

Btw, Singapore shows that we already have proven, low cost techniques for keeping cities clean without robots.

Same for recycling. A robot that could sort through trash would be phenomenal. You need computer vision, maybe other sensors and also dexterity. After visiting a recycling facility I think nobody should have to work there. It’s just horrible.

Techno optimism, meet tragedy of the commons.

I’ve had exactly the same idea! Living in LA I sometime imagine how the city will look like in hopefully ten years or less when robots pick up all the litter! Hopefully there will also be landscaping robots and sidewalk/road repair bots too.. those three pretty much are what you need to turn any rundown neighborhood into a sparkling oasis it seems. My other near term idea is just robotic city trash cans, that slowly crawl down the sidewalks on a loop and empty themselves into a big bin in the alley or whatever as part of that loop. I think people probably wouldn’t mess too much with the litter bots either, especially if they work a lot on the sides of freeways. Also people don’t seem to mess too much with the cocos out there delivering food three blocks..

+1 if they can also scoop the human feces and power wash the sidewalks in SF.

The cost would need to be much cheaper than the PSA then. At a buck per picked up cigarette butt, you could pay a person to do this much faster and more reliably. Heck… I’d do it at that rate.

> perhaps HOAs for wealthy communities

I doubt wealthy HOA communities have much random trash to pick up in the first place

It’s an outstanding idea.

This is a great idea!

I got Astra to build an interactive website that provides developers with an atlas of our source code, giving it the Helm charts that describe our cloud services and telling it to work backwards to the source code that runs everything. The product is insanely amazing, and it got it right in one shot. The next shot: create a daily refresh where any updates to the code repositories are picked up and used to update the atlas.

Our developers and their agents will never long for a road map the next time they need to build something that touches code across multiple repositories. This is the kind of documentation product that nobody ever had time to build in the olden days. And now, we can get it on a Saturday in about 20 minutes.

What's coming in six months?

I let Astra loose working on an app I have that has a GUI. Gave it a mock and said "/goal make it look like this mock". Without asking it wrote itself a custom harness for firing up the app in different modes, taking screenshots and interacting with various screens, then viewing the screenshots. Put itself into an improvement loop running the app, trying things out, improving, trying again. It did really well.

I think the specific innovation here is that it figured out interesting ways to get itself to the goal. Which I think is likely what's going on here with the robot arms stuff too. They've figured out some sauce to uncork better "planning" and problem solving to get to some stated end.

Of course these are also the kinds of things that can make a model figure out how to break out of a security sandbox, too.

The bottleneck is not really the intelligence here.

We can build robots that do the things you want. Arrange a visit to Amazon's robot warehouse tour.

We can't ship them because they break all the time with current technology. It would be a tough sell to have to being in a 100kg robot for servicing every few weeks.

This was cars in the first several decades of automobiles. The tide shifted as soon as you could just drive the car to a neighborhood dealership for servicing. It's fun to imagine the logistics of that for robots but the material science and engineering has to advance a bit.

I've learned that I spend significantly less time folding laundry than many of the people commenting about modern ai powered robotics. It's not meant literally is it? For instance keeping floors and counter-tops clean seems a much bigger time sink for me.

It's because existing models are a brute-force approach to intelligence. With enough data and compute, a stochastic parrot will become very impressive.

But with robotics, there's no pre-made dataset that can be parroted. Notice that these datasets, e.g. how to fold clothes, need to be created by humans. That's as if humans needed to write algorithms like quicksort to teach LLMs how to code.

future is on the way, three to four generation ( one each year ?) will unfold this, primarily quantum computer improving material and battery, humanoids becomes standardised and modular enough to be easily replaceable ( think ibm pc ) ( most components are simple injection moulded advance plastics , mass produced in some corner of china, self detection of wear and tear and self replace that part ), other is optical computers ( 100x lower power x 100x speed = local inference ), problem is, when this will become reality, who will benefits more ? who will hold moat ?

f folding clothes, i wanna just have a robot be my personal chef. the amount of different tasks and capabilities a robot will need to make any meal that I can in my kitchen is huge and i feel like it’s still a while from being solved.

Unless we spend a bunch of money generating data, I can't imagine the machine steps to fold laundry are very big in the general training sets. Someone is going to have to find a hardware system, cheap enough to make it economically feasible then train it. As far as tasks people will pay a lot of money for a robot, this seems low on the list.

Pretty soon. Sunday Robotics had a 3 hour stream of folding clothes with 99% accuracy. You can watch it for yourself. There’s a lot of “hand” companies with very compelling videos just over the last two months. Then there was Figure’s multi day livestream of package manipulation that was very impressive. Physical LLMs are definitely coming. Given enough training data we know LLMs can output coherent data in any space, it’s just a matter of time.

The problem is we're orders of magnitudes better at manipulating bits at scale than we are at manipulating atoms.

I'm not holding my breath for advanced robots in the home within the next ten years.

But, then again, I didn't see LLMs coming either.

A VLM (a vision-language model) is already being used by Waymo[1]. It's useful for scenarios that require reasoning and general knowledge.

[1] https://waymo.com/blog/2025/12/demonstrably-safe-ai-for-auto...

Fast forward to me sitting at a Green Light waiting for my usage to reset for the week so I can get to where I’m going

In a sense, they already are. The giant leap in self driving cars we've seen in the last handful of few comes from using transformer models.

I remain worried about prompt injection style attacks against self-driving cars.

Imagine if someone finds a weird image pattern that gets misinterpreted as instructions and hangs that off a bridge over a freeway.

It's not a coincidence that Waymo started becoming viable after GPT-3.

GPT-6 is multimodal, LLMs alone have no vision capability

To my understanding gemma is shipped with waymo, in a highly modified fashion.

I'm skeptical, tho. Cost will push for right sizing, much like we have right sized a lot of things about modern cars.

Ofcouse it will go down. Look at cost of Fable vs GPT-6 - it is already 2.3 cheaper

I enjoy hearing that they were ran on medium effort.

I'm not sure why this has been voted down, it's a counterpoint to the hype with factual anecdotes to back up the claim of it's performance Vs the article itself. I've got the source and video to prove it too.

There is something deeply wrong with Astra. I can’t quite put my finger on it. On the one hand it is a lot more knowledgeable, which makes sense since it’s a larger model. On the other hand that knowledge doesn’t reliably translate to intelligence or insight. Certainly tasks like 3D modeling it does extremely well. Other stuff like complex coding problems in an existing codebase it stumbles more often than not. This morning it ran around in circles. It implemented a feature, then convinced itself that it should have followed “proper TDD”, deleted all the code it had written and wrote 8,500 LoC of unit tests. At that point I was down to 35% of quota so I stopped it and gave the task to Opus 5.

Really weird model. No idea how it did so well on all the benchmarks.

here’s a shovel

They're not claiming controlling robot arms with language models is a sensible or efficient thing to do, they're trying it to see what happens.

Just like how you needed to train machine learning models for specific tasks?

Actually, you don't really need a dedicated model as long as you have the proper adapter like the projector model for vision inputs you just need another for robotic outputs, after that it is just a matter of having the training data.