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🏠 I Want To Live!

🏠 I Want To Live!

Robots, robots, robots

Stephen Flanders
July 31, 2023

Gm. I missed this last week, but I want to wish everyone a belated happy National New Jersey Day. Somehow, the day celebrating my beloved home state and the greatest state in the union falls on my birthday (July 27th). If that’s not fate, I don’t know what is. Now go out there and get a pork roll, egg, and cheese for me.

— Stephen Flanders

🏠 ROBOTICS

Real Life Wall-E

Another week, another step closer to general-purpose robots.

This time the step comes courtesy of Google’s DeepMind team and their new Robotic Transformer 2 (RT-2) model.

LLMs, Of Course

RT-2 is a vision-language-action (VTA) model, which means it uses massive amounts of data to control the robot through natural language commands.

In other words, just like how ChatGPT gleans patterns from crap tons of data to be able to do stuff like write your essays, RT-2 gleans patterns from crap tons of data so that robots can do stuff it hasn’t been specifically trained to do, like throw out the trash, move cans, and put fruits into bowls.

This is much improved compared to the traditional manual way of training robots. No longer will people have to sink massive amounts of time and energy into teaching robots how to do everything.

Progress, Progress, Progress

Frequent readers will know that this is DeepMind’s second major robotic advancement in the last month.

Combined with last month’s RoboCat, a self-improving AI agent for robotics, you now have a robot that can independently learn new skills and can continuously improve.

Add in the push for humanoid robots, and you are growing ever closer to living in I, Robot.

But hopefully without the whole robot war part.

The Big Picture: The advancements in AI have proved to be invaluable for the robotics industry.