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OpenAI disbands its robotics research team
- samstave 5y agoCurious idea: With the mentioning that they can shift their focus to domains with extensive data that they can build models of action with etc... Why not try the following (If easily possible) --- Take all the objects on the various 3D warehouses (thingiverse, and all the other 3d modeling repos out there) -- and have a system whereby an OpenAI 'Robotics' platform can virtually learn to manipulate and control a 3D model (solidworks/blender/whatever) and learn how to operate it. It would be amazing to have an AI robotics platform where you feed it various 3D files of real/planned/designed machines, and have it understand the actual constituancy of the components involved, then learn its degrees of motion limits, or servo inputs etc... and then learn to drive the device. Then, give it various other machines which share component types, built into any multitude of devices - and have it eval the model for familiar gears, worm-screws, servos, motors, etc... and have it figure out how to output the controller code to run an actual physically built out device. Let it go through thousands of 3D models of things and build a library of common code that can be used to run those components when found in any design.... Then you couple that code with Copilot and allow for people to have a codebase for controlling such based on what OpenAI has already learned.... As Copilot is already built using a partnership with OpenAI...
- verall 5y agoNVIDIA Isaac sounds very close to what you're describing.
- marcinzm 5y agoI suspect it's because at a certain point detailed physics matters and simulating things well enough is really hard. A robotic arm might flex just a bit, a gear may not mesh quite correctly, signals may take just a bit longer to get somewhere, a grip might slip, a plastic object might break from too much force, etc, etc.
- robotresearcher 5y agoSounds like a perfect domain to explore robust methods that can’t overfit to silly details.
- minimaxir 5y agoThe cynical-but-likely-accurate take is that researching language modeling has a higher ROI and lower risk than researching robotics.
- Animats 5y agoYes. Also, regular ML researchers sit at tables with laptops. Robotics people need electronics labs and electronics technicians, machine shops and machinists, test tracks and test track staff... If you have to build stuff, and you're not in a place that builds stuff on a regular basis, it takes way too long to get stuff built.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- wolverine876 5y ago> If you have to build stuff, and you're not in a place that builds stuff on a regular basis, it takes way too long to get stuff built. I wonder why they don't invest in establishing the competency for robotics. The potential return might seem enormous, though their choices might signify that they don't agree. Or maybe they just aren't willing to leave their comfort zone. 'Software will eat the world' is a convenient idea for people who want to stay in that comfort zone.
- taneq 5y agoIt's just higher risk and lower bang for buck right now.
- amelius 5y agoOrder picking in e-commerce warehouses seems a potentially profitable market.
- johnmoberg 5y agoDefinitely! Pieter Abbeel (who was working with OpenAI at some point) and others realized this and founded https://covariant.ai/ https://covariant.ai/.
- xnx 5y agoInteresting contrast to another story today: https://ai.googleblog.com/2021/07/speeding-up-reinforcement-learning-with.html https://ai.googleblog.com/2021/07/speeding-up-reinforcement-...
- ansk 5y agoIs the prevailing opinion that progress in reinforcement learning is dependent on algorithmic advances, as opposed to simply scaling existing algorithms? If that is the case, I could see this decision as an acknowledgement that they are not well positioned to push the frontier of reinforcement learning - at least not compared to any other academic or industry lab. Where they have seen success, and the direction it seems they are consolidating their focus, is in scaling up existing algorithms with larger networks and larger datasets. Generative modeling and self supervised learning seem more amenable to this engineering-first approach, so it seems prudent for them to concentrate their efforts in these areas.
- andyxor 5y agoReinforcement learning itself is a dead-end on a road to AI. They seem to slowly starting to realize it, probably ahead of academia.
- nrmn 5y agoWhy do you believe this to be the case?
- andyxor 5y agoIn a nutshell it’s too wasteful in energy spent and it doesn’t even try to mimic natural cognition. As physicists say about theories hopelessly detached from reality - “it’s not even wrong”. The achievements of RL are so dramatically oversold that it can probably be called the new snake oil.
- vladTheInhaler 5y agoI'm going to need you to unpack that a bit. Isn't interacting with an environment and observing the result exactly what natural cognition does? What area of machine learning do you feel is closer to how natural cognition works?
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- varelse 5y agoFascinating in the wake of Fei Fei Li's lab publishing significant work on embodied intelligence... https://arxiv.org/abs/2102.02202 https://arxiv.org/abs/2102.02202 Not to mention a bunch of relatively inexpensive reinforcement learning research relying on consumer knockoffs of Spot from Boston Dynamics... Really does seem like they are following the money and while there's nothing wrong with that it's also nothing like their original mission.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- coolspot 5y agoThe team was probably replaced by GPT-4. No need for humans to slow down great mind.
- wly_cdgr 5y agoThis feels like a strong sign that AGI is quite close now
- amerine 5y agoWhy do you think that?
- wly_cdgr 5y agoThey smell the urgency in the air, and they're close enough to the center to get a good and accurate whiff
- abeppu 5y agoHow on earth would you know if a whiff was accurate, when we're talking about something which has never before been created? I think even if you have intuitions about an approach, and have promising results, if you're trying to arrive at something new, it's really hard to know how far away you are.
- wly_cdgr 5y agoIt's just a hunch, no need to get your boxers in a bunch
- fartcannon 5y agoThis is lunacy. The first country/company to replace human labour with general bipedal robots, will reap wealth beyond imagination. The short sitedness is astonishing, if you ask me. I genuinely believe how we as a society act once human labour is replaced is first aspect of the great filter.
- ragebol 5y ago> replace human labour with general bipedal robots No need for bipeds, car factories employ dumb robot arms, no humans needed. Not very general purpose robots though. The first country/company to create robots that can be instructed similar to a humans to do any job will indeed have great benefits, but how long until that happens? Not within any amount of time that an investor wants to see. I'm unsure if I will ever see that in my life (counting on ~60 years to go still maybe?)
- TaylorAlexander 5y agoOne thing that struck me recently was that the famous imagenet competition that was won by a neural net took place in 2012. So we have made fantastic advances in ten years. But I'd still say at best robots like you describe are 20 years away, and that's a long time horizon for a small organization.
- ragebol 5y agoHas robotics had such an 'ImageNet moment'? Nothing springs to mind, just slow advancement over decades. If suddenly robot manipulators could grasp any object, operate any knob/switch, tie knots, manipulate cloth, with the same manipulator, on first sight, that would be quite a feat. But then there's still task planning which is a very different topic. And ... and .... So much still to develop for generally useful robots.
- TaylorAlexander 5y agoNot yet. I have a four wheel drive robot I designed with four 4k cameras feeding in to an Nvidia Jetson Xavier. [1] Just getting it to navigate itself using vision would mean building a complex system with a lot of pieces (beyond the most basic demo anyway). You need separate neural nets doing all kinds of different tasks and you need a massive training system for it all. You can see how much work Tesla has had to do to get a robot to safely drive on public roads. [2] From where I am sitting now, I think we are making good inroads on something like an "Imagenet moment" for robots. (Well, I should note that I am a robotics engineer but I mostly work on driver level software and hardware, not AI. Though I follow the research from the outside.) It seems like a combination of transformers plus scale plus cross domain reasoning like CLIP [3] could begin to build a system that could mimic humans. I guess as good as transformers are we still haven't solved how to get them to learn for themselves, and that's probably a hard requirement for really being useful in the real world. Good work in RL happening there though. Gosh, yeah, this is gonna take decades lol. Maybe we will have a spark that unites all this in one efficient system. Improving transformer efficiency and achieving big jumps in scale are a combo that will probably get interesting stuff solved. All the groundwork is a real slog. [1] https://reboot.love/t/new-cameras-on-rover/277 https://reboot.love/t/new-cameras-on-rover/277 [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hx7BXih7zx8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hx7BXih7zx8 [3] https://openai.com/blog/clip/ https://openai.com/blog/clip/
- cweill 5y agoI think the comments are confounding shutting down the robotics research team with eliminating all RL research. Most robotics teams don't use data-hungry RL algorithms because the cost of interacting with the environment is so expensive. And even if the team has a simulator that can approximate the real world to produce infinite data, there is still the issue of the "simulator-gap" with the real world. I don't work for openAI but I would guess they are going to keep working on RL (e.g hide and seek, gym, DoTA style Research) to push the algorithmic SoTA. But translating that into a physical robot interacting with the physical world is extremely difficult and a ways away.
- adenozine 5y agoI'm sure the overhead and upkeep of a robotics lab far outweighs that of a computer lab for software research. Are there any Open* organizations for robotics that could perhaps fill the void here? I think robotics is really important and I think the software is a big deal also, but it's important that actual physical trials of these AIs are pursued. I would think that seeing something in real space like that offers an unparalleled insight for expert observers. I remember the first time I ever orchestrated a DB failover routine, my boss took me into the server room when it was scheduled on the testing cluster. Hearing all the machines spin up and the hard drives start humming, that was a powerful and visceral moment for me and really crystallized what seemed like importance about my job.
- spiritplumber 5y agowww.robots-everywhere.com we have a bunch of free stuff hereif it helps any
- dougSF70 5y agoDesigning robots to pick fruit and make coffee / pizzas cannot have a positive ROI until labor laws make the bsuiness-case for them. Majority of use cases where we can use robots for activities humans cannot perform (fast spot welding on production line, moving nuclear fuel rods, etc) have been solved. It is smart to focus on language and information processing, given that we are producing so much more of it, everyday.
- Jack000 5y agoMakes sense I guess, integrating robot hardware requires an entirely different set of skills to ML research and has a much slower dev cycle. I think OpenAI has progressively narrowed down its core competency - for a company like 3M it would be something like "applying coatings to substrates", and for OpenAI it's more like "applying transformers to different domains". It seems like most of their high-impact stuff is basically a big transformer: GPT-x, copilot, image gpt, DALL-E, CLIP, jukebox, musenet their RL and gan/diffusion stuff bucks the trend, but I'm sure we'll see transformers show up in those domains as well.
- modeless 5y agoI think most people believe that the problem with robots is that we don't have the right software, and if we just knew how to program them then today's robots could be incredibly useful in everyday life. From that perspective, this move from OpenAI seems dumb. That belief is wrong. Today's robots can't be made useful in everyday life no matter how advanced the software. The hardware is too inflexible, too unreliable, too fragile, too rigid, too heavy, too dangerous, too expensive, too slow. In the past the software and hardware were equally bad, but today machine learning is advancing like crazy, while the hardware is improving at a snail's pace in comparison. Solving robotics is now a hardware problem, not a software problem. When the hardware is ready, the software will be comparatively easy to develop. Without the right hardware, you can't develop the appropriate software. OpenAI is right to ignore robotics for now. It's a job for companies with a hardware focus, for at least the next decade.
- pedalpete 5y agoI'm not an expert, but I'd suggest hardware is trailing software, but there is still great progress happening in materials design, soft-robots, miniaturization, etc. Just as in the computer era, we go through phases where the software is ahead of hardware, then hardware gets ahead of software. It seems that is a pendulum that swings, and the argument many people have to the integrated pipeline Apple operates.
- TheRealPomax 5y agoDangerous, fast, reliable. Pick three.
- qwertox 5y agoOne day a person will see a Spot robot and smile at its cuteness, then notice that there's no way to get past it, no way to have it not decide where you can and can't step towards. It won't have a gun, but that person will no longer have a reason to smile at them in the future. Later you will have a Spot robot chasing a person and getting it to stop, surrendering at the machine without being threatened by it, but just by recognizing that there's no longer a point in running away.
- xyproto 5y agoNote that OpenAI is a company and often release news of interesting projects without any corresponding open source code.
- machiaweliczny 5y agoAnyone is aware on progress in biobots? I think that building these might be way cooler than traditional robotics.