What a fascinating intersection of technology and human psychology!
"One thing I noticed toward the end is that, even though the robot remained expressive, it started feeling less alive. Early on, its motions surprised me: I had to interpret them, infer intent. But as I internalized how it worked, the prediction error fadedExpressiveness is about communicating internal state. But perceived aliveness depends on something else: unpredictability, a certain opacity. This makes sense: living systems track a messy, high-dimensional world. Shoggoth Mini doesn’t.
This raises a question: do we actually want to build robots that feel alive? Or is there a threshold, somewhere past expressiveness, where the system becomes too agentic, too unpredictable to stay comfortable around humans?"
"ah, you hesitated" no more so than on every single other question.
the delay for the GPT to process a response is very unnerving. I find it worse than when the news is interviewing a remote site with a delay between responses. maybe if the eyes had LEDs to indicate activity rather than it just sitting there??? waiting for a GPT to do its thing is always going to force a delay especially when pushing the request to the cloud for a response.
also, "GPT-4o continuously listens to speech through the audio stream," is going to be problematic
This is adorable! I did some research on tentacle robots last year. The official term is “continuum robots” and there’s actually a great deal of research into their development due to their usefulness in medical robotics. This lecture is a great overview for the curious:
https://youtu.be/4ktr10H04ak
This is so sick. I agree that it’s a little lame that we have all these AI capabilities right now, robotics improving, and all we can think of making is humanoid robots. Like I want a spider/squid hybrid robot running around my house
Beautiful work! I appreciate how this robot clearly does NOT try to look like any natural creature. I don't want a future where we can't easily distinguish nature from robotics. So far humanoid robots look clearly robotic too: hope that trend continues.
Show HN: Shoggoth Mini – A soft tentacle robot powered by GPT-4o and RL
(matthieulc.com)606 points by cataPhil 15 July 2025 | 107 comments
Comments
"One thing I noticed toward the end is that, even though the robot remained expressive, it started feeling less alive. Early on, its motions surprised me: I had to interpret them, infer intent. But as I internalized how it worked, the prediction error faded Expressiveness is about communicating internal state. But perceived aliveness depends on something else: unpredictability, a certain opacity. This makes sense: living systems track a messy, high-dimensional world. Shoggoth Mini doesn’t.
This raises a question: do we actually want to build robots that feel alive? Or is there a threshold, somewhere past expressiveness, where the system becomes too agentic, too unpredictable to stay comfortable around humans?"
the delay for the GPT to process a response is very unnerving. I find it worse than when the news is interviewing a remote site with a delay between responses. maybe if the eyes had LEDs to indicate activity rather than it just sitting there??? waiting for a GPT to do its thing is always going to force a delay especially when pushing the request to the cloud for a response.
also, "GPT-4o continuously listens to speech through the audio stream," is going to be problematic
Just basic interactions with a child plus lessons and a voice would be game changing for the toy world.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pQ2dI_B_Ycg
Also was thinking of Oogie Boogie Tim Burton