Nvidia Says 'the Age of Generalist Robotics Is Here' (theverge.com) 80
During the company's GTC 2025 keynote today, Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang announced Isaac GR00T N1 -- the company's first open-source, pre-trained yet customizable foundation model designed to accelerate the development and capabilities of humanoid robots. "The age of generalist robotics is here," said Huang. "With Nvidia Isaac GR00T N1 and new data-generation and robot-learning frameworks, robotics developers everywhere will open the next frontier in the age of AI." The Verge reports: Huang demonstrated 1X's NEO Gamma humanoid robot performing autonomous tidying jobs using a post-trained policy built on the GR00T N1 model. [...] Other companies developing humanoid robots who have had early access to the GR00T N1 model include Boston Dynamics, the creators of Atlas; Agility Robotics; Mentee Robotics; and Neura Robotics. Originally announced as Project GR00T a year ago, the GR00T N1 foundation model utilizes a dual-system architecture inspired by human cognition.
System 1, as Nvidia calls it, is described as a "fast-thinking action model" that behaves similarly to human reflexes and intuition. It was trained on data collected through human demonstrations and synthetic data generated by Nvidia's Omniverse platform. System 2, which is powered by a vision language model, is a "slow-thinking model" that "reasons about its environment and the instructions it has received to plan actions." Those plans are passed along to System 1, which translates them into "precise, continuous robot movements" that include grasping, moving objects with one or two arms, as well as more complex multistep tasks that involve combinations of basic skills.
While the GR00T N1 foundation model is pretrained with generalized humanoid reasoning and skills, developers can customize its behavior and capabilities for specific needs by post-training it with data gathered from human demonstrations or simulations. Nvidia has made GR00T N1 training data and task evaluation scenarios available for download through Hugging Face and GitHub.
System 1, as Nvidia calls it, is described as a "fast-thinking action model" that behaves similarly to human reflexes and intuition. It was trained on data collected through human demonstrations and synthetic data generated by Nvidia's Omniverse platform. System 2, which is powered by a vision language model, is a "slow-thinking model" that "reasons about its environment and the instructions it has received to plan actions." Those plans are passed along to System 1, which translates them into "precise, continuous robot movements" that include grasping, moving objects with one or two arms, as well as more complex multistep tasks that involve combinations of basic skills.
While the GR00T N1 foundation model is pretrained with generalized humanoid reasoning and skills, developers can customize its behavior and capabilities for specific needs by post-training it with data gathered from human demonstrations or simulations. Nvidia has made GR00T N1 training data and task evaluation scenarios available for download through Hugging Face and GitHub.
Sure, right after ray tracing finally arrives (Score:2)
Marketing hype is growing, the lead time is like ten years at least now, at these prices the current technology is like going back to the future. The only people buying into this are investors who don't really understand the business they are investing in. This salesmanship is just massively overselling the value of these classist transnational corporations. It can't be long before this house of financial cards collapses once again. Like every game of monopoly, anyone caught without real property will be ta
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Ray tracing on GPUs are already quite good. Good enough for anything, anyway. I mean nowadays real-time path tracing seems to be what graphics nerds are on about. Robotics will keep developing for as long as people need work done and hate doing it. Farming needs robots, every factory job is a target for robotic takeover as well.
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This is a bad answer to a bad analogy. Nvidia's cards don't do ray tracing. That's why they renamed ray tracing "path tracing" in their marketing. Stop parroting marketing terms.
But robotics development based on current models, unlike nvidia's ray tracing marketing wank isn't just marketing. It's actually actionable in real world in a very meaningful way, and has been for a while. For example until very recently Amazon burned billions of dollars on getting a robot to person a job of a picker. That is to pi
Re:Sure, right after ray tracing finally arrives (Score:5, Insightful)
I couldn't disagree more. Yes, robotics is coming along nicely, so long as it's confined to a predictable environment. Look at the self-driving car tech, yah it's great, until it isn't. Then what? Are we going to hold the corporation that designed the robot accountable for its actions? Where is the accountability? We can already see corporations are not going to be responsible enough. The technology may improve but until the ethical issues are resolved, this is looks like it's going to be a dystopian future. Clealry this is road to hell.
Re:Sure, right after ray tracing finally arrives (Score:5, Insightful)
Are we going to hold the corporation that designed the robot accountable for its actions?
What sort of actions are you imagining the robot will need to be held accountable for?
If it's something like "our housecleaner-bot accidentally stepped on the dog's tail, Nvidia should pay our vet bill", then sure.
If you're thinking of something like "robot runs amok, kills all humans in its neighborhood", then that's just Hollywood silliness.
OTOH if you're wondering who will take responsibility for restoring the livelihoods of people whose job skills have suddenly become worthless because a robot will now do the same thing 24/7/365 for much less money... that's a very good question. That's going to be a significant problem at some point.
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Not "at some point". It's already starting to be a serious problem, so far only in niche areas, but to those people it's a serious problem. Pretty soon all the call center "sales people" will be replaced. I'd say *great*, except their replacements will be even more persistent and less flexible. These robots are probably for warehouse work, and possibly for mines. (Mines might be too difficult an environment.) And jobs are currently being redesigned to allow fewer people to do the same amount of work
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we can already see how corporations use legalese to avoid taking any responsibility, they even corrupt the law itself, sorry, I have little faith that this will go well, me, I see this as heading towards the dark side of the force
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Where is the accountability? We can already see corporations are not going to be responsible enough. The technology may improve but until the ethical issues are resolved, this is looks like it's going to be a dystopian future. Clealry this is road to hell.
same argument repeated during industrialization's formative years.
solution was largely regulation.
believe most would agree it was wise to not abandon industrialization.
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"Clearly this is (the) road to hell"
What are you talking about? The road TO hell? Brother, you're IN hell already.
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>so long as it's confined to a predictable environment
The exact opposite. What is coming is robotics that no longer need to be confined to a perfectly predictable environment. This is in fact the problem with grabbing objects. Unpredictability of strength they need to be grasped with until pressure sensors tell you (as a human) what kind of grip strength is needed.
As for "but muh driving", Tesla's current gen FSD is getting driven thousands of miles in US tests without need for a single interrupt. There'
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self-driving seems to have hit the brick wall of reality lately, just saying, it's still not that practical, or safe, not by a long shot
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Just use open source software, then there's nobody to blame!!
Apparently, that is why our governments businesses are dependent on Microsoft software, I'm told
I could never figure out why governments aren't using open source software. It's more or less free. If you're the government you have all the tax dollars in the world to customise, support, or build what you need.... BUT, instead, again, I'm told, purchasing decisions are etched in policy, so managers everywhere don't h
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But self-learning and self-adapting systems like modern AI are proving actually able to cracking this problem for a lot less!
Do you have a citation for that? The NVidia video didn't make it clear how often they accidentally drop objects.
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Currently mainly limited by pressure sensor quality that can be fitted inside those fingers. Actual learning appears to have been mostly crunched, and models are pretty good. Even shit tier things like that ridiculous Tesla bot is now more or less capable of grasping objects without dropping or crushing them, and that's a pretty low effort as far as robotics of that grade go.
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Path tracing is a particular type of ray tracing.
To put in the usual simplification for folks like you, all path tracing is ray tracing, not all ray tracing is path tracing.
There's a reason everyone else is also using the term in their marketing. [amd.com]
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Ray tracing is the term that everyone used before GPU makers decided they're going to try to make it a feature to justify price of higher end offerings.
Then they quickly found out that all they can do is that retarded approximation thingy they do today. It's still cripplingly slow, but at least it's workable with current tech in real time, unlike actual ray tracing which isn't.
But how do you market this problem to retards? That's right. You do what far left does. You rename things. Gender and sex are totall
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Ray tracing is the term that everyone used before GPU makers decided they're going to try to make it a feature to justify price of higher end offerings.
Ray tracing means just that- ray tracing. It includes everything from ray casting, up to full recursive ray tracing.
For GPUs, full recursive ray tracing simply isn't anywhere close to possible.
Path tracing is a method of ray tracing that offers the ability to produce near-recursive-ray-tracing quality for a fraction of the cost.
Movies began using path tracing for their rendering in the late 90s and early 2000s. [wikipedia.org]
Put shortly, shut the fuck up, and quit spreading misinformation.
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Nvidia's cards don't do ray tracing.
That's a dense comment. Nvidia's cards do what you tell them to, nothing more nothing less. The mathematics behind ray tracing and path tracing use identical hardware. What you are trying to say is that games don't do general ray tracing using NVIDIA's cards, but instead use path tracing.
That's why they renamed ray tracing "path tracing" in their marketing. Stop parroting marketing terms.
They didn't "rename" it. "Path tracing" is a form of "Ray tracing" It's a specific subset designed to more accurately portray environmental lighting. The math is the same, the fundamentals is the same, the visual aberration
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Yeah that's what I thought as well, I was like, but it's still ray tracing, sure it's not fully recursive ray tracing that fully simulates real light but, I mean it's a light ray...a straight path..is..a ray..so it's a subset of that technology with different math to offload perfo.....anyway I digress. Thanks for posting your comment.
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Ray tracing on GPUs are already quite good. Good enough for anything, anyway.
Really, how many times do people turn off ray tracing so framerates are acceptable? See any competitive gaming with raytracing active? No? Me either. Just saying.
As for robotics, well we do have vacuum cleaners, sort of, they work ok until they run into crap
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I turn it on in every game I play.
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exceptions prove the rule
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The meaning of "prove" in that phrase is "test". In modern English it should be said "Exceptions test the rule.".
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No, exceptions do not prove the rule. That's provably false.
Further, they're not the exception- your test bench of competitive gamers are, as they're the cohort that consists of some microscopic fraction of gamers.
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I use it on my 3070 which is actually quite bad at RT, but I get value from it. Your comment about competitive gaming is exceptionally ignorant. Competitive gamers almost always turn down settings for clarity and frames, and that's in games without raytracing. Completely irrelevant to most gamers.
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hardly irrelevant, you think they wouldn't turn up the ray tracing if framerates weren't effected, look, once you hit 240 or so, it's diminishing returns and most synched monitors only go that high anyways, we gamers play at the same fps for consistent latency, we would gladly turn up the eye candy if we could, sure, there's performance mode but it's for low performance not competitive game play, heck, people reprocess it to add it back to uploads so we often don't see in a replay what the player actually s
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No, it's not just framerates. They turn off shadows because they reduce visual clarity. You simply don't know what you're talking about.
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I used it on my 3080, no issue with FPS at all. High end CPU as well. However, I don't play games at 240 fps because I'm mega lite but when I die it's the enemy teams fault or anything. 120 FPS is fine for me.
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Really, how many times do people turn off ray tracing so framerates are acceptable? See any competitive gaming with raytracing active? No? Me either. Just saying.
What kind of stupid fucking reasoning is this? Did your parents bathe you in fucking lead paint?
Do you think the crowd that seeks 200fps represent the crown looking for quality of visuals?
Every person who isn't a competitive gamer who turns off ray tracing is disappointed that they had to, and are considering getting a card that can do it well enough that they don't have to... and frankly, even the competitive gamers probably wish they could run at 200fps with ray tracing on.
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yes, people want and deserve both visuals and framerates, it could be done too if generational engineering and market manipulation weren't throttling product design
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The segment you pointed at turn off every quality improvement they can, because everything with a fps cost is a detriment to them. They're not representative of anything in the broade
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It's been proven that in a a fair number of testing scenarios that 240 fps makes a difference, but not much of one for a lot of gamers.
I don't disagree with people min maxing to the extreme but, minority market.
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What are you running for a video card? I have a 3080, it's on for everything, I get 60 to 100 FPS easily on most games.
If you're the '240 FPS or why bother' type I can't argue with you but that's a very niche level of acceptable FPS.
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What do you mean "ray tracing finally arrives"? It objectively arrived several years ago. It's a think many games do. Just like AI training models for physical objects is a thing that objectively is already here. In fact a paper by NVIDIA's researchers postulated how to properly train such a model several years ago before the kids thought AI was cool.
Like every game of monopoly, anyone caught without real property will be taken off the board.
They have real property. They are selling proprietary AI models for robotics. I feel like you're on a general rant that has nothing at all to do with the subje
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This general rant is the reason we don't have effective ray tracing or robotics yet and why we have marketing hype instead.
If the upper class had invested our capital into research and development instead of market manipulation and monopolization, we would be looking at a bright future instead of this dystopian nightmare. Just saying.
My advice to people is pay off your mortgage and get out of debt now, before it's too late once again.
Just because it's a rant, does not mean it's wrong,
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If the upper class had invested our capital
Capital doesn't mean "money", and it doesn't mean "taxes". It means "wealth in the form of money or other assets owned by a person or organization or available or contributed for a particular purpose such as starting a company or investing."
The Upper Class has the bulk of the capital. The Middle class has a little bit of capital. The lower classes have none. But when you pay taxes, or buy a product, or otherwise engage in ordinary economic activity (buying and selling products or services, that is) there is
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can't eat gold or live in, sorry, pay off your house so it can't be seized by a bank and keep your taxes paid so the government can't seize your house and keep enough capital so you can afford to buy the basics and pay the bills, doesn't hurt to learn an honest trade either, for whenever honest work is hard to find ..
the upper class owns and controls 85% of all our capital, which leaves just 15% of all our capital for the rest of us 85% to mange with, which is not enough capital, we are all undercapitalized
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pay off your house so it can't be seized by a bank
Great plan. Working people should just pull some money out of their asshole and pay off their mortgages.
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there are strategies that help pay down mortgages faster, real conservatives live conservatively, financial freedom is the only real freedom that is unless one wants indentured servitude of course
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real conservatives live conservatively
Real conservatives? Do they exist any more? I'm only seeing the ones who want to burn down the forests so they can build flammable homes where they used to stand.
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For repetitive tasks, the only questions remaining are how much does it cost? Cheaper than a person loading inventory in a warehouse?
For less repetitive tasks, like a home robot, there are still a lot of questions. Like, how often does it hallucinate when I ask it to wash the dishes? Does it ever get violent accidentally?
Still, pretty cool technology even if it's just a demo.
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sure and ray tracing looks cool too, we just can't use it in day to day gaming quite yet, like I said, oversold and premature, it's all just hype, meanwhile they know they are misleading people with false promises
it's all cool and it's all unaffordable and unobtainable, and that's because it seems like these upper class people are corrupt, irresponsible and self serving
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sure and ray tracing looks cool too, we just can't use it in day to day gaming quite yet, like I said, oversold and premature, it's all just hype, meanwhile they know they are misleading people with false promises
We sure can. I do. It's excellent.
it's all cool and it's all unaffordable and unobtainable
Oh- did you suffer some kind of TBI back in 2019?
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Also, notice how Nvidia had to turn of commenting on the demo video, so much for free speech in corporatocracy, eh?
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Free Speech has always been for the guy that owns the press. That's what made mimeograph machines so disruptive. You've never had the right to say what you want on someone else's media.
It what you're saying is that we *should* have that right, I don't think there's any way to make that workable. When 1,000 people try to comment on the same thing, if you don't filter them, than nobody gets heard.
Um... We have Ray tracing (Score:2)
But the feature exists and is in active use. There's a couple of games that require it because they screwed up and didn't realize average consumers wouldn't be able to afford a video card that can do ray tracing at a decent frame rate yet. The Intel b580 can do a pretty good job of it at decent framerates and it's got a $250 MSRP which is a great price, but good luck ge
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the truth is most gamers, by far, cannot afford raytracing, not that many people actually buy top tier cards, the promise of ray tracing is still just that for most gaming although I will admit it's getting closer
I still don't use it, either the games don't support it or the performance hit is too great
it's just a form of classism which keeps the best out of the hands of the poor, prices are being used as barriers, deliberately
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the truth is most gamers, by far, cannot afford raytracing
The first 8 [steampowered.com] of these most common cards can do ray tracing at great performance.
The 9th can do it at not-so-great performance.
You're literally just a fucking shitpost misinformation generation machine.
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Most of those cards only have adequate raytracing performance at 1080p. Anything higher and frame rates rapidly fall to unplayable levels. This still serves about half of gamers, so it's not a dealbreaker, except as you can see from other results in that same survey, 1440p is making serious strides.
I wouldn't call that "great" performance, more like adequate for some titles. If you care enough about visual effects that you want to turn on RT, you probably also care enough to want more than 1080p...
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Most of those cards only have adequate raytracing performance at 1080p.
Negative.
A 4060 non-Ti is generally capable of 60fps at 1080P with ray tracing enabled.
If you want to do 4K with RT, you will definitely need DLSS on the lower end cards.
60fps at 1080P is great performance.
In that 99.9% of all people literally can't hope to see better, lacking monitors with faster refreshes.
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A 4060 non-Ti is generally capable of 60fps at 1080P with ray tracing enabled.
What I'm seeing is that this is only true if you compromise on settings. I'm not going to degrade other image quality just to get raytracing.
In that 99.9% of all people literally can't hope to see better, lacking monitors with faster refreshes.
The refresh isn't the issue, it's the resolution. 2k is getting to be very popular. But everything I'm seeing says that to do raytracing on 4060 at 1080p60, you will need to compromise on quality settings which defeats the purpose entirely.
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What I'm seeing is that this is only true if you compromise on settings. I'm not going to degrade other image quality just to get raytracing.
Raytracing is simply part of "High" settings these days.
For low end cards like the 4060, RT on or off, you're using DLSS for high settings.
The refresh isn't the issue, it's the resolution. 2k is getting to be very popular. But everything I'm seeing says that to do raytracing on 4060 at 1080p60, you will need to compromise on quality settings which defeats the purpose entirely.
No, you turn on DLSS. It's the bottom of the line card. It doesn't perform great at 2k resolution without DLSS, even with RT off.
RT has about a 5fps cost on the RTX4060. It's low on all of the 4xxx models, as they've added more RT cores every generation.
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Marketing hype is growing
The role of a CEO has always, to various extents, been to promote their company and their products. Some are natural salespeople (Steve Jobs comes to mind), and some less so, but they still have to promote and hype the product(s) they offer. As there is a sucker born every minute, some people will believe anything they hear from a good salesperson.
Nvidia says a lot of things (Score:2)
Declare an age before proof of concept (Score:3)
Marketing hype has been declaring ages before proof of concept for a long time now. For some things, it sort-of almost works. See the current AI hype.
How about we start declaring the Age of New Enlightenment begun so we can start working on the problem of humans getting more ignorant and hateful? Maybe if we believe it hard enough it'll actually start happening?
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While I giggle at you dumbshits calling multi-billion dollar markets "hype".
Part of the reason the world is such a cesspool of bullshit is because we've decided profit is the marker of all value. Not needs being met. Not work being done. Not proven benefits. Profit. Worship of greed is destroying us. And while it's been slow up to this point, it seems to be accelerating now.
Some of the current multi-billion dollar markets are entirely built on hype. There's no substance behind the thin, if shiny, veneer. And when that multi-billion dollar market sucks up vast quantities of resource
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Part of the reason the world is such a cesspool of bullshit is because we've decided profit is the marker of all value. Not needs being met. Not work being done. Not proven benefits. Profit. Worship of greed is destroying us. And while it's been slow up to this point, it seems to be accelerating now.
Eyeroll.
It's offered as a service. People want that service, and so they pay for that service.
Trying to handwave that away as some kind of magical profit generation from the ether isn't helping what you so colorfully call, "the cesspool of bullshit".
Some of the current multi-billion dollar markets are entirely built on hype.
Ridiculous. They may be hyped- for sure. But the idea that the people spending billions of dollars on the service are doing so because of the hype, not because they derive value from it, because you can't see that value in it, is the very epitome of trying to
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Yes and no. Firstly a proof of concept exists, it's even talked about in TFS and in creating it they partnered with one of the best known companies in the field of robotics. NVIDIA has released many papers already on AI robotic modelling (let me guess, you didn't know they publish actual peer reviewed science as part of their R&D?)
Secondly it's hilarious to watch people down play advancements in huge tech industries as marketing hype. Especially when it comes to something that makes obvious sense to do
Humanoid is not the best shape for a robot (Score:2)
General purpose robots don't need to look like people.
More legs = better mobility and stability.
C3PO was only useful as a translator.
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I was thinking the same thing. The optimal strawberry picking robot is unlikely to be humanoid. Something more deer-like should be better. That style should also work for weeding. But the AI has to be able to distinguish between nightshade and tomatoes. And it must error to the safe side. If it pulls the tomato by mistake you've lost that production for the year.
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Humanoid is the best shape for a general purpose robot that has to function in an environment designed for humans, i.e. in your home.
In any other environment, like a field, lots of other shapes will make more sense (depending on the job) although mostly they will be like a crab or an ant if wheels won't serve. But for harvesting treetops, it might be more like a giraffe. I'm thinking of the Mine Kafon Ball [interestin...eering.com] here too.
C3PO was a pretty low-tech robot as far as physical capabilities, there are far more physical
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Humanoid is the best shape for a general purpose robot
Really? Roomba vacuum cleaner is not hominoid shaped.
Read before replying, kthxbye
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That depends on the environment. If you design the environment to fit the robot, then you're definitely correct, but if you want to fit the robot into an environment designed for people, then it needs to fit the human factor. As an example, ask any left-handed person about the problems they have with things designed for right-handed people.
What human? (Score:1)
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"Hugging Face" disturbs me (Score:2)
Ah yes, because I definitely want a face-hugger robot attempting to learn how to be more like the human it is replacing. Sounds like we're the ones being turned into bots here, and it's literally in the company's name.
Salesmen (Score:2)
Never listen to anything they tell you.
I can't wait (Score:2)
for a general all-purpose robot manservant.
Hope I live long enough to buy one, but I suspect not.
Douglas Adams quote (Score:2)
"People will never be replaced by robots, because people are cheaper and the factory owner doesn't have to pay when they break."
Has anyone checked in the Nvidia Execs recently? (Score:2)