Building Crazy Legos With AI

I LOVE Legos. And I found an app that will scan a pile of unused Legos and shows you what you can build with them. It doesn't just give you build instructions, it will show you exactly where in your pile each piece is.

It’s called Brickit. It's powered by a machine learning system that was first trained on 3D models of piled up lego bricks, and then on real world photos that app users sent in. Honestly, THIS is a good use of AI...

This video is part of our show Huge If True. If you love optimistic science and tech stories, subscribe for more!

#tech #lego #supersonic #airplane #stem #build #science

[decreasing_entropy]

The LEGO Concorde breaking is kind of metaphoric, because the actual project also fell apart when they were retired.

[MarkArandjus]

"I'll fix that later."

Exactly what Concorde said as well.

[AleyleyBng]

TO EVERYONE: THIS APP IS CALLED BRICKIT APP

[CieplinskiPawel]

Now that's an app *I HAD NO IDEA I NEED‼️*

[iipranavii]

Thanks for making tech positive, i love your vibe! Hope you have an amazing year ahead

[YoungGandalf]

I can't wait for this to expand beyond LEGOs. Point your phone at a pile of random mechanical and electrical components, and the AI will tell you how to build a robot...which the AI will control and use to destroy humanity.

[btf_flotsam]

People are actually enthusiastic about AI here, because it's used on something mundane.
People are weird.

[Agnostic_Mind]

You are the main reason I watch reels lately

[weezerweewoo]

The app is called brickit for anyone wondering

[borissinaga]

This is crazy. As an older millenial I still remember using a monochrome brick phone. And I still remember how computer vision supposed to be a hard problem. And now my phone can easily look at some pile of lego and say "yeah, take this and that then you can make this."

[jultomten]

Noo way, I had this as a idea like 10 years ago

[immortalsun]

LEGO wants you to call them ‘LEGO bricks’, not ‘LEGOs’.

[GlamorousTitanic]

That Concorde model isn’t meant to be held. It’s meant to be built and placed on a shelf for you to look at it with awe at the graceful lines of the supersonic queen of the sky.

[Pyradox]

Hey Cleo. Love your content and after seeing this short today (as I also love lego and want to see exciting uses of AI and think this is a killer idea), spent the evening playing around with it. It is definitely a cool idea, but with a $50 annual “pro” fee is still very early concept and not - to my mind - worth it yet.

I hope that my experience and feedback to the Brickit team helps others know what they are getting into and that you can do a follow up in six months or something once they have more fully developed the tech!

Here was my feedback to the team:

Hey Brickit team!

Love the idea for the app but will not pay at this time and wanted to let you know why, as I hope to want to in the future.

1) I offered to help train the ai, but I figured that meant being able to call out false positives so I/everyone would get less of them. There were piece shown where I had 7-8 “hits” and none were the piece I was looking for

2) No ability to rescan during a build. I tried to build a helicopter. And did ok actually. But it was a 33 page instruction set, and by page 10 I had enough false positives that I had moved bricks enough that to find needed bricks, a rescan mid instruction set would have been really useful. Instead it got frustrating knowing that I had the right piece (maybe), but it had been moved and now was hiding.

2.1) The instruction set had pieces that it could not find, and were not selectable in your piece finder. (Or at least I could not find them). These pieces were shown in white, but it took me a bit to understand that pieces shown in white were not found, instead it just kept taking me to the piece list. So not sure why that instruction set was offered up.

2.2) There was no way to get a list of all required pieces at the beginning to pull them out and then follow the instructions. If I knew that I need 6 of one piece for the whole set right from the start, I would go and pull all six or ten of those pieces. But it kept showing me locations of pieces that I had already taken, so then had to remember where I had not looked.

3) Buggy instructions. I was in the fourth to last instruction (of 33 pages) and the piece identifier at the bottom just disappeared. If I went back a page I could get to the piece list, but it just stopped showing the map and what pieces I needed (so I could not even really go to an area. And once I reopened the app there was no way to just search all instruction sets (e.g. all helicopters) to restart where I left off. And with the rescan the instruction set obviously did not reappear as I has removed all of those pieces.

4) I think there is an opportunity for paid people to scan “batches” and then combine those to make things. I have a huge bag of ~25lbs of random Lego pieces, and by removing big pieces, and only being able to take a picture of a specific area of lego I feel I was limited in my presented options.

5) As I rescanned I kept getting less and less pieces returned. In my first few scans I was getting 1800-2000 pieces analyzed. By my 15th scan of the evening I was getting less than 1000. And this seemed to be a steady progression down.

Again. I love the idea. But charging $50 annual fee for this early level of beta seems a bit steep. I look forward to a more developed product that solves/offers the solutions to the issues listed above.

[CommentRedacted]

That app is actually pretty cool. I have all my childhood legos in a bin and after spending a week building most of the stuff there is still a lot left.

[GooberGab]

She did a perfect Pikmin scream when the Concorde broke lol

[Blend_No.]

Essentially taking out all the imagination, curiosity and fun to further dumb down our coming generations.

[JordanWeber]

I slammed that like button so hard I broke her lego build in half.

[Banana_oil]

Your the only person chill enough to say legos and not get me mad

[thelolsamshow]

They use the same technology to fix ancient ruins, map the "stones" to piece it together. Before this tech usually they would just eyeball it.