The word on the street among the researchers I know from my grad school days is that this is basically a bunch of datasets that were created earlier on for specific papers, and the subset of researchers are repackaging them as a kind of weird academia twitter winnertakeall thing.
The author list also reminds me of the embarrassing practices of the physics community…
Nothing wrong with releasing a webpage with a list of datasets, but the press and need for a whole big announcement that claims it will change robotics makes them seem desperate.
Paper is pretty upfront about that, "we provide the Open X-Embodiment (OXE) Repository, which includes a dataset with 22 different robotic embodiments from 21 different institutions". Some of the data is new from Google's robots, but the rest is not.
The author list is long because Google is a big company with big teams.
Aside from this paper, I do think that generative modeling is going to change robotics. It seems likely that large transformer models could learn to do many simple tasks in response to natural-language instructions. This could be the burger-flipping robot.
The author list isn't long because everybody at Google got listed. There are a ton of full Professors in the author list. This is a cross-university effort.
They are attention-seeking, but they don't care about you, they want big grant money. Training is very expensive and it's a lot to ask for money for not just robotics hardware but now also big compute. Imagine trying to bid for a $100m H100 cluster like some sovereign nations.
I think one of the contributions is that the data are provided in the same format for all robot embodiments, i.e. action spaces, and observations. This way they can feed all the data to same model.
Why is it so painfully obvious that people with position piece blog posts do so to distance themselves or provide an alibi for the things they plan to directly contradict in the future?
Chunks of society, including basic services like gym, laundry, and transport are now locked* behind "apps" on proprietary app stores, and you need an officially sanctioned (Google/Apple has root) smartphone to even download them. If AI becomes "the next big thing", there will be no opting out of that either.
Okay now imagine you're a plumber. How are you going to advertise your services to get business? Put an ad in the Yellow Pages? Post flyers around the neighborhood? Make an ad on Craigslist?
It's easy to say "ditch all that crap" when you have other people in your corporation who use all that crap so you can just show up at your job and do your work. But the crap is still there, becoming a necessary tool for functioning in society, one impressionable teenager at a time.
Sure. But this is what is meant by "required to play the game". And it's also happening on a personal level--witness the number of events I haven't been invited to because I'm not on Facebook.
You are completely right about this being a shallow treatment of a complicated subject.
There are many different functions the concept of the "growth mindset" serve. Unfortunately, we do not differentiate between them, which as you pointed out can make quite challenging to even discuss.
For example, the OpEd by Hattie you linked is also a fairly undeveloped exploration of what we are really getting at when we discuss the growth mindset. On one hand, for example, it is a way to help children cope with psychological struggle. On the other hand, it is a paradigm by which we live and fit into societal hierarchical structures.
I would argue that although having a fixed mindset might be a "tool" to use so that you don't "try too hard and hurt yourself" (which is more or less what Hattie argues), it is a terrible general paradigm to live by as it is fundamentally, a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you are born "dumb" and unable to read, that will always be the case. Obviously this is not how brains work. The reasonable conclusion here is that the growth-mindset is the closer model to reality and the fixed-mindset is a tool to help handle "moments in time".
I have stayed in SF for almost a decade and have no plans to leave.
Many of my younger friends have moved to NYC (or elsewhere) and they have told me they don't like the overwhelming tech culture that permeate the bay drowning out the rest of the culture. I could see that happening to Seattle as well, but probably not NYC.
I can kind of understand it being like competing colonies of bacteria (each sub-culture). I think its pretty valid, but I don't mind all tech all the time ;D.
I also don’t mind tech all the time, and I also see it as competition among cities for young talent.
I guess my line of thinking is that young professionals will eventually find SF trendy again once NYC becomes passé for being too expensive, overhyped, attracting too many of the charlatans and clout chasers. People love different parts of the country for many reasons but I think in aggregate SF is generally a number 2 choice after NYC for many young professionals if cost is not a (big) factor. Which is why I think if the trend continues and NYC gets more and more expensive vs SF, 23 year olds will start picking SF over NYC
No disrespect. This article isn't terrible (and I did learn something practical), but isn't the underlying purpose of this post to advertise whatever service assemblyai.com provides?
Why is it necessary for MLOps product websites to have blogs? This content could also be posted on Medium or the author's personal project website and serve the same purpose (arguably helping the author's brand more effectively). The only downside would be that this startup would not get the indirect advertising.
Tech startups often invest a big portion of their marketing budget in creating useful technical content that people actually want to read. I found [0] yesterday which I think describes the "why is it necessary to have blogs" quite well.
Creating a good article takes dozens of hours to draft, and often many more to polish, edit etc. If you benefit from it, I'd suggest encouraging companies to do this more rather than buying paid ads etc (but I'm biased as I run a tech writing agency that helps companies implement exactly this, so take with a pinch of salt).
A fair response. I agree, I would rather see thoughtful technical insights than vanilla advertisements on reddit or whatever. That being said, the quality of these MLOps websites blog posts (excluding the one from OP) on average tend to leave a lot to be desired, seemingly trying to say _anything_ rather than _something_. Because of this, I tend to click the link, but back out when I see its true purpose is to be an ad.
Some MLOps product websites cross-post their blog articles to Medium, or even encourage authors to cross-post to their own websites/portfolios, as to your point. Obviously, this would mean designating a canonical link so Google doesn't penalize for duplicate content, but otherwise there's no reason not to cross-post.
It's almost as if governments are actually serving their constituencies...
Something that large corporations (or otherwise masquerading as NGOs) will most certainly never do unless it magically aligns with making them filthy rich in the process.
The author list also reminds me of the embarrassing practices of the physics community…
Nothing wrong with releasing a webpage with a list of datasets, but the press and need for a whole big announcement that claims it will change robotics makes them seem desperate.