Gary Marcus

I don't know, others may, but is it inherently more impressive than the Baoding ball result from the week before? Factoring in the 80% failure rate? And the bluetooth sensors inside the highly souped-up cube?

it’s hard to see any obvious way in which the rubik’s demo is more impressive than the more flexible Google Brain Baoding demo that came out earlier in the month. what do you think @beenwrekt?

if they showed that in some general way that wasn't one (pre-rigged) object, I could maybe sorta squint and see that point. but sim to real with one overlearned prerigged object is a joke. no respectable academic journal would buy that argument.

They do have unseen modifications e.g. finger tying. While it's just one object, I really hope you appreciate how hard this must have been to pull off. While I'm with you that the PR is a bit silly, this is a significant advance.

Indeed your last sentence is not far my original assessment, repeated above, that "[despite the other misrepresentations] system is (very impressively) trained to do the perception and manual dexterity parts." I do remain skeptical that demo w 1 prerigged object solves sim->real.

There is a big gap between "solving sim->real" and "joke". Did anyone actually claim the former? It's an advance in sim2real capabilities that is significant while falling short of the hype.