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I thought the most interesting thing about tinygrad was that theoretically you could render a model all the way into hardware similar to Taalas (tinygrad might be where Taalas got the idea for all I know).

I could swear I filed a GitHub issue asking about the plans for that but I don't see it. Anyway I think he mentioned it when explaining tinygrad at one point and I have wondered why that hasn't got more attention.

As far as boxes, I wish that there were more MI355X available for normal hourly rental. Or any.


You need to provide info on your hardware. Pocket-TTS does cloning on CPU, but for me randomly outputs something pretty weird sounding mixed in with like 90% good outputs. So it hasn't been quite stable enough to run without checking output. But maybe it depends on your voice sample.

Qwen 3 TTS is good for voice cloning but requires GPU of some sort.


Thanks for open sourcing this.

Is there any way to do a custom voice as a DIY? Or we need to go through you? If so, would you consider making a pricing page for purchasing a license/alternative voice? All but one of the voices are unusable in a business context.


thanks a lot for the feedback. yes, we're working on a diy way to add custom voices and will also be releasing a model with more professional voices in the next 2-3 weeks. as of now, we're providing commercial support for custom voices, languages and deployment through the support form on our github. can you share more about your business use-case? if possible, i'd like to ensure the next release can serve that.

Right now it's outgoing calls for a small business client that checks information. Although if they call back they don't mind an automated system, on outgoing calls the person answering will often hang up if they detect AI right away, so we use a realistic custom voice with an accent.

This is a mind numbing task that requires workers to make hundreds of calls each day with only minor variations, sometimes navigating phone trees, half the time leaving almost the exact same message.

Anyway, I believe almost all such businesses will be automated within months. Human labour just cannot compete on cost.


I don't like the sound of that. Why do humans always need to spoil new advancements by finding the worst use cases?

Why do you assume it's the worst use case? It's checking important info that has been entered into forms. People lie. Someone has to verify info. It's very tedious and something that obviously should be automated. And it's about 70% automated already.

The legitimate objection people have to AI in this use case is that it can be slow or stupid in a way that wastes time. By acting more humanlike, we signal that we are going to be closer to human level performance.


These little 5.4 ones are relatively low latency and fast which is what I need for voice applications. But can't quite follow instructions well enough for my task.

That's really the story of my life. Trying to find a smart model with low latency.

Qwen 3.5 9b is almost smart enough and I assume I can run it on a 5090 with very low latency. Almost. So I am thinking I will fine tune it for my application a little.


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Corporate Speak has always existed.

They aren't writing that, it's the AI running with their ideas.

We have just started ramping up practical use of imitation learning from human demonstrations in humanoids. A bigger development is that one or two projects are working on training foundational vision action language models based on large video datasets.

I think before the end of summer general purpose physical knowledge and capabilities will start to be demonstrated by one or more humanoid AI or robotics groups.

Maybe 18 months at the absolute latest.

I'm guessing by next year or 2028 there will be services where you can order a robot to come cook and or clean for you. By 2029 it should be quite affordable to get a humanoid on a short term rental.

Do we have any standard benchmarks for humanoids to do domestic tasks?


That seems like quite an extrapolation and an extraordinary statement. This is a single task, in a lab setting. What your describing are extremely open-ended tasks in people’s homes.

What is informing these timelines?


Look at recent developments/announcements involving novel increasingly generalizable learning capabilities from projects like 1X/Neo, Figure 03, Skild AI. Also see open published work like MimicDroid, HDMI, GenMimic, Humanoid-Union Dataset, RoboMirror, Being-H0

Figure 03:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e-31-KBBuXM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZUTzuhkDG3w

1X Neo:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lS_z60kjVEk

Skild AI

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YRmjBdKKLsc (Learning by Watching Human Videos)


Yeah those are demos. I think we‘re pretty far away from this becoming a real thing. I wrote up why here: https://matthiasplappert.com/blog/2026/humanoid-robot-in-the...

You're not really trying to see the advances in things like the data flywheel. If you were you would see that those demos represent real movement towards generality.

Where’s the data flywheel exactly?

Hey guys I rooted my humanoid and it killed my mom when I disabled the "slow limb motion" mode. It just wacked her in the head as she walked in the kitchen and she's not moving what do I do??

You should @linustechtips and hope he picks it up, then you have a good chance of getting a voucher for the funeral and getting a shout out in the manufacturers next demo when they talk about their new safety features.

At least @tyrellcorp on X Social and see if you can threaten their support AIs with a bad viral story.

" Do we have any standard benchmarks for humanoids to do domestic tasks?" The answer is yes. Steve Wozniak proposed the Coffee Test. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MowergwQR5Y

It's actually very clever. Despite the apparent simplicity, no current model could pass it.

Re your forecasts, I think they are optimistic in terms of timing but not ridiculously so.


I think coffee test for robots will be similar to Turing Test for LLMs, which was quietly achieved and forgotten somewhere between gpt-3.5 and gpt-4. Real tests are tasks like cooking or plumbing - I expect that to come in 2-3 years.

The "AGI" (-ish) moment for AI was shoving Common Crawl into a transformer.

What's the animal intelligence (physical int.) equivalent of that? I don't think such a dataset exists? (e.g. NVidia is trying to compensate for that with simulated worlds, i.e. synthetic data)


I know labs are throwing an insane amount of money wherever they can to try and build datasets for this - at claru.ai we're working with a few and they are even grabbing all the players like labelbox, toloka etc to throw armies at getting bespoke data for these needs. Most of the time its get data then figure out what to do with it after...the unfortunate strategy from what I'm seeing but data is a moat in their eyes

I think that's a bit too optimistic, but I still think the direction is right-ish. It feels hard to give a timeline though. Robotics is hard.

>I'm guessing by next year or 2028 there will be services where you can order a robot to come cook and or clean for you.

Bullshit.


omg Elon Musk posts here! Are we also going to get full self driving, no interventions from NYC to LA within this timeframe, sir???

I’ve been thinking about this too, and I share your optimism: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47213310

I haven't looked at it recently but always felt that tools like Jira encourage poor management. Effective teams are small teams, and small teams should be communicating and working together across issues freely and frequently. It's generally harmful to have a manager assigning tasks outside of the actual day-to-day discussion without having to speak to someone directly or preferably in an open chat or thread where people can see the discussion.

And ideally the user facing chats and threads are directly linked in to the development chats or at least with channel notifications somewhere.

Task assignment tooling encourages managers to stress developers out with low priority tasks that often start off with incorrect requirements that the structure makes it hard to correct because it is then directly a disagreement with your boss and there is inherently not a discussion it. Whereas a chat at least has the concept of an informational response to a nonsensical task as being fairly standard.


Jira is not a task assignment machine. Jira is, in fact, designed to facilitate exactly what you claim effective teams need to do.

Because they are now self-driving cats and continue to need less and less monitoring and intervention.

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