Interesting indeed. Does such a finding suggest any worthwhile easy-to-try 'treatments' that may help alleviate symptoms?
I don't know much about the biochemistry here, I assume this is not something like GABA that can be directly supplemented. But maybe there are precursor nutritional and supplemental substances that can help these people upregulate how much of the glutamate molecule in question the body can produce.
There isn't enough information to start doing that. Consider: UV exposure results in sunburn, cellular damage, and increased skin pigmentation. We have medication that reduces skin pigmentation. Should we give it to people who experience chronic sunburn?
Unless you can get the blastocyst and fetus to take supplements, any treatment would be attempting to undo the effects that have already taken place.
For now, your best options are ESDM, occupational therapy, modified CBT, ABA, or neurofeedback, depending on your circumstances and presentation. Except for neurofeedback, these are behavioral approaches, so the architectural and neural activity variations aren't directly addressed.
Receptors quite readily remodel in response to external factors. It is one of the things antidepressants do.
To me it's kind of the biggest red flag here, if it's really about receptors then autism should be far more plastic than it is currently defined to be (which is kind of silly since at the moment any sign of plasticity puts you outside one of the hard criteria for an autism diagnosis - so almost definitionally, it can't be the answer).
Meta comment - what a weird comment to downvote. I am expressing curiosity in good faith after reading the article, with a fairly logical follow up. What is the point of commenting in this community if it's primarily cynicism and negativity?
> Now, a new study in The American Journal of Psychiatry has found that brains of autistic people have fewer of a specific kind of receptor for glutamate, the most common excitatory neurotransmitter in the brain. The reduced availability of these receptors may be associated with various characteristics linked to autism.
Reduce receptors. This might suggest a _developmental_ or genetic link. Think of this more like "height" or a particular "facial feature" of a person.
God, why are so many people commenting out of their depth today.
> Reduce receptors. This might suggest a _developmental_ or genetic link. Think of this more like "height" or a particular "facial feature" of a person.
No. This isn't how it works at all. Receptor counts are extremely plastic, able to change within a weeks and in some cases hours. This is how you get drug tolerance.
No, "AI" is software, and software is a tool, and tools aren't people that should pay taxes.
You wouldn't charge your CNC Machine taxes for the productive labor it produces that could have otherwise been done by a dozen blacksmiths.
By all means have corporate and sales taxes pertaining to the owner of said tools though. Even as a right-leaning individual, it's become pretty clear to me that corporations pay too low in taxes compared to the broad 'middle class'. Corporate tax cuts don't help the common man. An extra few hundred in their pockets each month certainly would though.
Costco doesn't seem to be like a monopoly, broadly speaking they compete with many grocery stores and bulk food outlets. That being said they often have solid inventory, and the samples used to be a nice touch until all my local locations got way too crowded.
Who else competes in that specific market though? Sam's Club and Smart-and-Final are the two I can think of, and it's been a while since I've seen either one of those. Oh, and actual restaurant supply stores, but those are different, imo. Costco's not directly competing with Safeway, for example,
as they are different parts of the market.
They seem decent enough. I barely play games these days, so I don't fully understand the value they add. Just seems like a convenient app store that lets me port my collection across different computers.
That convenience is everything. Doing it well, and not falling into the trap of putting profit (too far) above users is the challenge that is too hard for other players (except maybe GoG) to get right. It's like WiFi. You go somewhere, connect, it works, and then you don't think about it unless it's surprisingly fast, or there are problems with it. Everyone else's offerings on this space just feel janky and liable to take your money for some reason. Steam, for the majority of its users "just works". That's not to say there are zero buys with the software and that nobody has valid complaints about it, but just that in general it's great.
It's still facing the headwind that a lot of people still don't believe that Steam can give you a lean-back experience which is fun like a game console. Some people still think PC games all have sweaty keyboard and mouse control schemes and those crappy huge joysticks from the 1990s that were always falling apart and had to be recalibrated every few minutes -- and that's what is keeping the PS5 alive.
I loved Pebble back in the day, and Eric is a great guy and friend to entrepreneurs trying to build cool things.
I do wonder how a modern revival of Pebble will compete from a product perspective within the current landscape. Obviously there's the high-end Apple Watches, but there's also incredibly cheap and long battery life products from China that you can see on Aliexpress and similar. Fitness tracking is another related niche that seems oversaturated, unless you do something really unique in biometrics sensing.
So it seems like a hard market to get back into, curious where they take things.
I used a super-cheap Chinese smartwatch (Amazfit Bip S) for years and recently switched to the Pebble. The Bip's battery lasted forever and it did check a lot of feature boxes, but overall it was clunky to use and not in any way hackable.
I switched to a Pebble 2 Duo recently and while the features are comparable on paper (multi-week battery life, reflective display, basic health tracking, etc.), everything is just nicer on the Pebble. The software is thoughtful and fun and there are tons of third-party apps, so it can do all kinds of things the Bip could never do.
There really isn't a huge market for this kind of thing; most people, including nerds, want a watch with a brightly colored screen and tons of health metrics and service integrations. I imagine Pebble will stay a boutique brand this time around.
If there is market for long lasting watch, I think it is if it looks like a traditional round watch. Or if it can work as outdoors watch. Garmin is moving from transflective to AMOLED for better colors, and there might be spot for rugged, long-lasting, cheap watch.
I think Eric has more-or-less implied that they will probably make a Pebble Time Round successor (no doubt with worthwhile battery life this time, given how much more the Duo is)
> They sold the whole production run of Pebble 2 Duos,
They actually sold more than the whole run; I ordered one, and recently got an email informing me that they don't actually have the parts to fulfill the order.
The key value of Pebble to me was its incredible C SDK that made it super easy to write custom apps for it. I remember way back I got full turn-by-turn navigation working on it.
> Pebble 2 Duo is sold out! We are not making more. If you want a Pebble, I recommend pre-ordering a Pebble Time 2 soon.
Is this supposed to be a collector's item? I'm not sure I'd want to invest in an ecosystem where damaging the device means I'm out or stuck waiting in line for replacement - with no guarantee the new device will be similar enough.
People comparing this to GPT-2 is very interesting. While it sounds like a nice analogy or even a good story to investors, the fundamentals are very different.
To train GPT, all of the training data (the internet of text, scanned books, etc) had already existed, even before the GPT project began. Arguably, the compute required (for GPT-3) also already existed, even before GPT-2.
The GPT project really just came down to investing in all of the pieces to take the ideas from a 2017 research paper to the next level. Nobody knew if X thousand GPUs, plus all of the internet's text, plus neural network transformers, would work out. But somebody took a risk in putting together the existing pieces, and proved that it can.
There's no analogy here to humanoid robotics. Not only is the data required for neural network operated humanoids close to non-existent (at the scale needed), but the nature of the data itself is enormously more complicated that taking a list of tokens in a vocabulary, and outputting 1 more token from the same vocabulary.
That being said, I still applaud the ambition of the Figure team. While I think it's clear they are presenting incredibly cherry-picked examples, they aren't trying to mislead consumers with a product for sale (because... they can't). Instead, they are productizing important research to investors, who would otherwise waste money on less important and less ambitious projects. So overall I find projects of this nature to be a net positive for technical innovation.
Could we do RL in simulated environments, and use a vision LLM to provide the verification? I.e test a policy then take a 2d image of the end state, VLM yields 0 or 1.
Another idea: video extension model as a world model. We fine tune Sora on first person robot videos (and we train another model to predict actuation states from FPV). Then we extend the video using Sora “a robot in first person view finishes moving laundry from washer to dryer”. Then predict actuation states from the extended video?
Isn't that assuming training methods remain the same?
It seems like learning from the environment will be a requirement for robots to scale. My understanding is that research has been yielding new architectures that might have that type of real-time, general intelligence but we haven't seen that similarly large investment yet.
We don't really need an analogy here as we just have to look at ourselves, we are the analogy. New training data comes from experiencing the world and learning from failed tasks.
That's a cool little robot, and I see the appeal, definitely as an educational toy. I don't think the fidelity is there for real autonomous research. But the bigger issue imo is that there's no way this should cost $2000.
You've got a $250 computer, some lidar+camera sensor for maybe $1-200, 6 servos, and cheap plastic. Plus you want to charge a $50/mo software subscription fee for some software product, whatever I guess that's beside the point.
No shade on the idea because low-cost robotics is an unsolved need for the future. But this current iteration is just not competing well with other alternatives. Perhaps this is more of a comment on what we can accomplish in the West vs what's possible in Asia.
Actually the BOM cost required to make something stable that can execute manipulation tasks well enough is around $1k+ hence our price. You will find very cheap robots that can pretend to do what this one can, but in practice won't work well enough.
As for the unitree robot, this one is not unlocked for development, does not have onboard GPU, and does not have an arm. If you want it, check the price they give, it's very prohibitive.
You could attach a cheap arm to it but it would also not be stable enough for AI algorithms to run it. We're researchers ourselves, we would have made it cheaper if we could, but then you just can't do anything with it.
Our platform will deliver the experience of a real AI robot, anything cheaper than that is kind of a lie - or forces you to assemble and calibrate, which we do for you here. It is just the nature of trying to deliver a really complete product that works, and we want to stand for that.
I don't want to be too negative, but all your demos seems extremely silly.
Sure, the package is really interesting and definitely got me interested. But not one of the demos seems like a good use of the hardware. If you want to position yourselves mainly as an educational tool I don't think that is a problem. But if you want to target the 'maker' community I think you should put some thought into that.
For example, you could change the 'security guard' demo into a 'housekeeper' demo. You make it roam your house during the day and keep an up-to-date list of things you need to buy. I think this should work reasonably well for laundry and cleaning products. And after you have some historical data you could even do some forecasts about when you need to buy things again.
Another example would be to have it integrated with weather data and when it starts to rain it goes around the house to check if all windows are properly closed. On this same note it could keep track of the window state during the day and send you a reminder to open/close some windows if the temperature/humidity is above/below some threshold.
I think that by having some more 'useful' examples you should be able to get more attention from the 'maker' community. My guess is that a lot of folks that are heavily into home automation would love to have a device like that help with random things around the house.
Best of luck with your product, and I hope you succeed because this idea looks really exciting.
This does not sound negative to me and actually is great to read because this is definitely in the list of potential use-cases so we could make a video for it!
That's just one example that came to mind. I guarantee I could dig for 30 mins and find a mobile manipulator platform from China that kills it on hardware-to-price ratio that is either 'open enough' or could be made so.
As someone who's dabbled in this before, I guess I'd rather just sit down and plan a BOM and do it myself if that's your markup anyways. Not that it's totally unreasonable for people who just want something super simple out of the box that works.
My general commentary is just that it's sad how much basic servos and what not cost in North America. We've completely ceded this industry to Asia.
Our servos come from Asia. If you can find a platform with everything we have for around $1k BOM happy to review it but we've been pretty deep in picking our components.
Also, fair to say that if indeed you're the kind of person who likes to assemble all of this yourself, you're not directly in our target :)
This is more for AI / software folks who don't want to have to assemble and calibrate everything and risk having an arm that is not repeatable and thus can't actually properly learn. We have seen many folks spend a weekend or more trying to put these together and end up with a barely working platform and then be disgusted of AI robotics
Actually the reason is that with the Unitree products if you want the Python SDK the price jumps to $5,000 for the same hardware. At least it was the last time I checked earlier this year.
As a side note, the previous generation of research platforms for that size made in Asia were the Turtlebots, which go for that same price, but without GPU, arm...
I would say the problem is that most manufacturers, including chinese, sell you platforms that are not reliable enough for AI manipulation, and there's a race to the bottom for it, to which we try not to participate to
> I would say the problem is that most manufacturers, including chinese, sell you platforms that are not reliable enough for AI manipulation, and there's a race to the bottom for it, to which we try not to participate
Pretty lofty claims though, really think you're so above everyone on quality at this price point? I know what dynamixels are capable of, and I see the jitter in the demo videos.
Why aren't the manipulator specs easily accessible on the website? Have you run a real repeatability test? Payload even?
It's a neat high-fidelity garage build platform, but I don't see any reason to assume this price premium is due to hardware quality.
That's fine, but for future reference, robotic arms should have their specs listed and quantified - stuff like reach, payload, repeatability. If I'm a researcher, how do I know if this arm can do what I need? I can only infer so much from a few demo videos.
Final comment I'll say, it's a weird and tough price point. Actual research labs would rather spend $20,000 on a very high quality and likely larger high-fidelity platform. A random hacker or grad student will need some real convincing to shell out $2,000, sub $1K might better serve them. So what's the target customer profile exactly?
I encountered similar issues developing a $3K plug and play robot research arm in the past. The economics are awkward. You can actually just spend $5K and get a really good second-hand industrial robot (maybe even first-hand now from China). Or you could spend $500 and get a 6 DOF platform at least as good as your current platform's arm and then buy the sensor separately and bolt it to your workspace - bam, done. And no, the software isn't that important, servos are easy to work with...
Therefore my 'in between platform' was stuck in a hard place. I made some one-off sales, but never really scaled the business, which is what would be needed for any fancy "we're the platform where people do AI" vision to manifest to investors. Hardware is tough - they'll see your numbers and easily pass. They'll realize you need sales in quantity to get anywhere meaningful otherwise.
So I wanted to share criticisms and my experience so you can look ahead to likely challenges and hopefully get further. Best of luck.
Absolutely, the link I sent you has these specs you mentioned listed.
And yeah, I agree this mid-market is indeed tough, but this is the upper price I was looking for when I started with my AI background and bought a similar-price turtlebot then struggled to put a cheap arm on it. Anything under this is really bad for algorithms, although you can reduce it with just the arm and clamping it to your workspace as you suggested but then you don't have mobility.
I will keep your comment in mind, and thank you for the thoughtfulness. You might be interested to know that we intend to show something bigger not long from now. But this is, as you said, more for investors.
For now I'm content if there's enough people that want this one
The kind of person who would buy this doesn’t care whether it’s $2000 or $5000 probably. They care more about whether it actually exists and will arrive. Complaining about price, especially for something so niche, is useless feedback if you’re not actually in the market for one.
Stuff like this is sad, especially looking at the costs involved.
It just shows the stark contrast: China is interested in building and being competitive (through unruly means as well as legitimate ones) while the US is a 'lawfare society' prioritizing paperwork and bureaucracy and not moving to help actual physical industries that matter.
We don't need more of our economy relying on lawyers and paper pushers. We need builders and innovators back at the forefront. China gets this.
Agriculture has a lot, utility services including fiber internet, electrical, and natural gas, many credit unions, there are a few retail stores like REI, mutual insurances, a number of pharmacies and homecare and other health services are co-op, many other worker co-ops, and there are a decent number of housing co-ops. Other than maybe a few rural fiber co-ops most are not super fast growing businesses, and they lack attention seeking rich owners, so they don't get a lot of attention, but co-ops as a whole has steadily gained more market presence nearly across the board over the decades.
> Are you being snarky and suggesting that employees deserve the same upside that founders deserve
The founders are excluded from the employee compensation discussion. They own the company because they founded it. Nobody thinks they just put the equity into a structure that nobody owns.
The question is whether all employees are compensated equally, which is a very important detail. Giving everyone the same salary is very different than giving everyone the same total compensation.
For early/mid stage startups - this is an awful position to take. These orgs are heavily influenced by who they hire - what you pay defines your incentive structure.
Does the world class engineer or business development lead just take it easy and travel around after they join?
Does the new manager push the team and business forward or prioritize stability?
Do engineers spend their time on reactors and impressive sounding projects or figuring out what customers need?
Do people feel lucky to have a seat in the org or do they spend their time complaining and looking for the exits?
Money isn't the only lever, but its a strong one - startups will never compete with established firms on cash outlays.
People are paid salary and awarded equity based on supply/demand for labor, the marginal product of that labor, and the amount of risk engineers are willing to accept by joining a startup. It's an economic transaction, the same as buying office equipment and signing contracts for cloud resources. Trying to imbue mysticism into it is just asking to be lied to by your employees
There is no mysticism in incentive structures. My point was rather that if you provide strictly below market compensation (as most startup equity is positioned these days). You are likely to get below average talent, or below average results from poor incentives.
Im not saying that you should pay below market rates, im just saying that the equity calculation is just about supply and demand. It has nothing to do with fairness
It's not so much a question about fairness, just that the employee and employer are playing different games. Acknowledging this and devising a compensation strategy which aligns incentives is important.
Employers play an iterated game where they will hire/release/develop many workers, Employees play a single game where they choose the firm that maximizes their compensation offer.
Once the employee joins, the incentives flip - employers can take advantage of the fact that employees can't move in less than a year to maximize output, while employees can take advantage of their influence on the organization to minimize expectations.
Hence employers offer strong bonuses, or pay above market to avoid this behavior. Supply/Demand influences what companies pay - but isn't the only influence.
Thinking that you can stiff your employees on equity compensation and have it go unnoticed is imaginary. Employees convinced of outsized valuations for equity compensation will quickly become disillusioned.
Would love to engage in a discussion with you on this. How would you describe "deserve" in the sense of compensation? I agree with your premise that what you get is ultimately bound by the ceiling of the payer's generosity and your ability to negotiate.
But what sorts of things input into the function of "deserve"?
Everyone deserves healthcare, a place to live, food to eat. Some people deserve to live happy lives and some people deserve to rot in prison. These are about your personal conduct and how much you contribute to society.
How much equity or salary you get in a company is a function of supply/demand and the marginal product of your labor. I would say there are probably fewer CEOs who can take a company from startup to unicorn status than there are really good founding engineers out there, so CEOs tend to get more equity in a company. Sometimes the founding engineer knows something that nobody else in the world does, so their equity reflects that. It's also a reflection of how much risk the engineer is willing to take on (they'll probably take a salary cut to be a founding engineer, and they also risk the company randomly running out of runway and finding themself suddenly unemployed).
But it has nothing to do with what you deserve. Maybe if the CEO/President is a sentimental type, he'll award you equity based on how much he feels you deserve but ultimately it's about supply and demand.
If a CEO puts in 90 hours a week at a tobacco company while his engineers put in 20 hours a week, does he deserve lots of money (and therefore a more comfortable life) because he puts more effort into killing people? Or does he deserve every bad thing that happens to him because he decided to spend his limited time on this earth making it a worse place?
That isn’t a snarky position; early employees in high output orgs like this generally work just as much as founders do.
The founders aren’t really taking on that much more risk than the rest of the early team; it’s the VC’s money, not theirs.
I absolutely don’t agree with the idea that employees deserve the same upside as founders (because I think initiative and persistence against adversity/inertia is insanely rare and valuable and should be rewarded immensely), but it is not an insane proposition.
It’s especially popular among people who think the actual work output is more important than the leadership initiative. Both are obviously essential, and founders do both, while employees do only the first (or they’d be founders themselves).
We don’t need to define it; employees define it by who they choose to work for given the equity granted to them by the founders.
If they didn’t like the deal, they would become founders themselves, or choose a company that offers a better deal.
It turns out that leadership drive and the compulsion to bring something new into existence from scratch is actually quite rare.
Your figures seem to be roughly in line with what the employment market has settled on, although price discovery could be better (most employees don’t get to see the cap table during hiring negotiation, which, IMO, is wrong).
I don't know much about the biochemistry here, I assume this is not something like GABA that can be directly supplemented. But maybe there are precursor nutritional and supplemental substances that can help these people upregulate how much of the glutamate molecule in question the body can produce.
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