No, we're quite happy doing that. On behalf of the German people I wish to thank everyone involved for the thoughtful suggestions and intelligent way to approach a possibly interesting topic though. I can tell your hearts and minds are in the right place.
I don't think it is a uniquely German thing to trust the old institutions - which I think is what allowed Wirecard to do wire fraud. I'd say all of Western Europe is rather naive to Kremlin's shenanigans.
True. But, had they succeeded at conquering the world, they might have given their supporters the status of supreme human beings, at least on paper. It's good it didn't work out that time, but, it seems, some people want to try a variation of it again to see if it sticks.
They campaign for traditional values and opposes same-sex marriage, immigrants, and political elites, yet their leader Alice Weidel is a former investment banker who lives in Switzerland and is in a relationship with a woman.
How is that not a scam?
If it would work, it would be mildly useful. Actually, if it would work, that would be more exciting by itself than it would be useful.
But it doesn’t, really.
I assume you got a spouse or parent do all the laundry for you? I’m not sure you realize how spoiled you sound.
Seriously a laundry folding robot excites me much more than a CLI that can generate code. I enjoy generating code myself! I don’t enjoy laundry. Total killer app.
I just found out about them. To me it seems their core product is "boring" industrial robots with some AI fluff on top, which imho is smart because you can capaitalize on the hype without having it be pivotal to their entire business model. What I find interesting is the robot-as-a-service model.
Microsoft owned Bungie when they named their assistant Cortana.
Microsoft acquired Bungie in 2000 and released the Cortana assistant in 2014. It wasn't a stolen name. It was purchased and part of their portfolio for over a decade.
Halo had nothing to do with windows. They literally looted that character, maybe ‘legally’ yes but that doesn’t do anything to finish the ‘theft’ of them taking a character developed by a game studio, and using their likeness in an utterly unrelated context as some sort of cringey tie-in.
A couple decades ago, in Brazil, the parking lot used next to a popular Microsoft training center was called South Park. The contact e-mail was "cartman@southpark.com.br".
"Existing investors including Sequoia, Lightspeed, Greenfield, Kindred, Lingotto and Promus Ventures participated alongside new backers Cherry Ventures and European Tech Collective."
You move to USA from a 3rd world country, take money from the Americans, Arabs and the Chinese, hire bunch of Israeli, Pakistani, Canadians, Romanians and Russian engineers and and you become an American success story.
You found a robotics company in Germany and you instantly fail the purity test, you are American company if you took too much US money, you are actually Polish if you hired too many Polish engineers etc.
Yeah well HN is predominantly for and by American audiences I think and that already explains a lot of the attitude towards non-USA. A lot of Americans seem to think they are the main character in every story, and even if they are not, they try their best to somehow alter the narrative until they are.
A lot of Europeans are salty about the continent's decline into near irrelevance in terms of leading edge innovation. It's 90% the US and China at this point. But would be great to see that change.
After WWII Europeans decided to build an egalitarian society and focus on wealth creation, peace and cooperation. Pre WWII they were just too much for the world, as the concentration of powers, including clash of ideologies and need of survival, led to ultra competitive environment at a cost of aforementioned values. They were a leading edge once, due to continental race of industrialization. Because of this structure basically 80% of the world was under European rule. They just prefer watching from the backstage now. Let’s pray this continues.
Unfortunately I don't think that it looks promising for US either. "It's 90% the US and China" started to look more and more like the joke about how US and Albania together form the greatest military power and US isn't the US in the joke.
What US has a great entrepreneurial culture but it is extremely inefficient and the Chinese appear to be innovating much faster with much less drama. Chinese phones for example have much better batteries and some other specs, Chinese are on par or even better in AI and really very few things are more advanced in US.
Maybe it wasn't good idea to give 100s of billions of money to a guy to spend on 3D avatars and goggles just because figured out social media? I bet you that if US had better distribution of wealth(not talking about socialism, just greater number of middle class people and even billionaires that are not all commanding 10s of billions) it wouldn't be 90% US and China but %90 US. This %90 US and China combination seems to be tipping more and more in China's favor.
If anything, US looks more and more like Europe these days with nationalism and desires to have a king and conserve instead of innovate.
There is a lot of innovation happening in Europe, it is just that Europe is better in small and medium businesses than startups that become unicorns and tech giants. Interestingly that has always been the case, so it isn't even a recent development. For example while Ford is known to have invented the assembly line, in Germany it is the car supply industry that always came up with innovations and the car manufacturers then just put the components together to make full cars (sure, this is a simplified view). So there are some large companies, some of which are known and very successful worldwide, but they are not usually thought of as innovators. Large companies in Europe don't take real risks, so it falls on small companies that do that with limited funding. It's just a shape of the economy that Americans have a hard time to wrap their heads around.
I have traveled the world and the United States is functionally different than every other nation state on the planet.
The primary reason people immigrate to America is so that they can make money or become wealthy in some way. That’s it, there’s no other driver, so in general (not universally) the public doesn’t care whether you get your money from, cause they figure it’s yours now.
Why is that? It’s because it’s the simplest country to start a company and tons of liquid money is here.
You literally only have to have a legal resident of a state create an LLC with somewhere between 10 and $50, and you can start accepting payments for services the same day as incorporating the organization.
The regulations are only on enforcement when they get caught, and fines are usually manageable if you’re profitable, for the major majority of labor activities.
I just don’t think people understand the uniquely anarchic reason America continues to dominate capitalism: “Nobody is practically going to stop you from starting something cause you just move states which have different laws but the money flows fine”
The CEO did move to the US “to focus on the fastest growing market”. Usually that means that they start building an engineering org there and embracing a more US working culture.
Feels like eventually this company ends up being based there and no longer an “EU” company.
To be fair, it all depends on the definition you choose. It's often useless to have a general definition. If you try really hard you can claim that Apple is an Irish company or Chinese company. I always buy my MacBooks From Ireland and I can track it arriving from China.
No need to be defensive. It's simply true, and I say that as a European. The money and attitude required for it is just not present in Europe. German money is much more conservative and risk averse. So the funding will have to be from the US. It's perfectly justified to roll one's eyes when these cases are presented as if Europe could produce these companies by itself.
I agree and I am not against taking US money at all. People want to build things and people with money who want to partner with people who want to build things are usually in USA. US has an amazing business and entrepreneurship culture and the capital.
My view as well, as an European. For decades already I've been working for US companies remotely; and not for the love of the people for sure. But I do love their businesses' unquenchable thirst for new shiny toys. Always pumping money into innovation.
I don't mean startups here, I mainly mean established ones.
Talking with European-funded companies, there is usually much less investment into tech. Older tech, cheaper tech, less talent, random outdated practices. Literally next door they've got an US investor or even a big US customer and it's like night and day.
Money is effectively global these days. A lot of the money in the AI bubble is from all over the place, including Saudi funds and the ubiquitous Softbank.
It matters more where the money goes, in this case into European innovation.
People demanding the perfect isolated national champion that takes no foreign money, no foreign workers, no foreign inputs, and uses no foreign services are going to be disappointed.
The risk of having primarily foreign, especially American, investors is that the company will leave the EU. Like what we just saw happen with Heart Aerospace [1]. EU needs its own investors.
yes, but valuations are dogshit, which means capital is scarce, runways are too short, products end up so-so, and startups fail before they gain mindshare, not to mention the long enterprise sales cycles
What does "from USA" actually mean? Say I'm a European investor, I've invested my European-earned salary into a company with their HQ in Europe, registered in Delaware. Lets say that money 10x, is that money "from Europe" or "from USA"? Does the paying user-base geolocation matter or what is it that matters to you here, where the business is registered, actually located or something else?
And, secondly maybe more important question: Who cares? As long as the business doesn't host their data in the land of the non-free, aren't affected by the whims of the current Tsar and can't be put offline by the flick of a switch, I don't really mind if the money comes from Australia, South Africa or India.
If you can get him in time, plus are willing to risk unknown quality of his work. Reliable professionals tend to be booked long in advance, at least where I live.
Depending on the task, a human doing it may be highly discouraged by H&S regulations, or the insurer.
Even on individual small building sites in France I'm now seeing mini-diggers instead of human shoveling, everywhere, or tile elevators (for a 3 man roofing team!) instead of the stereotypical exploited immigrant manual labourer. These are justified by insurers quoting such a high price for covering the expected accident and long term health costs of human shoveling or tile carrying to roofs that buying the machines is cheaper.
Mini diggers are cheap to rent for a few days on a job and you can shift absolutely tons more in a single day than a labourer can do in a whole week.
If a roofing company can complete three jobs in a month compared to one job without a goods lift then renting one for each job makes economic sense, especially if it's physically easier too.
I agree, should have mentioned that it must help productivity too. I was just surprised to see it on even the smallest building sites, like a 2 story house, where I thought the bother wouldn't be worth it.
I don't know enough about airline finance to understand if this is a simplification or not. Are engine users really billed by the kilonewton-hour or by something simpler like a service hour? It seems like kN-h would be a hard thing to meter to everyone's satisfaction and some simpler proxy would do just as well.
I'm not sure a robotic bricklayer is going to open up construction to anyone who doesn't otherwise have expertise in the area. You still need design/engineering/permitting etc. The robot just replaces the grunt work.
Huh? I thought that was their entire selling point. That you can have a factory that needs retooling and instead of having to carefully plan and buy robots yourself, you can hire these guys instead.
AI as a service is hugely successful, at least on the stockmarket.
It makes more sense for complicated products, and things where any one user's demand is uneven. Industrial "plant" construction equipment is often leased for similar reasons.
The comments here are just another reminder of how US-centric HN has become. Whenever there's positive news from Germany or elsewhere in Europe, people are quick to dismiss it. But the moment there's negative news, everyone jumps on the bandwagon to bash it.
There was an interesting study showing that while social mobility is generally greater in Europe than in the US, the European tendency to underestimate vs American to overestimate it, results in broad agreement that social mobility is in fact greater in the US.
Poking holes in every new idea is a pan-European pastime - it's how people in this region of the world managed to survive despite exhausting its resources.
Two aspects: industry & research (worked in both).
Research is using a lot of VLM (or whatever Jim Fan decided to call them this year) when it comes to manipulation (robot arm). For navigation it is still a little mixed bag, best to see self driving advancement for that. On the control side (cool jumping humanoid) it's a mixture of RL/IL and traditional control(MPC) and running a slow ass VLM/LLM is not an option.
SOTA is hard to say in the sense that there's just so much variation to the task you want to measure. This can be considered SOTA in one aspect https://youtu.be/3aQWvdCac9o As it's an robot that can lift a heavy unknown object without information about it, RL trained in simulation, but at the same time trained eye will see that the task is made simple by fridge being put on a pallet making the bottom of it exposed for grabbing. On the other hand you have PI (Chelsea Finn / Sergey Levine) https://youtu.be/cRZNwgvcWUg that can do nothing of the thing above but can cook food and fold shirts. Deformable objects and tools interaction is hard so their demo is more focused on understanding and interacting with the world compared to the fine motion like the Boston dynamics one. The latter is also teleoperated, and teleoperation tend to look good but have pretty sad deployment success %
Industry is... Depends on startup vs established. VLA/LLM is flashy but really even 95% success rate is not enough for factory/logistics automation if the failure is unrecoverable, and VLM/LLM is far, faaaaaaaaaaaar from that success rate. In controlled settings traditional pipeline of detection + motion planning often outperform VLM/LLM hybrid models by a mile. Established ones have run humanleess logistic centers for many years now and they're seldom VLA stuff, although there is an interest in using it for the 5% failure cases. But they're not interested in SOTA.
Even if VLA reaches 100% success rate it still isn't viable. No factory operator wants a cloud hosted model in the critical path. And nobody is (yet) building a server rack that can be air gapped in the factory to run VLA, and these models don't run on a Mac Mini. Probably an opportunity for something like Oxide to pick up, but they have more profitable segments to go after.
I'm not sure if the following has any point, really.
First, my father worked as an industrial mechanic in an amazon distribution hub. But he couldn't touch any of the automation. Amazon would bring in German contractors for months at a time to work on the robots, conveyor belts, automation hardware. They made 2.5-3x my father, had 6 weeks vacation, didn't pay for lodging in the US. To me, Amazon's idea of US jobs were the backbreaking labor 'pickers' and 'sorters'.
Second, half my professional career has been in office/factory configurations. Where the engineering offices are glued onto some factory. We're HEAVILY invested in automation. The factory workers are barebones crew designated by union minimums. We have a team of 2-5 people (really, 2 engineers, 3 technicians) who design, build, program, and maintain automated stations. Ranging from a robotic arm picking different components in the correct amounts and putting them in a box, heavy forklift-like robots moving product around, and robotic arms performing some manufacturing task.
What happens when those 2 engineers get sick? or retire? One guy who built half the factory is in his 50s. the line could go down with no backup.
Why haven't we hired like 3 junior people to apprentice with the senior guys? They make machines that make money! The new investment in people is happening in Germany, Poland, Scandinavia
Germans in Germany are cheaper. Globe-trotting contractors are probably well-paid specialists. GP is probably not commenting on the German labor market.
> They probably just used the Germans because they are cheaper.
I think a more pressing question is why businesses all over, but especially in America, are so obsessed with cost-cutting to the exclusion of everything else that they're openly, predictably setting up said business to implode once the wrong people leave.
Like I dunno, being a pink-haired lesbian communist I am, I'm somewhat suspect of my own opinions, but that said, I personally have no problem seeing that investing in your employees is probably a good idea if you want your business to remain sustainable for the long-haul. But nowadays all corporate leadership is fixated on the next handful of quarters at most. The less-skilled only on the next quarter and no further. I don't personally think capitalism and corporations are good ideas in general, but they also seem to be failing quite spectacularly at their own stated advantages at this point which I don't think gets brought up enough.
My guess would be that big German companies like to sell and insure their industrial equipment wholesale. For example, if you buy stuff from Siemens, everything in the factory must be as per how the applications engineer described it - which is to mean you have to buy everything from them and set it up exactly as they want - otherwise there goes your insurance/warranty.
This isn't exactly cheap, it's worth it for the big players, but needless to say, I'm not exactly enamored with the practice.
This is basically how the rest of the world feels with US tech giants.
It's not necessarily a bad thing if there's balance to it. Maybe it's OK if Germans are great at industrial automation and Americans are great at writing word processors. But I'm not sure there's a nice balance to it. Especially if you're in a developing country which is good at neither of those things.
> The new investment in people is happening in Germany, Poland, Scandinavia
These are shitty job tbh. Friend of a friend worked on designing and testing windscreen wiper motors in Poland. Company did a round of layoffs and there are zero jobs in the country. There is one job in US - nobody will sponsor a visa. He doesn't know the language to work in Asia.
>What happens when those 2 engineers get sick? or retire? One guy who built half the factory is in his 50s. the line could go down with no backup.
A lifetime of working in mission critical environments taught me one thing. When people leave, nothing happens. People come and go, and everyone is replaceable, even those who believe the company will fail without them. Most departures barely make a ripple. With today's advances in technology, it's only becoming more likely that none of us will be needed down the road.
The US government spends $1.4T on education. They already invest more than anyone else. That spending may not be productive but no one can credibly say the US hasn't spent enough money on education.
The US on a PPP-adjusted per capita basis is on the upper end of OECD but 1) not the top in the world, and 2) not even uniquely high among what Americans would call their "peer countries" (Denmark, Germany, Australia, Canada, etc)
And education is unfortunately one of those things with diseconomies of scale. The US has worse wealth disparities, health disparities, nutrition disparities, and greater cultural variation than all of our peers.
The US isn't spending more than everyone else, but you really would expect them to have to do so to reach parity with others.
> Amazon would bring in German contractors for months at a time to work on the robots, conveyor belts, automation hardware. They made 2.5-3x my father, had 6 weeks vacation, didn't pay for lodging in the US. To me, Amazon's idea of US jobs were the backbreaking labor 'pickers' and 'sorters'.
Saw a major brewery that operated like this too. Flew in Belgian technicians to do the really valuable work.
It’s weird that people are celebrating the end of Europe here every day because they „milled themselves with regulations” but one German company does well and it’s a mass freak out?
Because it's always extremes in the media? One day Germany is on the brink of collapse because so called economic scientists (in Germany we have a group opf them working for the government that are colloquially called "sages" https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sachverst%C3%A4ndigenrat_zur_B...) predict zero growth. Next week suddenly it's an boom because some so called economic scientists predict a GDP growth of 0.2%
You must be insane to think that investment is happening in Germany. We have negative real economic growth, by far the worst of all EU countries.
Your contractors made so much not because they are from Germany but because they were freelancers. And if they weren't, they probably had less take-home pay after taxes than your father had, despite the company paying 3 times as much. I'm an engineer with 10 years experience and I make 65k before taxes. Barely over 3k net per month. Many others would be happy to even have a job in the current economic climate. And before you Americans come with "muh free health care": I wait 9 months for an appointment and paid almost 10k last year out of pocket for orthopedic work.
The manufacturing is more important than the automation, that’s how Midea was able to buy KUKA.
Being in the loop of using the tools gives you the power.
Best to have both, but if we can keep the toolmaking in Europe and Japan instead of China and move manufacturing back in to the US we are in a much better position.
The market is definitely there, and Kuka was sold for $4 billion, but whenever venture capitalist are involved, the hype machine is activated and it's difficult to see through the smoke and mirrors.
Coming right up: Belgian Hybrid shower curtain and defense startup Aperture Science raises 780M Euros, while biotech unicorn Umbrella in on the verge of coming out of stealth and releasing a vaccine for cancer.
I remember few years ago couple of German fintech startups reached more than 1B$ valuation. Had it been the case in US, those startups would have gone IPOs and started expanding worldwide.
However, raising capital in Europe/Germany is so hard. Still majority of the Germans don’t invest their money and just let it depreciate in their savings accounts. Because of that most startups are funded by US venture capitalists. Hope this one would be able to sustain the valuation
> Still majority of the Germans don’t invest their money and just let it depreciate in their savings accounts
Do you have a source on this? I live in Germany and most people I know either invest into stocks (safe, boring ones), invest into a house/apartment/land or similar, or are too broke to even save anything at all (most people).
You must be interacting with young people because they have started investing after Covid with neobrokers. But the real wealth is with boomer generation and they just let it rot in savings accounts. Maybe things would change once the wealth transfer from boomers to millennials happens
What was that US robotics startup that got tons of press like a decade ago for their "human safe" cobot you were supposed to be able to program by just dragging its arm through the motions? It had a goofy LCD face, I want to say the co. was called US Robotics or something but changed their name, all I’m finding is the modem company though.
> What was that US robotics startup ... "human safe" cobot you were supposed to be able to program by just dragging its arm through the motions?
You're probably thinking of Rethink Robotics in Boston.
Its first model was the two-arm "Baxter", very popular at universities and research labs. The second model was the single-armed Sawyer, much more capable, with built-in vision, which sold several thousand units to small manufacturers.
Rethink Robotics was co-founded by Rodney Brooks. The robots were originally built in the Boston location, and later by a contract manufacturer in New Hampshire. In 2018, the company was unable to find a buyer and shut down operations. The brand and the remaining inventory was purchased by a German distributor, but eventually the robots were sunset, afaik.
robotics-as-a-service makes the upfront cost easier, but downtime is still the factory's problem. i'd be more interested in the service contract and recovery time than the valuation.
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[ 1.7 ms ] story [ 13.7 ms ] threadGermans are totally capable of their own scams (see Dieselgate or Berlin airport or ...).
The downvotes are puzzling.
But it looks like they're trying to build something that is actually useful.
By the time we get robots capable of folding laundry, we'd already have solved many, many other use-cases.
Seriously a laundry folding robot excites me much more than a CLI that can generate code. I enjoy generating code myself! I don’t enjoy laundry. Total killer app.
What a weird accusation. I do this myself, it takes like half an hour a week and is actually quite relaxing.
I'm not sure you realize how spoiled people sound who would spend thousands of dollars to replace such an insignificant inconvenience.
Microsoft acquired Bungie in 2000 and released the Cortana assistant in 2014. It wasn't a stolen name. It was purchased and part of their portfolio for over a decade.
Eyerolling to anyone with half a brain.
But maybe most people don't have half a brain.
this one doesn't sound that evil though? Just a simple portmanteau that may not sound as stupid in German?
Edit : typo
> Why Mordor Intelligence Private Limited is a Great Place To Work
https://www.greatplacetowork.in/great/company/mordor-intelli...
> Pottery Workshop. Roleplays in Entrepreneurship Training
https://www.mordorintelligence.com/about-us/csr
Feels a bit more like some Doctor Who-ish happy-sounding evilcorp than Omni Consumer Products
What share of the investor money is from USA?
Don't know about Lingotto. Looks Italian.
Cherry Ventures is the only German investor. ETC is EU.
I read it as confirmation that there is apparently no shortage of investor money in Europe, since US investors are willing and able to invest here.
Reminds me of this: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/vHfbUIQeW_A
You move to USA from a 3rd world country, take money from the Americans, Arabs and the Chinese, hire bunch of Israeli, Pakistani, Canadians, Romanians and Russian engineers and and you become an American success story.
You found a robotics company in Germany and you instantly fail the purity test, you are American company if you took too much US money, you are actually Polish if you hired too many Polish engineers etc.
It's just weird attitude.
What US has a great entrepreneurial culture but it is extremely inefficient and the Chinese appear to be innovating much faster with much less drama. Chinese phones for example have much better batteries and some other specs, Chinese are on par or even better in AI and really very few things are more advanced in US.
Maybe it wasn't good idea to give 100s of billions of money to a guy to spend on 3D avatars and goggles just because figured out social media? I bet you that if US had better distribution of wealth(not talking about socialism, just greater number of middle class people and even billionaires that are not all commanding 10s of billions) it wouldn't be 90% US and China but %90 US. This %90 US and China combination seems to be tipping more and more in China's favor.
If anything, US looks more and more like Europe these days with nationalism and desires to have a king and conserve instead of innovate.
https://artificialanalysis.ai/leaderboards/models
The primary reason people immigrate to America is so that they can make money or become wealthy in some way. That’s it, there’s no other driver, so in general (not universally) the public doesn’t care whether you get your money from, cause they figure it’s yours now.
Why is that? It’s because it’s the simplest country to start a company and tons of liquid money is here.
You literally only have to have a legal resident of a state create an LLC with somewhere between 10 and $50, and you can start accepting payments for services the same day as incorporating the organization.
The regulations are only on enforcement when they get caught, and fines are usually manageable if you’re profitable, for the major majority of labor activities.
I just don’t think people understand the uniquely anarchic reason America continues to dominate capitalism: “Nobody is practically going to stop you from starting something cause you just move states which have different laws but the money flows fine”
https://dealroom.co/charts/us-hubs-map
60% of the entire world's startup funding comes from the US.
Feels like eventually this company ends up being based there and no longer an “EU” company.
Whatever makes you feel better, I guess?
I don't mean startups here, I mainly mean established ones.
Talking with European-funded companies, there is usually much less investment into tech. Older tech, cheaper tech, less talent, random outdated practices. Literally next door they've got an US investor or even a big US customer and it's like night and day.
It matters more where the money goes, in this case into European innovation.
People demanding the perfect isolated national champion that takes no foreign money, no foreign workers, no foreign inputs, and uses no foreign services are going to be disappointed.
I read it as confirmation that there is apparently no shortage of investor money in Europe, since US investors are willing and able to invest here.
[1] https://www.heartaerospace.com/newsroom/heart-aerospace-relo...
And, secondly maybe more important question: Who cares? As long as the business doesn't host their data in the land of the non-free, aren't affected by the whims of the current Tsar and can't be put offline by the flick of a switch, I don't really mind if the money comes from Australia, South Africa or India.
Oof. Amazed that venture-backed robotics companies are still interested in making this work.
Even on individual small building sites in France I'm now seeing mini-diggers instead of human shoveling, everywhere, or tile elevators (for a 3 man roofing team!) instead of the stereotypical exploited immigrant manual labourer. These are justified by insurers quoting such a high price for covering the expected accident and long term health costs of human shoveling or tile carrying to roofs that buying the machines is cheaper.
If a roofing company can complete three jobs in a month compared to one job without a goods lift then renting one for each job makes economic sense, especially if it's physically easier too.
It makes more sense for complicated products, and things where any one user's demand is uneven. Industrial "plant" construction equipment is often leased for similar reasons.
They, per the article, have set up manufacturing there and a research lab in SF.
The co-founder has also relocated to the USA.
Much of the dismissal I think doesn’t come from a bad place - people see potential in europe, why can’t we be a similar market?
Poking holes in every new idea is a pan-European pastime - it's how people in this region of the world managed to survive despite exhausting its resources.
[1] https://insight.kellogg.northwestern.edu/article/how-closely...
Research is using a lot of VLM (or whatever Jim Fan decided to call them this year) when it comes to manipulation (robot arm). For navigation it is still a little mixed bag, best to see self driving advancement for that. On the control side (cool jumping humanoid) it's a mixture of RL/IL and traditional control(MPC) and running a slow ass VLM/LLM is not an option.
SOTA is hard to say in the sense that there's just so much variation to the task you want to measure. This can be considered SOTA in one aspect https://youtu.be/3aQWvdCac9o As it's an robot that can lift a heavy unknown object without information about it, RL trained in simulation, but at the same time trained eye will see that the task is made simple by fridge being put on a pallet making the bottom of it exposed for grabbing. On the other hand you have PI (Chelsea Finn / Sergey Levine) https://youtu.be/cRZNwgvcWUg that can do nothing of the thing above but can cook food and fold shirts. Deformable objects and tools interaction is hard so their demo is more focused on understanding and interacting with the world compared to the fine motion like the Boston dynamics one. The latter is also teleoperated, and teleoperation tend to look good but have pretty sad deployment success %
Industry is... Depends on startup vs established. VLA/LLM is flashy but really even 95% success rate is not enough for factory/logistics automation if the failure is unrecoverable, and VLM/LLM is far, faaaaaaaaaaaar from that success rate. In controlled settings traditional pipeline of detection + motion planning often outperform VLM/LLM hybrid models by a mile. Established ones have run humanleess logistic centers for many years now and they're seldom VLA stuff, although there is an interest in using it for the 5% failure cases. But they're not interested in SOTA.
That is not true anymore. Nowadays factory operators are quite open to cloud-hosted products when it saves operating costs.
I hear Nvidia sells server racks.
The next level up of decacorn is sub 100 so if we only tracked that it’d be a bit limited.
First, my father worked as an industrial mechanic in an amazon distribution hub. But he couldn't touch any of the automation. Amazon would bring in German contractors for months at a time to work on the robots, conveyor belts, automation hardware. They made 2.5-3x my father, had 6 weeks vacation, didn't pay for lodging in the US. To me, Amazon's idea of US jobs were the backbreaking labor 'pickers' and 'sorters'.
Second, half my professional career has been in office/factory configurations. Where the engineering offices are glued onto some factory. We're HEAVILY invested in automation. The factory workers are barebones crew designated by union minimums. We have a team of 2-5 people (really, 2 engineers, 3 technicians) who design, build, program, and maintain automated stations. Ranging from a robotic arm picking different components in the correct amounts and putting them in a box, heavy forklift-like robots moving product around, and robotic arms performing some manufacturing task.
What happens when those 2 engineers get sick? or retire? One guy who built half the factory is in his 50s. the line could go down with no backup.
Why haven't we hired like 3 junior people to apprentice with the senior guys? They make machines that make money! The new investment in people is happening in Germany, Poland, Scandinavia
Anyway, good for RobCo
Lol. Lmao, even.
They probably just used the Germans because they are cheaper.
I think a more pressing question is why businesses all over, but especially in America, are so obsessed with cost-cutting to the exclusion of everything else that they're openly, predictably setting up said business to implode once the wrong people leave.
Like I dunno, being a pink-haired lesbian communist I am, I'm somewhat suspect of my own opinions, but that said, I personally have no problem seeing that investing in your employees is probably a good idea if you want your business to remain sustainable for the long-haul. But nowadays all corporate leadership is fixated on the next handful of quarters at most. The less-skilled only on the next quarter and no further. I don't personally think capitalism and corporations are good ideas in general, but they also seem to be failing quite spectacularly at their own stated advantages at this point which I don't think gets brought up enough.
German engineering salaries are definitely not cheaper. If you want cheaper then hire people from Poland, Romania or even Spain, Portugal.
This isn't exactly cheap, it's worth it for the big players, but needless to say, I'm not exactly enamored with the practice.
It's not necessarily a bad thing if there's balance to it. Maybe it's OK if Germans are great at industrial automation and Americans are great at writing word processors. But I'm not sure there's a nice balance to it. Especially if you're in a developing country which is good at neither of those things.
These are shitty job tbh. Friend of a friend worked on designing and testing windscreen wiper motors in Poland. Company did a round of layoffs and there are zero jobs in the country. There is one job in US - nobody will sponsor a visa. He doesn't know the language to work in Asia.
He switched to software.
A lifetime of working in mission critical environments taught me one thing. When people leave, nothing happens. People come and go, and everyone is replaceable, even those who believe the company will fail without them. Most departures barely make a ripple. With today's advances in technology, it's only becoming more likely that none of us will be needed down the road.
I believe Napoleon once said "the graveyards are full of indispensable men"
And education is unfortunately one of those things with diseconomies of scale. The US has worse wealth disparities, health disparities, nutrition disparities, and greater cultural variation than all of our peers.
The US isn't spending more than everyone else, but you really would expect them to have to do so to reach parity with others.
And how much they lie, too. After all Trump promised to bring jobs to the USA. Well, he lied. And so did Amazon etc...
Saw a major brewery that operated like this too. Flew in Belgian technicians to do the really valuable work.
A tell-tale sign that you're touching the third rail.
Your contractors made so much not because they are from Germany but because they were freelancers. And if they weren't, they probably had less take-home pay after taxes than your father had, despite the company paying 3 times as much. I'm an engineer with 10 years experience and I make 65k before taxes. Barely over 3k net per month. Many others would be happy to even have a job in the current economic climate. And before you Americans come with "muh free health care": I wait 9 months for an appointment and paid almost 10k last year out of pocket for orthopedic work.
Being in the loop of using the tools gives you the power.
Best to have both, but if we can keep the toolmaking in Europe and Japan instead of China and move manufacturing back in to the US we are in a much better position.
However, raising capital in Europe/Germany is so hard. Still majority of the Germans don’t invest their money and just let it depreciate in their savings accounts. Because of that most startups are funded by US venture capitalists. Hope this one would be able to sustain the valuation
Do you have a source on this? I live in Germany and most people I know either invest into stocks (safe, boring ones), invest into a house/apartment/land or similar, or are too broke to even save anything at all (most people).
You must be interacting with young people because they have started investing after Covid with neobrokers. But the real wealth is with boomer generation and they just let it rot in savings accounts. Maybe things would change once the wealth transfer from boomers to millennials happens
You're probably thinking of Rethink Robotics in Boston.
Its first model was the two-arm "Baxter", very popular at universities and research labs. The second model was the single-armed Sawyer, much more capable, with built-in vision, which sold several thousand units to small manufacturers.
Rethink Robotics was co-founded by Rodney Brooks. The robots were originally built in the Boston location, and later by a contract manufacturer in New Hampshire. In 2018, the company was unable to find a buyer and shut down operations. The brand and the remaining inventory was purchased by a German distributor, but eventually the robots were sunset, afaik.
Weren't germans so accurate in the past? The AI slop degrades all quality.
I prefer the variant in the movie from 1987.