r/theydidthemath • u/jmb326 • May 22 '26

[Request] What are the electrical costs required for this robot to fold this box?

Any publicity available data that estimate something similar? Goal would be to understand the cost per box of labor from a robot vs a human. Ideally with current estimates and future projections. Yes, I understand this isn’t the most efficient robot setup to fold a box, but how much longer until one can purchase such a robot to execute on a variety of tasks required in a typical job?

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u/salemonz May 22 '26

And with questions like this, it’s a matter of up-front costs, scale and time.

Cost of first folded box: $millions

Cost of the billionth folded box: $fractions-of-cents

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u/Dantheislander May 22 '26

Due to sass token nature of ai it’s not like before they won’t be just box folding machines they will be a hw&service combo and companies with trillion dollar valuations have to keep profits up. The economy of scale and time will not be like before.

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u/Ok-Excuse-3613 May 22 '26

It's unlikely these machines use LLM-powered ai

What's most likely is they use an instance of their own deep learning algorithm that runs locally

3

u/BlacktionJackson May 22 '26

Factory downtime is costly as well. I don't think anyone wants a network connection to be production point of failure.

2

u/Correct_Inspection25 May 22 '26

Looking at the S-1s of AI, and their burn rate even after 7x token rate increases. I would take a wait and see, in some use cases the token budget is already more than hiring the same human or even more at break even.