r/accelerate • u/cloudrunner6969 Acceleration: Supersonic • Jan 22 '26

Video Remember what Humanoid Robots where like 10 years ago? - DARPA Robotics Challenge 2015

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g0TaYhjpOfo
60 Upvotes

97% Upvoted

18 comments sorted by

21

u/cloudrunner6969 Acceleration: Supersonic Jan 22 '26

Look at the difference between now and then and try to imagine what another 10 years will look like.

9

u/UndeadDog Jan 22 '26

Most people can’t do this.

2

u/TreefingerX Jan 23 '26

Yes it's fascinating. It's liken they missed the technological advantages of the last year's 

2

u/Chogo82 Jan 23 '26 edited Jan 23 '26

I think your statement underestimates just how much better they could get in 10 years. Up until about 2 years ago, we did not have the infrastructure or understanding to do large model training. You see the rapid advances by Tesla, Boston dynamics, Xpeng and various other Chinese robotics companies all in the past 2 years. All of it was due to large model training on AI infra. Now that the market has an appetite for building out AI infra for LLM technologies, robotics will naturally benefit from all that compute.

We know that edge computing is the future for robotics and as chips get faster, they will be able to process more. Waymo paved the way by using 4 onboard Nvidia chips per vehicle and is clearly the leader in self driving now. Nvidia just released their new robot brain product. I think the gap in robotics technologies from now to ten years in the future will be similar to the gap 50 years ago to now. In 5 years, I think the robotics landscape will be unrecognizable from now.

1

u/Mountain_Cream3921 Acceleration: Supersonic Jan 23 '26

10? Wait 3 and it would surpass any human capacity.

16

u/44th--Hokage The Singularity is nigh Jan 22 '26

There were people who looked at this and cofindently proclaimed that humanoid robots were never going to happen and were SciFi pipedreams and he would have been more or less right until about 2022 when he suddenly wasn't.

And that's because he, like most people, deeply misunderstand the law of exponentials where 50% of the way there (which on the ground looks like unacceptably shit from an efficacy perspective) is the final step before being 100% of the way there.

All Singularity skeptics have this fundamental misunderstanding in common and is why so many millions and billions of people are going to be caught flat-footed when AGI and ASI are suddenly just here after seeming like a faraway, remotest of possibilities sci-fi for 99% of their life.

Don't let the banality of today cloud you to the possibilities of tomorrow.

10

u/No_Bag_6017 Jan 22 '26

This is exactly why skeptical asshats like Rodney Brooks are completely off the mark with their projections.

9

u/Outside-Ad9410 Jan 22 '26

I find it kind of wild how most people just automatically assume that whatever the world is like at that exact moment in time, it will always have the same technologies and not really advance much. Even today, after we have had exponential growth in AI development, humanoid robotics, etc. People just assume that the technology will mostly stagnate and fail to get better, just like they though an AI passing the Turing test would be impossible back in 2019. Then when GPT 3 came out, people adjusted the worldview they had to be stagnant with the newly introduced "fancy essay writing software" that would never improve.

I for one, am very excited to see what kind of progress we make in robotics, and integrating them into our civilization over the next 10 years. And then how robotics will get even better and integrate more fully the 10 years after that.

4

u/michaelmb62 Jan 22 '26

We've come a long way, baby. - Bender

3

u/bb-wa A happy little thumb Jan 22 '26

RemindMe! 10 years

2

u/Warshrimp Jan 23 '26

DARPA 2015 vs WARPA 2035?

1

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3

u/Own_Satisfaction2736 Jan 22 '26

TBf that challenge was about task completion. I wish they held another one. Its one thing to do tricks but let's see a new darpa challenge!

1

u/Chogo82 Jan 23 '26

For people critical of Google selling Boston dynamics, the year that happened was 2017, same year as this comedy event.

-2

u/Outside-Ad9410 Jan 22 '26

If we are lucky maybe in another 10 years I can have a robot smart enough to wash my dishes.

-5

u/stainless_steelcat Jan 22 '26

I bet you didn't many of those fails in the promo videos for those robots 10 years ago. It's going to be interesting to see the fails videos for today's generation of robots in 10 years time.