it's pretty good at making something that looks natural and realistic, but it doesn't seem to be accounting for any difficult constraints like gravity, wrinkles, or whether the egg is done on this side

robotics also needs instant reaction time, which i don't think this kind of thing is good at

maybe something like a rough pre-simulation step for further rapid prototyping work? can't imagine the practical application..

disclaimer: i have no idea what i'm talking about, and am just going through the motions, much like the diffusion model under discussion

If we'd ever really try to do humanoid robotics, ones that interact with an environment made for humans in the way it's intended to be interacted with, this could actually be very valuable: imitate the general movement to quickly get the general action plan, use live feedback loops and simulation for the details. Basically like a child learns, but with one part in the cloud hivemind.

Without that, you have a much bigger solution space to search for the optimal approach. And you likely wouldn't even want that optional solution anyways: if your humanoid robots have sufficiently strong actors, optional solution for, to pick a simple example, navigating a staircase would likely be vertically scaling up the handrails through the slot in the middle. That might save staircase capacity and a tiny amount of battery (better aerodynamics!) but it would certainly ruin any humanoid qualities.

This may also be how it works for humans. The more conscious parts of the brain are involved in coming up with a general "movement plan", while fine-grained re-balancing and re-planning is taken care or subconciously.

With the twist that for a robot that gets it's rough plan from a diffusion model that's then executed in a tight conventional control loop, I'd call the control loop more "conscious" than the diffusion model part (which is of course an extremely subjective categorization).

On the other hand, if you take another step back and think of the query input to the diffusion model, perhaps a text "human walking up to a higher floor" in our stair-climbing example, then you are absolutely right, that would be much closer to what we'd call "conscious" than I had ever imagined!

(my usual model of technical consciousness is an entirely different beast, the "simulate before act" approach with the additional requirement that the simulation includes a "self" and "peers" and the simulation includes rules/mechanisms that put them in the same category)

I found your response both insightful and funny.

Heh, your post did not make sense to me at all the first time I read it, then I re-read grandparent, this time without skipping the final paragraph. I completely agree!

Nah - it's going to be wonky as hell, and robotics is much more complex and exacting than this. This is useful for animation or creative stuff.

> complex robotic agility tasks like folding laundry or making eggs

The robotic challenge in those tasks is not insufficient Actuation capabilities or Control capabilities, but insufficient sensory Proprioception.

Sure you can compensate for those in Control or adding Vision guidance but ultimately what you needs is sensors/transducers that are able to mimic touch and pressure and proprioception in a way that approximates what exists in the animal kingdom.