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We're all speculating here. It's all going to depend on the timing and use cases. But imagine a factory that's sunk millions in capital for their human driven processing.
They can re-do all that with hyper-specialized machines, dozens of vendors, the nightmare of IT/OT interactions (doing a project on this right now in bottling actually). Which they probably do every couple of decades.
Or they can wait for a humanoid robot with these capabilities and drop them almost completely in-place.
Humanoid robots work with existing interfaces. With sufficient image recognition quality and human-like sensory capabilities, they're going to fit in way more jobs. Think of the difference in outlay between training a single humanoid robot to cut chicken legs (which is doable by illiterate illegal immigrants) compared to the expense of developing and deploying a hyper-specialized machine.
This would be more convincing if humanoid robots existed -- or llms were able to control them. If you ask an LLM "how do you break down a chicken?" it will probably give you a pretty good description that a human could follow -- this sort of thing is well represented in its training set. If you ask it for a program to activate the servos of a hypothetical knife-wielding humanoid robot such that a chicken if front of it will be disassembled, it will give you utter trash. (if it doesn't demur)
It's a pretty good example of the difference between an intelligence and language model actually -- a language model can describe things, and AI can do things.
All that to say, if you want your chicken factory automated, waiting for a humanoid robot so you can drop it into place is not a very effective approach. Buying some machines from the Dutch would work much better.
LLMs != AI. Critical here - the models for understanding physical feedback while cutting aren't going to be built from scraping Reddit.
One thing I will concede is that these hyper specialized machines are going to have other physical advantages. A humanoid robot will take up humanoid space. When you compare it to these automated cutting machines elsewhere in the thread, the latter has more throughput than a humanoid interface would at even superhuman speed.
Agreed!
(that means that there is no AI at all though -- and the sheer effort/$ being devoted to LLMs is if anything making it less likely that there will be anytime soon.)
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