SpaceX has acquired xAI, the company announced on Monday, merging two of Elon Musk’s most ambitious companies into the most valuable private company in the world.

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[–] 9 points 9 months ago (2 children)

They seem so bad for factory work though? One of those robot arms would work so much better than some shitty humanoid robot.

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  • [–] 1 point 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

    The world is made for general purpose humans including vast amounts of factory space. There will always be things for a general purpose robot to do that'll be cheaper than designing and manufacturing a low volume bespoke robot.

    Like Amazon is trying and building robots to do a lot of picking, but they can't even fully automate that.

    It's more a question of can they solve it (huge if) and even if they do, how many can they actually sell.

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  • [–] 0 points 9 months ago

    Not defending Musk, but the point of humanoid robots is to perform a job currently done by a human worker without modifying the process or tools. Dedicated robot arms are fantastic for factory work, but the jobs they do have to specifically be designed to be done by a robot arm.

    As an example, you can't put a robot arm at a human workspace and have it open a plastic bag, put an item inside it, and pick up a tape gun seal it with tape. For a robot arm to do that, the entire workspace, and extra robots would have to be added and programmed to accomplish the same task.

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