There are numerous ways to include AI into robots, starting with improving how they’re trained to do tasks. But using large language models to offer instructions, as Google has done, is especially interesting.
It’s not the primary. The robotics startup Figure went viral a 12 months ago for a video wherein humans gave instructions to a humanoid on put dishes away. Around the identical time, a startup spun off from OpenAI, called Covariant, built something similar for robotic arms in warehouses. I saw a demo where you possibly can give the robot instructions via images, text, or video to do things like “move the tennis balls from this bin to that one.” Covariant was acquired by Amazon just five months later.
If you see such demos, you may’t help but wonder: When are these robots going to return to our workplaces? What about our homes?
If Figure’s plans offer a clue, the reply to the primary query is soon. The corporate announced on Saturday that it’s constructing a high-volume manufacturing facility set to fabricate 12,000 humanoid robots per 12 months. But training and testing robots, especially to make sure they’re protected in places where they work near humans, still takes a protracted time.
