From our other sites
The story
At an investor event in Europe, Toyota Motor Corporation announced plans to invest 1 trillion yen annually starting in 2028 to progressively update the 400,000 robots operating across its 60 factories worldwide and the broader group. The robots will be equipped with the generative AI “LBM (Large Behavior Model)” developed by its R&D subsidiary, aiming to advance factory automation that links entire production processes together. On 5ch, the thread sparked lively debate, split between anxiety that the investment could take jobs away from factory workers such as temporary contract workers, and opinions that for simple tasks, deploying robots is more cost-effective than paying human labor.
Toyota Motor Corporation held an investor event at TME (Toyota Motor Europe), its European regional headquarters. During the event, Toyota Executive Vice President and CTO Hiroki Nakajima announced that, starting in 2028, the company will invest 1 trillion yen every year to update the 60 factories it operates worldwide and the 400,000 robots run by the Toyota Group (150,000 at Toyota and the Toyota Group, and 250,000 at suppliers).
[Photo] Toyota Motor Corporation Executive Vice President Hiroki Nakajima speaking about the annual 1 trillion yen investment to update factories and robots
For the robots in particular, the company will adopt LBM (Large Behavior Models), a generative AI developed by its R&D subsidiary, Toyota Research Institute. By deploying LBM-equipped robots — described as the next generation of “physical AI” — across Toyota, the Toyota Group, and suppliers, and connecting their production systems end-to-end (E2E), the company aims to achieve “Factory Automation 3.0.”
Source: news.yahoo.co.jp / Original article here
What people said
Yeah, because they just complain and barely work anyway
Honestly, even at 1/3 the speed, it can work 24 hours a day, so it balances out
There's still farming, fishing, forestry, and caregiving, so it's fine
Physical AI barely gets introduced in low-margin industries
There's no way temp factory workers were ever 'winners'
What could a robot that looks this janky possibly do?
If it's just for factory use, copying a temp worker's movements is enough — no need to make it do anything else
Is there even a reason to make it humanoid?
You still need people to do the maintenance, after all
Because it eliminates human error
Robots will handle the maintenance too.
We're talking AI robots that cost like 2 million yen each
If both can do the same work, wouldn't a 2-million-yen AI robot beat hiring someone on a 3-million-yen salary, even with maintenance costs included?
There's no real reason for it, so it'll probably stop being bipedal eventually
By that logic, robots are already pretty widely adopted, aren't they?
Looking pretty dumb now
White-collar jobs will disappear, but blue-collar won't
It'll just shrink
If it's only tens of millions, that's cheap compared to feeding and paying benefits to temp workers
These guys are definitely gonna riot
It's shift work, so there are even more of them than that
There's already a labor shortage, so it'll sort itself out
It just seems like early rollout would be easy specifically in places like factories, where humans were already working like robots to begin with
AI engineer
Arm-only robots have already been widely deployed for ages
Firing them like this is definitely going to make public safety worse
There's still farming, fishing, forestry, and caregiving
Temp workers were never full employees to begin with — once the contract ends, it just ends, there was never any job security to lose
If Elon's Optimus 3 drops next year, blue-collar work is finished
Optimus was never a factory-specialized robot to begin with, so it probably won't be usable in factories anyway
For temp work where all you need is stamina, robots beat humans easily
They did a segment on that — apparently there are AC-installation employees earning 10 million yen a year
They can't find humans willing to do that kind of simple, robot-like labor anymore, so they want to switch to robots instead
Makes sense, since it's for internal use and built around their own vehicles
Back at the Aichi Expo, they also made a robot band that played trumpet and drums, remember?
That's Denso
Background and Key Points of This Topic
This announcement was made by Toyota Motor Europe (TME) at an investor event, and it concerns not new hires but the update of the 400,000 robots already operating across 60 factories worldwide and group companies (150,000 at Toyota and the Toyota Group, 250,000 at suppliers). At its core is the generative AI “LBM (Large Behavior Model)” developed by Toyota’s research institute, aimed at achieving “Factory Automation 3.0” by connecting processes end-to-end. The thread saw debate comparing labor costs against the cost of deploying robots, along with opinions about where temp factory workers who handled simple tasks would find new jobs. However, the original article does not make clear whether this applies only to bipedal humanoid robots or also includes existing industrial arm robots, and the thread title’s phrase “completely copying their movements” may be getting ahead of what’s actually confirmed.
*This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (Nanademo Jikkyo G) thread “Toyota to Deploy 400,000 Humanoid Robots That Completely Copy Temp Workers’ Movements.”
Leave a Reply