Dream-1

This post feels really weird, DreamLabs isn’t some well known project like Anthropic or OpenAI and Dream-1 wasn’t really an awaited release.

But somehow this was pushed to the front page of HN before receiving a single comment with a title reminiscent of a major LLM release. Like I can only find 1 other reference historically to this lab and nobody noticed it or cared.

Tested one prompt in the playground ("Move the elephant next to the ball") and this is the generated recorded video link:

https://dreamlabs.ai/playground/?play=a05f0e641559490e#sim

This is all very cool and something I would like to play with. However I also can’t mentally bridge this over to the actual automation, manufacturing, and warehouse work I’ve been involved with throughout my career. Everything about this looks optimized for getting-started tasks to play around with, but I’m left feeling that it’s not the right fit or even a good starting point for real automation work.

Everything about this page strikes me as having been optimized for investors, not customers. Why would they cite a literal toy as a leading example of automation work? It doesn’t make any sense unless they’re maximizing for what investors remember seeing in headlines, not what actual automation customers would be interesting in paying for.

I think the product they’re selling is their equity, and their target customers are acquirers. The demos and the model feel like marketing material for that highly specific goal, but they forgot to include enough about how it could be useful to anyone.

Obviously AI written text. At least there is real content here, however I do find the order and the way in which it was written and portrayed to have a heavy AI smell. That is, it's hard to read and follow the clean narrative, it isn't written the way a human who was trying to convince another human would write, and is less effective because of it.

I don't like the direction this is going in - so a third party is going to be able to control a robot in my house?

we shouldn't aim for economies of scale on this problem as there are massive negative externalities attached to it. Hopefully, a chinese lab will release an open source version soon.

Their "breaking the flywheel" strategy is predicted on people using their enabled robots in real world tasks. And from the demos it looks like they are unusable for real world tasks.

Looks like they are not solving any hard problems yet, but just want to launch a platform so they can be acquired for big $$$ once a community finds working solutions.

What happens when robots can perform all manual labor better and cheaper than humans, and AI can perform any task on a computer better and faster than humans? Will everyone politely accept losing their job and hoping that their UBI payments will be enough to preserve their old lifestyle?

I think this is a bit too ambitious. Let's first have 1 robot reliably do things. And only then generalize.

How is this cheaper than (sadly) one of the 1/1,000,000,000 humans who can do the same?

So we’re one step closer to Judgment Day then. Nice.

> Imagine two Microducks folding your laundry, using their beaks as grippers.

Getting my meals prepped, flat cleaned and laundry folded is getting closer!!

I'm looking forward to robotics a lot because solving menial tasks will have a huge class impact as we can stop looking for ways to keep a portion of society suppressed and dumb.

One can dream, right?

  Once a robot can do everything an IQ 80 human can do, only better and cheaper, there will be no reason to employ IQ 80 humans. Once a robot can do everything an IQ 120 human can do, only better and cheaper, there will be no reason to employ IQ 120 humans. Once a robot can do everything an IQ 180 human can do, only better and cheaper, there will be no reason to employ humans at all, in the unlikely scenario that there are any left by that point.

  In the earlier stages of the process, capitalism becomes more and more uncoupled from its previous job as an optimizer for human values. Now most humans are totally locked out of the group whose values capitalism optimizes for. They have no value to contribute as workers – and since in the absence of a spectacular social safety net it’s unclear how they would have much money – they have no value as customers either. Capitalism has passed them by. As the segment of humans who can be outcompeted by robots increases, capitalism passes by more and more people until eventually it locks out the human race entirely, once again in the vanishingly unlikely scenario that we are still around.

I feel like robotic tasks by LLM models and similar are very much underexplored, a few new frontier models are now able to do very simple tasks but hopefully there would be more competition in the future, this one was the first one that offers an API for this task specifically, maybe in the future if more models come up there will be a dedicated OpenRouter category, that would be cool.

So looks like generalized actuator planning & control is possible.

This is just going to get acquired by OpenAI for their robotics department.

Yeah I said it. Time to start the countdown timer.

~ whispers quietly ~ I’m not sure of the point…?