Agreed, Quantum Computing is a nice example of this.

Why?

Even for domestic robots people don't care, see just about every cloud connected smart vacuum robot and the numerous data leaks

And for companies, most of them are fine using SaaS and cloud based hosting platforms, so why would it be any different for robotics?

Sure there is the latency argument, so at least something doing very short term decision making needs to run on device or at the edge, but for most task the end to end time is in the single didit seconds to minuites, so the extra 100ms or whatever that you get going out to some model in the cloud isn't a deal breaker.

I assume the first versions will have local AI handling basic functions like balance and motion, and remote AI handling higher-level decisionmaking. I also agree that robots feel like something we should approach very cautiously, but of course we’re not.

Right. If you're new to the area, it may seem like AI came out of nowhere in 2022. If you dig a little, you'll be amazed that it somehow came from nowhere in ~2012. If you dig even more, you realize there was a wave in the late 90s, early 2000s about "machine learning" (e.g. SVMs) and before it there was an 80s wave of both neural nets, agent models, and logic-based AI, probabilistic graphical models. Then you dig more and you realize AI originated from that Dartmouth workshop by Minksy and others in the 50s. Then you dig more and realize McCulloch and Pitts already modeled neural nets as little logic circuits in the 1940s. Then you realize the role of Shannon, Turing etc. Then you realize that computers actually arose in a milieu with a much more AI-shaped vision, cybernetics etc. than what we today think of as computing (PCs etc). And the precursors in the thought-formalization and mechanization trend in math and philosophy at the start of the 20th century. And even more back Leibniz's calculus ratiocinator and "calculemus!" slogan to settle debates by reducing argumentation to computation.

The point is, typically when something seems like it came out of nowhere, it just means you didn't dig deep enough. Ideas don't come at an instant, fully formed like Athene from Zeus' forehead. It's brick by brick, one twist on an existing idea and zeitgeist at a time.

Remember this when some corporate talking head talks about this stuff like it wasn’t predictable or preventable. Or when a coworker talks in a defeatist manner about it.

Right? Amazing how confidently wrong one can be, by assuming there is no other way to approach a problem, other than the one your current intellectual tools point at.

That thread is a goldmine. Very humbling.

The other two left because they had fundamental disagreements with sama about how to run a company and how to shepherd humanity into an AI future.

If you ask me, it'd be better if none of them remained at OpenAI.