AI lab offers free plumbing and HVAC repairs across three cities to train robots

brunomarsjams

Good Home repairs are too expensive

zztopisgreat

Lol looks like no one is safe

vegnus

It was inevitable. Who want's to pay an extra bundle for a plumber to come in and destroy a bunch of walls to fix a clogged pipe? No job is safe.

macinjosh

the problem is no two houses are a like and you have to navigate, crawl spaces, basements, stairs, tiny utility closets where you can't even see the bolt you are tightening. there is no way this works in real everyday homes.

pfdietz

I'll believe this when I see it.

zemvpferreira

Yes, but not via robotics any time soon. The first wave of AI job replacement will come from letting the computers make the decisions while the meatpuppets (personified by whoever is lowest-costing at the time) turn the knobs. If you have the plumbing expert system ready to go why would you wait for the actuators to catch up? Slap AR glasses on 5000 kids/immigrants, get a couple of actual plumbers to go around town checking the work and let the AI dictate which tool they should use where and how. GPS was the zero to one, now for everything else.

lenerdenator

It's almost like they'll do literally anything to not pay you.

wampwampwhat

no theyre not. the founder has clearly never worked a day in maintenance-trades and doesn't understand the problem space at all. new construction residential plumbing is so cheap that there is no edge to having a robot do it, and emergency plumbing triage in finished homes is a game discovering exactly how wrong the usually non-existent schematics are.

dyauspitr

AI is coming for a lot of physical labor, but it’s definitely not electricians, plumbers, roofers, barbers, etc. anytime soon. I genuinely believe that’s going to take at least a decade or two. Those jobs are way too precise and finicky for a robot to be able to do it. Cleaning a house, commercial restrooms, loading and unloading, delivery, landscaping, mail delivery, servers, chefs, old age care, truck drivers etc. will definitely be automated within the next five years though by robots.

seanmcdirmid

AR glasses plus an LLM would be great for DIY maintenance, renovation tasks. Plumbing, electrical work, kitchen renovation, etc… often times it’s just knowing what to look for or check.

flerchin

> AI lab offers free plumbing and HVAC repairs across three cities Cool! VC capital at work for the common people. > to train AI robots LOL total bullshit.

root_axis

This will never be worth the risk. Every plumbing job is a unique challenge, you can't just spin up 10000 agents to brute force your way to a correctly cut pipe, one mistake and you've destroyed a house or office.

robertclaus

The last time I saw a news article about this it was talking about how many Airbnb kitchens in SF had been wrecked by teams running field tests for robots doing dishes. Excited to hear about the damage actual plumbing jobs would cause.

PowerElectronix

This is soooo optimistic of them. Do they really think they can just swap a dude who's been fixing all kind of stuff that can happen in an installation with robots and AI? "So, what do you think it is?" "i don't know dude, I just have to do as the machine tells me, what's a pipe wrench?" Is anyone willing to pay for a person without knowledge asking an AI or a robot to mess with their AC or pipes? At that point I'd rather do it myself with AI, at least I will care and be responsible about the results.

jrflo

I feel like a lot of robotics companies are trying to ride the AI hype train right now, but the tech is soooooo far behind what we're seeing with knowledge work. The bridge from raw vision input to high level task definition to low level actuator movement with force feedback is super difficult. Unless we can get superintelligence to solve it for us, I don't see this happening for many decades.

dgemm

If AI comes for the trades it seems like it will not be via robots but instead by leveling up all of the DIYers and lower skill handyman types allowing them to troubleshoot/build/fix more than they were capable of before.

kaffekaka

I would never hire an AI plumber. I want the guy who came here last time, did a good job, and pay him premium prices.

yellow_postit

Grok is just directly advertising the “let ais help you buy and run service business” foolishness as the next wave of home flipping. One good thing about interest rates being up is the capital to just hoover up a bunch local services will be harder to come by.

georgemcbay

If I were in the trades, my larger concern than AR goggled meatpuppets would be: 1) The dramatic drop in demand for my services when most of the knowledge workers lose their jobs and thus incomes. 2) The dramatic increase in supply of people doing my job when all those knowledge workers attempt to flee to 'safe' jobs. Crushing forces coming from both sides are likely to harm even the jobs that seem to have the lease AI exposure.

RajT88

I tried to hire a general contractor or plumber recently. Called around, waited weeks for them to get back to me. I ended up figuring out how to do the work myself. What I gather is happening is that the K shaped economy is having wealthier people who benefit from the current tech boom buying and renovating houses at such a rate that skilled trades people are not bothering to chase smaller jobs. That said, I am going to need some pretty good evidence a robot can be trusted to do the work. Working on houses in any form results in finding weird and unpredictable work from DIYers and prior generations doing things in radically different ways. My sink for example did not fit exactly the space the old cast iron sink sat in. What is the right decision: knock the spacers off the new stainless steel sink, or cut pieces of the countertop to make it fit? The next problem I had was the even once it fit, the faucet did not have clearance for the bolt which held it in place - requiring a trip to Home Depot to consult with their experts on how to handle it (turns out: a PVC pipe spacer cut to fit). That is a lot of improvisation and dexterity for a simple sink replacement. It is going to be a while I think.