Humanoid Robots: The Scaling Challenge - IEEE Spectrum
It takes more than building a humanoid robot to build a humanoid robot product.| IEEE Spectrum
Engineers are masters of scale. They harness energy from the sun, wind, rivers, atoms, and ores. They manipulate electrons, photons, and crystals to compute and communicate. They devise instruments that detect perturbations in the fabric of space-time. And they grapple with challenges—anticipated or not—that are presented by the scale of the problem they are trying to solve. The articles in this issue describe engineers who think about, interact with, and create things at very precise and...| IEEE Spectrum
A gibbous moon hangs over a lonely mountain trail in the Italian Alps, above the village of Malles Venosta, whose lights dot the valley below. Benjamin Wiesmair stands next to a moth trap as tall as he is, his face, bushy beard, and hair bun lit by its purple glow. He’s wearing a headlamp, a dusty and battered smartwatch, cargo shorts, and a blue zip sweater with the sleeves pulled up. Countless moths beat frenetically around the trap’s white, diaphanous panels, which are swaying with gho...| IEEE Spectrum
What happens when you say “Hello” to ChatGPT? Such a simple query might seem trivial, but making it possible across billions of sessions requires immense scale. While OpenAI reveals little information about its operations, we’ve used the scraps we do have to estimate the impact of ChatGPT—and of the generative AI industry in general. This article is part of The Scale Issue. OpenAI’s actions also provide hints. As part of the United States’ Stargate Project, OpenAI will collaborate...| IEEE Spectrum
Low Earth orbit, where most satellites operate, has become a whirlwind of metal shards and dead, tumbling debris. Anyone with hardware or human crew in orbit knows the drill. Orbital collision warnings can be unremitting. Whether the object is a defunct satellite or a stray hunk of glass from a solar panel that shattered long ago, every item circling Earth is also a potential projectile. And nearly all of this junk, traveling at least eight times as fast as a rifle bullet, can be damaging in ...| IEEE Spectrum
To the naked eye, the stars are diamond flecks scattered across the inner surface of a celestial sphere. Telescopes have brought depth to our vision, mapping the true distances to cosmic objects. But the universe they reveal appears utterly beyond the human scale of space and time. Even the closest stars seem infinitely remote, and reaching them a thing of science fiction, save for a few dead and dying probes drifting outward for eternity. This article is part of The Scale Issue. Now, though,...| IEEE Spectrum
It takes more than building a humanoid robot to build a humanoid robot product.| IEEE Spectrum
