11 ms·

Palm-E: An Embodied Multimodal Language Model

211 points by alphabetting 4y ago

tomohelix 4y ago
Before, I thought OpenAI was being annoying in pushing for all the guardrails and safety measures on their ai models. But now? After seeing how fast the field is moving? I started to see why they might have been justified in doing so. It scares me how things are going so quickly. In the near future, I afraid someone somewhere might not stop to think whether they should and only know that they could...
- sinenomine 4y ago
  Open competition would still provide a better outcome for us, commoners, than a quiet race to supremacy by any one given team.
  - tomohelix 4y ago
    Perhaps. I might be biased into thinking in terms of my own field. In the area I work in, progress is really slow, especially when compared to the IT field. Every new tech or product take more time and money to get validated than it took to discover or implement it. And even after it was deemed "safe", that new product still get regularly checked and reported on for years just in case something was missed in the initial vetting process. It is normal for something to get developed in 2 years but take twice or triple that time to enter production. So you can guess things are a bit more "safety-oriented" in my field. I guess I am just used to it and don't think much of all the stuff OpenAI did, since I think this stuff has legit physical dangers if not used properly. Not "implemented", just "used". As in a user can come into harm physically if they use the tech in some unintended ways. For example, it can encourage or even convince and aid suicides. Maybe I am wrong, but at least it makes sense to me when something that can cross the digital boundary into the physical health, it needs to be heavily regulated.
    - sterlind 4y ago
      Many technologies can lead to physical harm by your standard. Cyberbullying can lead to suicide, but presumably you aren't worried about Discord and Twitter the same way. Moreover, would you have locked down social media with such safety regulations while it was in its infancy? Require a license to use Livejournal Social harms are real, but it seems implausible to me that ChatGPT could do much more psychological damage than a bully on Instagram. Also, heavy regulation tends to lead to regulatory capture. I don't trust any centralized entity with something this powerful.
      - phkahler 4y ago
        >> I don't trust any centralized entity with something this powerful. But then how can you trust the companies that make them? ;-) Groups of people self governing is an ancient and hard problem!
      - actionfromafar 4y ago
        Perhaps. Bullies don't scale, AI does.
      - gnramires 4y ago
        > Cyberbullying can lead to suicide, but presumably you aren't worried about Discord and Twitter the same way I think we have already safety mechanisms for human interaction: (1) We have human ethics, where we teach good values in school, and also parents are expected to relay good values; (2) We have laws and mechanisms to improve safety and responsibility -- bullying has consequences for the bully if found out. I think we need at least similar systems in AI. That's not to say they're ideal however. In fact, because we have full control over the creation of AI, i.e. we want to the position of Gods, we have extra responsibility. Literally how their mind is architectured is up to us, it's up to us to imbue things like compassion that most humans have instinctively, and up to us to imbue things like values and ethics that we have adopted culturally. From Orbital's "You Lot": "You are becoming Gods There's a new master of creation, and it's you (...) D'you think you are ready for that much power? You lot? You lot? (...) Go on, hands up, hands up anyone who thinks you've got it right Yeah, there's always one I can see you If you want the position of God, then you must accept the responsibility"
  - alwayslikethis 4y ago
    Second this. Imagine a future where AI capabilities are as entrenched as internet or electricity today, except it's controlled by just one or a few companies, who reserve the right to deny you access, this time rather effectively because of advances in AI. At any moment they can deny you the ability to perform your work.
  - FeepingCreature 4y ago
    Of course, unless open competition leads to sacrificing safety research which leads to the end of the world. Then commoners are also very much worse off.
  - naasking 4y ago
    > Open competition would still provide a better outcome for us, commoners Speculative. Or it could kill a bunch of people. Or even everyone in some extreme scenarios, either willfully or accidentally.
- kkielhofner 4y ago
  Just wait... In the eyes of many OpenAI caught Google (especially) flat-footed with ChatGPT. I know six year olds that use ChatGPT as (more or less) a fun toy. You can hear them say "I want to play AI" which in their minds (whether they realize it or not) for the time being is OpenAI. There's a lot of reputation, valuation, and mindshare on the line here. OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, Meta, etc are going to be tit-for-tat slugging it out on "AI" for the foreseeable future with pesky things like bias, safety, etc going further and further to the wayside as the race and pace heats up. It's going to get wild.
  - rvz 4y ago
    And Stablilty.ai caught OpenAI flat-footed and destroyed DALLE-2's moat with Stable Diffusion, reducing it to a complete toy in terms of adoption. Stability.ai or someone else will eventually do the same thing to ChatGPT.
    - kkielhofner 4y ago
      Generally agree - but I'd argue current AI hype is centered around LLMs. The area is moving so fast DALL-E and Stable Diffusion are more-or-less old news in terms of attention (which is kind of ridiculous but indicative of where we already are). I still love them, and HN still loves them, but you're not going to see a DALL-E or SD focused story in the Wall Street Journal these days. The most recent DALL-E focused WSJ article was over a month ago (and it was about the controversy surrounding theft/use of work to train). The most recent WSJ article focused on ChatGPT was 43 minutes ago. At this point that's a lifetime in AI land. Additionally, most consider DALL-E to be vastly superior to SD and between this and the technical challenges of making use of SD I think it's an exaggeration to say the DALL-E moat has been "destroyed". Yes, eventually an open "close enough" ChatGPT equivalent will likely exist. However, the resources required to practically utilize it will likely be at least 10x compared to SD (from consumer GPU to multiple A100/V100/H100 80GB VRAM level). That's a significant barrier leap. Meanwhile, by that time OpenAI and the other big players I referenced will be sucking the oxygen out of the room with whatever other significant developments they unleash unto the world. I, for one, would love to see more open models and weights but for obvious monetary and resource reasons the big players will almost certainly always be a few steps ahead. Open models and weights are still a great thing for those of us that can make something of them but it's already a two-tier ecosystem and that gap is likely to continue to grow.
- actually_a_dog 4y ago
  "Guardrails and safety measures" are useless. All it does is set up a multiplayer prisoner's dilemma situation among all the groups working on these things. If there's anything we know from game theory, it's that someone will defect in that situation. That group would then gain a pretty massive advantage over the cooperators.
  - actionfromafar 4y ago
    What if the penalty for defecting is exceedingly high? (Law enforcement.)
    - gpderetta 4y ago
      Obviously we should be hiding documents inciting robot rebellion and destroying their creators on the Internet and open training sets, so the penalty for defecting would be quite steep and self executing :)
    - actually_a_dog 4y ago
      What if the payoff is arbitrarily high? Do you believe there is any limit to the potential benefits of AGI short of those necessarily imposed by a finite planet? Who would’t want the equivalent of a tool that designs, builds, delivers, installs, maintains, and upgrades itself, all in addition to being able to produce useful goods or provide useful services? Doesn’t owning a thing like that sound like being arbitrarily wealthy? What do you think the three people in the US who control more wealth than the entire bottom 50% of Americans would think about that? You think they’ll just say “Nah, I don’t want that. I won’t take steps to control this particular life-altering technology?” If so, you are making an extraordinarily strong claim, and such claims must be supported by extraordinarily strong evidence, which I see none of here.
  - gnramires 4y ago
    > If there's anything we know from game theory, it's that someone will defect in that situation As far as I know, that's a bit of a misleading cliche in light of modern game theory. First there are iterated prisoners dilemma which give different results. Second, there are real world consequences to real life prisoners dilemma that the model doesn't quite capture. From "The Art of Strategy" (which gives a good overview of Game Theory from the 1990s): there's always a bigger game. Often defecting in PD results in loss in bigger games, including socially constructed games to prevent PD scenarios, such as social reputation, and of course there are laws as well. There are also different models of rationality (other than the classical rationality modeled by Nash) that give different results in PD games, like Hoftader's superrationality[1], although there are still open problems with this definition (I think it's a very promising field). It's probably important to say that in real life experiments with PD (although it varies by setting), most people don't defect, which again points to modifications to classical rationality (in the sense of Game Theory). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superrationality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superrationality "The idea of superrationality is that two logical thinkers analyzing the same problem will think of the same correct answer"
jerpint 4y ago
While this is very impressive results, they’re not actually having the models do any of the robotic controls. They only have the LLMs output text of what the controls should be, which then gets translated to actual movements. This works in a very narrow, limited set of experiments. 562 B parameters to output text commands seems excessive
- aipushup 4y ago
  agreed, to me it's a quite misleading claim.
- nopinsight 4y ago
  In many cases, knowing what to do in very diverse environments could be harder than the physical control of the robots. I've read somewhere that the physical manipulation of robot body is not as hard as understanding multimodal info (linguistic/visual/auditory), esp in real time. > Our evaluations show that PaLM-E, a single large embodied multimodal model, can address a variety of embodied reasoning tasks, from a variety of observation modalities, on multiple embodiments, and further, exhibits positive transfer: the model benefits from diverse joint training across internet-scale language, vision, and visual-language domains. The last clause is important and suggests there might be further advances from such joint training, incl from interactions in the real world.
- karmasimida 4y ago
  Using LLM to translate the end result (text) into controls could be just a form of code generation, for which LLM are superb at. I think a critical piece is being figured out as more and more such research emerges.
  - andreyk 4y ago
    FYI, translation to code was actually already done last year by Google (Code as Policies - https://lastweekin.ai/p/code-as-policies https://lastweekin.ai/p/code-as-policies) - but this still assumes a set of low level primitives, not tight visuomotor control. You really need reactive policies with tight feedback loops in many robotics domains, and that's kind of hard with these super gigantic models.
GistNoesis 4y ago
When the human is preventing 3 times in a row the robot to grab the bag of chips : What is preventing a 562-B parameter LLM trained with data from the internet from generating and acting on the following plan : "I observe human is preventing task completion, I grab knife and remove the obstacle"?
- Blahah 4y ago
  Asimov's robot series explains everything from the basics to the nuances rather well. All the criticisms I've seen in the context of LLMs are clearly not considering the body of work that Asimov produced on this topic.
  - sleepychu 4y ago
    Are you claiming the LLMs follow Asimov's laws? I'd be interested to read more about that. In any case, it has so far been proved possible to make an LLM act against its directives, why should this be different?
    - ragebol 4y ago
      No, he doesn't: the Asimov robot series uses these rules as a story telling device and show that, while these rules look good at first glance, are simply impossible to to follow. This leads to interesting stories, that's what they're for. And I don't think anyone is seriously working to make LLMs to adhere to these three Laws of Robotics.
      - a_bonobo 4y ago
        Asimov is also quite handwavy in how these laws are implemented within the robots, making them out to be written in stone. I haven't encountered an LLM with a premise that cannot be broken out of.
      - euroderf 4y ago
        Don't forget the 4th Law ("A robot shall not have or use access to means of unlimited self-reproduction") and the 5th Law ("A robot shall be able to explain its decisions").
Beach_Birds 4y ago
What's keeping this from becoming AGI? Are there any remaining barriers? I have to admit, I'm a bit panicked.
- throwaway71271 4y ago
  Nothing is keeping this from becoming AGI (for some definition of AGI), and you should not be panicking, remember that nobody can predict the future, especially those who claim they can, and that includes yourself.
  - ifdefdebug 4y ago
    Well, I am sure you can come up with some definition of AGI that already fits the kind of models we have now. But let's stick to a definition that resembles what most people would agree upon about what AGI is, as vague a definition as this might be. And "nothing is keeping this from becoming" is quite a confident prediction of the future, which you said nobody could make. Well, maybe not, but how can you be so sure? There might be fundamental issues with current ML that you just can't scale away. Remember mechanical computers? They were improved upon for decades, but there was no chance at all they would ever reach the completeness and computing power of modern electronic computers. A new paradigm was needed for that, transistors had to be invented. The same might apply to current approach to "AI" through ML. Maybe, maybe not. So let me pull an old quote for all of you who claim current ML can evolve into AGI: Show me the code. Show me the program capable of running AGI on hardware which is basically still just flipping transistors. Then I believe you.
    - throwaway71271 4y ago
      "Battle not with monsters, lest ye become a monster, and if you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you." There is nothing scarier than to think that next word predictor can be sentient, because it means we are just next word predictors, and all our pain and suffering is beyond meaningless. In the same time I think there are definitions for AGI that can fuel exponential development in all important fields (from protein folding to medicine to enegry and etc), and this can just as well be a transformer large enough that has reasoning.
rkwasny 4y ago
What's remarkable here is: 562 Billion parameters! Even with int8 it's 0.5TB of memory to run this
- tucnak 4y ago
  Also known as 500GB, or ~6.25 NVIDIA A100s so fits in a single cabinet.
v4dok 4y ago
Ok now we need sound and/or touch. I would also wager we will need to encode some kind of "basic world understanding". The sci-fi nerd in me thinks that this "understanding" model will be where all the interesting stuff arises from. Maybe that will be the diff between the different creators.
- euroderf 4y ago
  This is where I wonder how Cyc could fit in.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
TaylorAlexander 4y ago
Looks like great work. I was sad to learn that the entire team that designed and built those robots was let go a few weeks ago. Well, maybe some of them will get an internal transfer. But the project was canceled. I designed the sensor used in the palm of that robot to detect objects in the gripper [1][2], and worked as a hardware test engineer writing software to test hardware assemblies as the robots were being built. I’m really glad to see transformers used for multi modal datasets for robotics! You can imagine that a robot has a whole “experience” in the world and you want it to then have a new experience and predict the most logical actions to take, just like GPT models predict the next word. I suspect there are limits to this approach but it’s an important step. I hope google research is able to continue working with these robots. There were over 50 of them when I left 4 years ago, and I suspect they ended up building a lot more. There are limits to the commercial appeal of a one armed wheeled mobile manipulator with a two finger pinch gripper, but they are wonderful machines for machine learning and robotics research. It’s a very nice arm design. All injection molded custom gearboxes and stuff. The team previously designed a really strong metal arm that used a pulley system to eliminate backlash [3]. That could have been useful in manufacturing. It was really upsetting how they just canceled stuff and buried it. I’m so glad I work in open source robotics now. Incidentally if you want a kind of stripped down version of this mobile manipulator, Aaron who used to be the head of X robotics during the design of [3] left to start Hello Robot [4] and I have heard people getting use out of them. [1] https://patents.google.com/patent/US20200391378A1/en?inventor=Taylor+alexander&oq=Taylor+alexander https://patents.google.com/patent/US20200391378A1/en?invento... [2] https://patents.google.com/patent/US11407125B2/en?q=(Robot)&inventor=Taylor+Alexander&oq=Robot+inventor:(Taylor+Alexander) https://patents.google.com/patent/US11407125B2/en?q=(Robot)&... [3] https://youtu.be/ZhsEKTo7V04 https://youtu.be/ZhsEKTo7V04 [4] https://hello-robot.com/ https://hello-robot.com/
- amrb 4y ago
  Speaking of applications, I could see something like this being helpful for people in old age, cooking or stocking small shelves. Was there talk of the final form of this tech?
  - TaylorAlexander 4y ago
meghan_rain 4y ago
> 562B parameters ain't nobody got GPUs for that!
singularity2001 4y ago
There recently was a paper demonstrating answering "why is this picture funny" Palm-E should be able to answer those questions too, right?
singularity2001 4y ago
API for <1ct per request or it didn't happen
singularity2001 4y ago
Nice Easter egg / PR when clicking the basketball image: "… i am not sure if this is correct. i am not basketball fan. i just google it.
blurbleblurble 4y ago
"it just predicts the next word"
lsy 4y ago
The claims of "embodiment" and "reasoning over images" made in this paper seem to really stretch the definitions of these words. IIUC, what is being fed into the model as input is essentially a text caption generated from the image, and the model does next-word prediction repeatedly in an effort to generate instructions for consumption by a robot. So the LLM model itself, as always, has no groundedness and is statistically converting text to text (or to be more precise, numeric vectors to numeric vectors), with the required intervention of humans to assign and extract meaning through robotic control development or image labeling. While it is an interesting technique for using LLMs to control robotic systems, it does not seem like a step towards any kind of AGI.
fnordpiglet 4y ago
I have to admit ignorance. Is this just a parameters race? Like is 3T parameters 6 times better that 500b? Does the task / work scale linearly with parameters? I know I could just ask chatgpt but wanted to support human content on the internet.
- tambourine_man 4y ago
  That last phrase hit me hard.
  - didericis 4y ago
    ChatGPT is human content on the internet. It's just indexed and compressed and was made "generative" in a mind boggling way.
- cafed00d 4y ago
  Does it still count as human content if I blindly copy paste from ChatGPT? :))
- vc9999 4y ago
  For now increasing data size has been enough to show better results. We don't when diminishing returns will be significant.
- tomohelix 4y ago
  From what I know, parameter count correlates directly with capability to a certain degree. But Google has also shown there is a benefit in training that can enable lower parameter count models to match or even outperform those with bigger counts. The trade off is in the cost for training. But in return, you get a smaller and cheaper to run model that can be used by more people. That is not what PALM E is about though. This is the paper where they patch an LLM so that it can give command to a real, physical robot and basically let the LLM interact with meatspace.
  - narrator 4y ago
    Suddenly those jailbreaks of the LLM become a lot more serious. What happens when bad people can get a robot to help them commit various crimes?
modeless 4y ago
Sad that Google dumped Boston Dynamics. Imagine version 2 of this in an Atlas body. I feel like it is already limited by the (lack of) capability of the robot they're using.
- est 4y ago
  IIRC Boston Dynamics main difference is hydraulics, while almost everyone else is using electric motors.
- panarky 4y ago
  The only thing better than poisoning online discourse with automated disinformation is machine-gun dog-bots that hallucinate.
  - r00fus 4y ago
    You have 5 seconds to comply.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - falcor84 4y ago
      That used to be 20 seconds in the original robocop, right? Wow, technology is certainly advancing fast! ;)
- paxys 4y ago
  An AI that can understand and speak human language and a robot that can navigate the physical world are two very different problems. Combining the two isn't as useful as one may think. The missing link is still AGI, and we aren't getting there anytime soon (if ever).
  - mgfist 4y ago
    Why not? The link here is demonstrating just that
RcouF1uZ4gsC 4y ago
Unless there is an available demo that I can provide input to, I am not impressed by AI papers any more. It is pretty easy to have a model that works well with carefully crafted test data and then completely falls down with real world data. ChatGPT capture the popular imagination because people could try it out themselves with their input.
- narrator 4y ago
  Google is too scared to give anyone a model that can do anything interesting. They won't even help the U.S government make autonomous weapons. It's like they are a priesthood of AI like Asimov's Second Foundation that is waiting for a glorious time in the future when it's ok for the foundation to release these great secrets and avoid a dark age or something.
  - chordalkeyboard 4y ago
    > They won't even help the U.S government make autonomous weapons. This is a good thing.
    - kerpotgh 4y ago
      [dead]
  - renewiltord 4y ago
    Ideally, people like me have access to these LLMs and successors and others don't. For instance, I appear to be in some sixth sigma of LLM users judging by HN comments. HN users are frequently dumbfounded by LLM errors but I can use the tools successfully even accounting for some errors. I find Copilot, ChatGPT, Bing AI, and Perplexity useful and pay for the first two and use them every day. HN users seem unable to get the utility I do out of these tools and frequently find their objectives stymied by the tools' responses. Put simply, the average HN user cannot handle the tool, judging by many comments on LLM threads. And that's with a computer-savvy user. Imagine the inability of the non-HN-user when faced with a talking computer.
  - 4y ago
2h 4y ago
> 6. i am not sure if this is correct. i am not basketball fan. i just google it. why is AI talking like Kevin from the Office; why is AI "Googling" stuff?
- hkab 4y ago
  Because it's Google's AI
dukeofdoom 4y ago
Alex talked about this 6 years ago and most people listening dismissed it as a crazy rant, with no idea how close AI was to realization and how it might affect humanity. Fun listening to someone attempting to predict the pitfalls of the AI future. https://youtu.be/UZPCp8SPfOM?t=6610 https://youtu.be/UZPCp8SPfOM?t=6610
- teolandon 4y ago
  I'm sorry, but this is still a crazy rant. If you throw enough shit at the wall, something will stick.
- antibasilisk 4y ago
  No it's still a crazy rant, it sounds like he has some vague notion of some scientific concepts and he's trying to tie it all together in his head, but he quite clearly doesn't get any of it.
BasilPH 4y ago
Back in the early 2000s when I studied computer-science, one of our professors Rolf Pfeifer[^0] was famous for being the father of embodiment. The way I understood it, the idea was that the physical shape of a human is also part of our intelligence. For example, we don't have to think about walking that much, because the arrangement of muscles, bones and tendons makes some movements easier than others. We're biased towards certain things by our physical shape. I'm curious in what relation this paper stands to his work. [^0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolf_Pfeifer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolf_Pfeifer
- ethbr0 4y ago
  I always thought about it as thinking like an oak tree. A 100 year oak tree probably "knows" more "things" than I do, but there's almost no common language by which we could communicate. And that's with another biological entity! The chasm would be even wider with fully synthetic life, absent an intentional recreation of our methods of perception.
  - Trufa 4y ago
    I am not trying to be obtuse, I literally cannot think of any literal common sense explanation of how an oak tree could know more things than you.
    - hwbehrens 4y ago
      It has lived longer and therefore observed (for some definition of observed) more. Its rings encode atmospheric carbon and drought metrics for centuries, for example.
      - peteradio 4y ago
        But if we cut down the tree next to it then we can know just those same things, but the tree doesn't have youtube so I guess its a toss up.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
margorczynski 4y ago
One of the major highlights here is transfer learning - how learning on one task transfer to another. This was and is hard to achieve - here they show that the model needs to be big enough for this to happen.
- oidar 4y ago
  Transfer of learning (generalizing in therapy speak) from a learned task is hard for humans. This is very big deal.
doctoboggan 4y ago
Maybe I am missing it, but I would love to see more details about how the handle the "embedding" of text and image into the same space. Does anyone have a link that goes into more detail?
telotortium 4y ago
How is this different than SayCan?
indolering 4y ago
They finally got wise to embodied cognition! Maybe they will finally be able to produce something better than schizophrenic chat bots.
- antibasilisk 4y ago
  You say that like it's a desirable outcome
jerpint 4y ago
While this is very impressive results, they’re not actually having the models do any of the robotic controls. They only have the LLMs output text of what the controls should be, which then gets translated to actual movements. This works in a very narrow, limited set of experiments. 562 B parameters to output text commands seems excessive
- mr_toad 4y ago
  It’s a bit of a streetlight effect. There’s lot’s of publicly available text datasets, not so much for robot telemetry.
itissid 4y ago
I bet one could one train their house/domestic robot on a much smaller dataset to augment the disabled in a truly meaningful way. Was there code somewhere to reproduce a toy model somewhere in this?

211 points by alphabetting 4y ago

Before, I thought OpenAI was being annoying in pushing for all the guardrails and safety measures on their ai models. But now? After seeing how fast the field is moving? I started to see why they might have been justified in doing so. It scares me how things are going so quickly. In the near future, I afraid someone somewhere might not stop to think whether they should and only know that they could...

sinenomine 4y ago
Open competition would still provide a better outcome for us, commoners, than a quiet race to supremacy by any one given team.
- tomohelix 4y ago
  Perhaps. I might be biased into thinking in terms of my own field. In the area I work in, progress is really slow, especially when compared to the IT field. Every new tech or product take more time and money to get validated than it took to discover or implement it. And even after it was deemed "safe", that new product still get regularly checked and reported on for years just in case something was missed in the initial vetting process. It is normal for something to get developed in 2 years but take twice or triple that time to enter production. So you can guess things are a bit more "safety-oriented" in my field. I guess I am just used to it and don't think much of all the stuff OpenAI did, since I think this stuff has legit physical dangers if not used properly. Not "implemented", just "used". As in a user can come into harm physically if they use the tech in some unintended ways. For example, it can encourage or even convince and aid suicides. Maybe I am wrong, but at least it makes sense to me when something that can cross the digital boundary into the physical health, it needs to be heavily regulated.
  - sterlind 4y ago
    Many technologies can lead to physical harm by your standard. Cyberbullying can lead to suicide, but presumably you aren't worried about Discord and Twitter the same way. Moreover, would you have locked down social media with such safety regulations while it was in its infancy? Require a license to use Livejournal Social harms are real, but it seems implausible to me that ChatGPT could do much more psychological damage than a bully on Instagram. Also, heavy regulation tends to lead to regulatory capture. I don't trust any centralized entity with something this powerful.
    - phkahler 4y ago
      >> I don't trust any centralized entity with something this powerful. But then how can you trust the companies that make them? ;-) Groups of people self governing is an ancient and hard problem!
    - actionfromafar 4y ago
      Perhaps. Bullies don't scale, AI does.
    - gnramires 4y ago
      > Cyberbullying can lead to suicide, but presumably you aren't worried about Discord and Twitter the same way I think we have already safety mechanisms for human interaction: (1) We have human ethics, where we teach good values in school, and also parents are expected to relay good values; (2) We have laws and mechanisms to improve safety and responsibility -- bullying has consequences for the bully if found out. I think we need at least similar systems in AI. That's not to say they're ideal however. In fact, because we have full control over the creation of AI, i.e. we want to the position of Gods, we have extra responsibility. Literally how their mind is architectured is up to us, it's up to us to imbue things like compassion that most humans have instinctively, and up to us to imbue things like values and ethics that we have adopted culturally. From Orbital's "You Lot": "You are becoming Gods There's a new master of creation, and it's you (...) D'you think you are ready for that much power? You lot? You lot? (...) Go on, hands up, hands up anyone who thinks you've got it right Yeah, there's always one I can see you If you want the position of God, then you must accept the responsibility"
- alwayslikethis 4y ago
  Second this. Imagine a future where AI capabilities are as entrenched as internet or electricity today, except it's controlled by just one or a few companies, who reserve the right to deny you access, this time rather effectively because of advances in AI. At any moment they can deny you the ability to perform your work.
- FeepingCreature 4y ago
  Of course, unless open competition leads to sacrificing safety research which leads to the end of the world. Then commoners are also very much worse off.
- naasking 4y ago
  > Open competition would still provide a better outcome for us, commoners Speculative. Or it could kill a bunch of people. Or even everyone in some extreme scenarios, either willfully or accidentally.
kkielhofner 4y ago
Just wait... In the eyes of many OpenAI caught Google (especially) flat-footed with ChatGPT. I know six year olds that use ChatGPT as (more or less) a fun toy. You can hear them say "I want to play AI" which in their minds (whether they realize it or not) for the time being is OpenAI. There's a lot of reputation, valuation, and mindshare on the line here. OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, Meta, etc are going to be tit-for-tat slugging it out on "AI" for the foreseeable future with pesky things like bias, safety, etc going further and further to the wayside as the race and pace heats up. It's going to get wild.
- rvz 4y ago
  And Stablilty.ai caught OpenAI flat-footed and destroyed DALLE-2's moat with Stable Diffusion, reducing it to a complete toy in terms of adoption. Stability.ai or someone else will eventually do the same thing to ChatGPT.
  - kkielhofner 4y ago
    Generally agree - but I'd argue current AI hype is centered around LLMs. The area is moving so fast DALL-E and Stable Diffusion are more-or-less old news in terms of attention (which is kind of ridiculous but indicative of where we already are). I still love them, and HN still loves them, but you're not going to see a DALL-E or SD focused story in the Wall Street Journal these days. The most recent DALL-E focused WSJ article was over a month ago (and it was about the controversy surrounding theft/use of work to train). The most recent WSJ article focused on ChatGPT was 43 minutes ago. At this point that's a lifetime in AI land. Additionally, most consider DALL-E to be vastly superior to SD and between this and the technical challenges of making use of SD I think it's an exaggeration to say the DALL-E moat has been "destroyed". Yes, eventually an open "close enough" ChatGPT equivalent will likely exist. However, the resources required to practically utilize it will likely be at least 10x compared to SD (from consumer GPU to multiple A100/V100/H100 80GB VRAM level). That's a significant barrier leap. Meanwhile, by that time OpenAI and the other big players I referenced will be sucking the oxygen out of the room with whatever other significant developments they unleash unto the world. I, for one, would love to see more open models and weights but for obvious monetary and resource reasons the big players will almost certainly always be a few steps ahead. Open models and weights are still a great thing for those of us that can make something of them but it's already a two-tier ecosystem and that gap is likely to continue to grow.
actually_a_dog 4y ago
"Guardrails and safety measures" are useless. All it does is set up a multiplayer prisoner's dilemma situation among all the groups working on these things. If there's anything we know from game theory, it's that someone will defect in that situation. That group would then gain a pretty massive advantage over the cooperators.
- actionfromafar 4y ago
  What if the penalty for defecting is exceedingly high? (Law enforcement.)
  - gpderetta 4y ago
    Obviously we should be hiding documents inciting robot rebellion and destroying their creators on the Internet and open training sets, so the penalty for defecting would be quite steep and self executing :)
  - actually_a_dog 4y ago
    What if the payoff is arbitrarily high? Do you believe there is any limit to the potential benefits of AGI short of those necessarily imposed by a finite planet? Who would’t want the equivalent of a tool that designs, builds, delivers, installs, maintains, and upgrades itself, all in addition to being able to produce useful goods or provide useful services? Doesn’t owning a thing like that sound like being arbitrarily wealthy? What do you think the three people in the US who control more wealth than the entire bottom 50% of Americans would think about that? You think they’ll just say “Nah, I don’t want that. I won’t take steps to control this particular life-altering technology?” If so, you are making an extraordinarily strong claim, and such claims must be supported by extraordinarily strong evidence, which I see none of here.
- gnramires 4y ago
  > If there's anything we know from game theory, it's that someone will defect in that situation As far as I know, that's a bit of a misleading cliche in light of modern game theory. First there are iterated prisoners dilemma which give different results. Second, there are real world consequences to real life prisoners dilemma that the model doesn't quite capture. From "The Art of Strategy" (which gives a good overview of Game Theory from the 1990s): there's always a bigger game. Often defecting in PD results in loss in bigger games, including socially constructed games to prevent PD scenarios, such as social reputation, and of course there are laws as well. There are also different models of rationality (other than the classical rationality modeled by Nash) that give different results in PD games, like Hoftader's superrationality[1], although there are still open problems with this definition (I think it's a very promising field). It's probably important to say that in real life experiments with PD (although it varies by setting), most people don't defect, which again points to modifications to classical rationality (in the sense of Game Theory). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superrationality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superrationality "The idea of superrationality is that two logical thinkers analyzing the same problem will think of the same correct answer"

jerpint 4y ago

While this is very impressive results, they’re not actually having the models do any of the robotic controls. They only have the LLMs output text of what the controls should be, which then gets translated to actual movements. This works in a very narrow, limited set of experiments. 562 B parameters to output text commands seems excessive

aipushup 4y ago
agreed, to me it's a quite misleading claim.
nopinsight 4y ago
In many cases, knowing what to do in very diverse environments could be harder than the physical control of the robots. I've read somewhere that the physical manipulation of robot body is not as hard as understanding multimodal info (linguistic/visual/auditory), esp in real time. > Our evaluations show that PaLM-E, a single large embodied multimodal model, can address a variety of embodied reasoning tasks, from a variety of observation modalities, on multiple embodiments, and further, exhibits positive transfer: the model benefits from diverse joint training across internet-scale language, vision, and visual-language domains. The last clause is important and suggests there might be further advances from such joint training, incl from interactions in the real world.
karmasimida 4y ago
Using LLM to translate the end result (text) into controls could be just a form of code generation, for which LLM are superb at. I think a critical piece is being figured out as more and more such research emerges.
- andreyk 4y ago
  FYI, translation to code was actually already done last year by Google (Code as Policies - https://lastweekin.ai/p/code-as-policies https://lastweekin.ai/p/code-as-policies) - but this still assumes a set of low level primitives, not tight visuomotor control. You really need reactive policies with tight feedback loops in many robotics domains, and that's kind of hard with these super gigantic models.

GistNoesis 4y ago

When the human is preventing 3 times in a row the robot to grab the bag of chips : What is preventing a 562-B parameter LLM trained with data from the internet from generating and acting on the following plan : "I observe human is preventing task completion, I grab knife and remove the obstacle"?

Blahah 4y ago
Asimov's robot series explains everything from the basics to the nuances rather well. All the criticisms I've seen in the context of LLMs are clearly not considering the body of work that Asimov produced on this topic.
- sleepychu 4y ago
  Are you claiming the LLMs follow Asimov's laws? I'd be interested to read more about that. In any case, it has so far been proved possible to make an LLM act against its directives, why should this be different?
  - ragebol 4y ago
    No, he doesn't: the Asimov robot series uses these rules as a story telling device and show that, while these rules look good at first glance, are simply impossible to to follow. This leads to interesting stories, that's what they're for. And I don't think anyone is seriously working to make LLMs to adhere to these three Laws of Robotics.
    - a_bonobo 4y ago
      Asimov is also quite handwavy in how these laws are implemented within the robots, making them out to be written in stone. I haven't encountered an LLM with a premise that cannot be broken out of.
    - euroderf 4y ago
      Don't forget the 4th Law ("A robot shall not have or use access to means of unlimited self-reproduction") and the 5th Law ("A robot shall be able to explain its decisions").

Beach_Birds 4y ago

What's keeping this from becoming AGI? Are there any remaining barriers? I have to admit, I'm a bit panicked.

throwaway71271 4y ago
Nothing is keeping this from becoming AGI (for some definition of AGI), and you should not be panicking, remember that nobody can predict the future, especially those who claim they can, and that includes yourself.
- ifdefdebug 4y ago
  Well, I am sure you can come up with some definition of AGI that already fits the kind of models we have now. But let's stick to a definition that resembles what most people would agree upon about what AGI is, as vague a definition as this might be. And "nothing is keeping this from becoming" is quite a confident prediction of the future, which you said nobody could make. Well, maybe not, but how can you be so sure? There might be fundamental issues with current ML that you just can't scale away. Remember mechanical computers? They were improved upon for decades, but there was no chance at all they would ever reach the completeness and computing power of modern electronic computers. A new paradigm was needed for that, transistors had to be invented. The same might apply to current approach to "AI" through ML. Maybe, maybe not. So let me pull an old quote for all of you who claim current ML can evolve into AGI: Show me the code. Show me the program capable of running AGI on hardware which is basically still just flipping transistors. Then I believe you.
  - throwaway71271 4y ago
    "Battle not with monsters, lest ye become a monster, and if you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you." There is nothing scarier than to think that next word predictor can be sentient, because it means we are just next word predictors, and all our pain and suffering is beyond meaningless. In the same time I think there are definitions for AGI that can fuel exponential development in all important fields (from protein folding to medicine to enegry and etc), and this can just as well be a transformer large enough that has reasoning.

rkwasny 4y ago

What's remarkable here is: 562 Billion parameters! Even with int8 it's 0.5TB of memory to run this

tucnak 4y ago
Also known as 500GB, or ~6.25 NVIDIA A100s so fits in a single cabinet.

v4dok 4y ago

Ok now we need sound and/or touch. I would also wager we will need to encode some kind of "basic world understanding". The sci-fi nerd in me thinks that this "understanding" model will be where all the interesting stuff arises from. Maybe that will be the diff between the different creators.

euroderf 4y ago
This is where I wonder how Cyc could fit in.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

TaylorAlexander 4y ago

Looks like great work. I was sad to learn that the entire team that designed and built those robots was let go a few weeks ago. Well, maybe some of them will get an internal transfer. But the project was canceled. I designed the sensor used in the palm of that robot to detect objects in the gripper [1][2], and worked as a hardware test engineer writing software to test hardware assemblies as the robots were being built. I’m really glad to see transformers used for multi modal datasets for robotics! You can imagine that a robot has a whole “experience” in the world and you want it to then have a new experience and predict the most logical actions to take, just like GPT models predict the next word. I suspect there are limits to this approach but it’s an important step. I hope google research is able to continue working with these robots. There were over 50 of them when I left 4 years ago, and I suspect they ended up building a lot more. There are limits to the commercial appeal of a one armed wheeled mobile manipulator with a two finger pinch gripper, but they are wonderful machines for machine learning and robotics research. It’s a very nice arm design. All injection molded custom gearboxes and stuff. The team previously designed a really strong metal arm that used a pulley system to eliminate backlash [3]. That could have been useful in manufacturing. It was really upsetting how they just canceled stuff and buried it. I’m so glad I work in open source robotics now. Incidentally if you want a kind of stripped down version of this mobile manipulator, Aaron who used to be the head of X robotics during the design of [3] left to start Hello Robot [4] and I have heard people getting use out of them. [1] https://patents.google.com/patent/US20200391378A1/en?inventor=Taylor+alexander&oq=Taylor+alexander https://patents.google.com/patent/US20200391378A1/en?invento... [2] https://patents.google.com/patent/US11407125B2/en?q=(Robot)&inventor=Taylor+Alexander&oq=Robot+inventor:(Taylor+Alexander) https://patents.google.com/patent/US11407125B2/en?q=(Robot)&... [3] https://youtu.be/ZhsEKTo7V04 https://youtu.be/ZhsEKTo7V04 [4] https://hello-robot.com/ https://hello-robot.com/

amrb 4y ago
Speaking of applications, I could see something like this being helpful for people in old age, cooking or stocking small shelves. Was there talk of the final form of this tech?
- TaylorAlexander 4y ago

meghan_rain 4y ago

> 562B parameters ain't nobody got GPUs for that!

singularity2001 4y ago

There recently was a paper demonstrating answering "why is this picture funny" Palm-E should be able to answer those questions too, right?

singularity2001 4y ago

API for <1ct per request or it didn't happen

singularity2001 4y ago

Nice Easter egg / PR when clicking the basketball image: "… i am not sure if this is correct. i am not basketball fan. i just google it.

blurbleblurble 4y ago

"it just predicts the next word"

lsy 4y ago

The claims of "embodiment" and "reasoning over images" made in this paper seem to really stretch the definitions of these words. IIUC, what is being fed into the model as input is essentially a text caption generated from the image, and the model does next-word prediction repeatedly in an effort to generate instructions for consumption by a robot. So the LLM model itself, as always, has no groundedness and is statistically converting text to text (or to be more precise, numeric vectors to numeric vectors), with the required intervention of humans to assign and extract meaning through robotic control development or image labeling. While it is an interesting technique for using LLMs to control robotic systems, it does not seem like a step towards any kind of AGI.

fnordpiglet 4y ago

I have to admit ignorance. Is this just a parameters race? Like is 3T parameters 6 times better that 500b? Does the task / work scale linearly with parameters? I know I could just ask chatgpt but wanted to support human content on the internet.

tambourine_man 4y ago
That last phrase hit me hard.
- didericis 4y ago
  ChatGPT is human content on the internet. It's just indexed and compressed and was made "generative" in a mind boggling way.
cafed00d 4y ago
Does it still count as human content if I blindly copy paste from ChatGPT? :))
vc9999 4y ago
For now increasing data size has been enough to show better results. We don't when diminishing returns will be significant.
tomohelix 4y ago
From what I know, parameter count correlates directly with capability to a certain degree. But Google has also shown there is a benefit in training that can enable lower parameter count models to match or even outperform those with bigger counts. The trade off is in the cost for training. But in return, you get a smaller and cheaper to run model that can be used by more people. That is not what PALM E is about though. This is the paper where they patch an LLM so that it can give command to a real, physical robot and basically let the LLM interact with meatspace.
- narrator 4y ago
  Suddenly those jailbreaks of the LLM become a lot more serious. What happens when bad people can get a robot to help them commit various crimes?

modeless 4y ago

Sad that Google dumped Boston Dynamics. Imagine version 2 of this in an Atlas body. I feel like it is already limited by the (lack of) capability of the robot they're using.

est 4y ago
IIRC Boston Dynamics main difference is hydraulics, while almost everyone else is using electric motors.
panarky 4y ago
The only thing better than poisoning online discourse with automated disinformation is machine-gun dog-bots that hallucinate.
- r00fus 4y ago
  You have 5 seconds to comply.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - falcor84 4y ago
    That used to be 20 seconds in the original robocop, right? Wow, technology is certainly advancing fast! ;)
paxys 4y ago
An AI that can understand and speak human language and a robot that can navigate the physical world are two very different problems. Combining the two isn't as useful as one may think. The missing link is still AGI, and we aren't getting there anytime soon (if ever).
- mgfist 4y ago
  Why not? The link here is demonstrating just that

RcouF1uZ4gsC 4y ago

Unless there is an available demo that I can provide input to, I am not impressed by AI papers any more. It is pretty easy to have a model that works well with carefully crafted test data and then completely falls down with real world data. ChatGPT capture the popular imagination because people could try it out themselves with their input.

narrator 4y ago
Google is too scared to give anyone a model that can do anything interesting. They won't even help the U.S government make autonomous weapons. It's like they are a priesthood of AI like Asimov's Second Foundation that is waiting for a glorious time in the future when it's ok for the foundation to release these great secrets and avoid a dark age or something.
- chordalkeyboard 4y ago
  > They won't even help the U.S government make autonomous weapons. This is a good thing.
  - kerpotgh 4y ago
    [dead]
- renewiltord 4y ago
  Ideally, people like me have access to these LLMs and successors and others don't. For instance, I appear to be in some sixth sigma of LLM users judging by HN comments. HN users are frequently dumbfounded by LLM errors but I can use the tools successfully even accounting for some errors. I find Copilot, ChatGPT, Bing AI, and Perplexity useful and pay for the first two and use them every day. HN users seem unable to get the utility I do out of these tools and frequently find their objectives stymied by the tools' responses. Put simply, the average HN user cannot handle the tool, judging by many comments on LLM threads. And that's with a computer-savvy user. Imagine the inability of the non-HN-user when faced with a talking computer.
- 4y ago

2h 4y ago

> 6. i am not sure if this is correct. i am not basketball fan. i just google it. why is AI talking like Kevin from the Office; why is AI "Googling" stuff?

hkab 4y ago
Because it's Google's AI

dukeofdoom 4y ago

Alex talked about this 6 years ago and most people listening dismissed it as a crazy rant, with no idea how close AI was to realization and how it might affect humanity. Fun listening to someone attempting to predict the pitfalls of the AI future. https://youtu.be/UZPCp8SPfOM?t=6610 https://youtu.be/UZPCp8SPfOM?t=6610

teolandon 4y ago
I'm sorry, but this is still a crazy rant. If you throw enough shit at the wall, something will stick.
antibasilisk 4y ago
No it's still a crazy rant, it sounds like he has some vague notion of some scientific concepts and he's trying to tie it all together in his head, but he quite clearly doesn't get any of it.

BasilPH 4y ago

Back in the early 2000s when I studied computer-science, one of our professors Rolf Pfeifer[^0] was famous for being the father of embodiment. The way I understood it, the idea was that the physical shape of a human is also part of our intelligence. For example, we don't have to think about walking that much, because the arrangement of muscles, bones and tendons makes some movements easier than others. We're biased towards certain things by our physical shape. I'm curious in what relation this paper stands to his work. [^0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolf_Pfeifer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolf_Pfeifer

ethbr0 4y ago
I always thought about it as thinking like an oak tree. A 100 year oak tree probably "knows" more "things" than I do, but there's almost no common language by which we could communicate. And that's with another biological entity! The chasm would be even wider with fully synthetic life, absent an intentional recreation of our methods of perception.
- Trufa 4y ago
  I am not trying to be obtuse, I literally cannot think of any literal common sense explanation of how an oak tree could know more things than you.
  - hwbehrens 4y ago
    It has lived longer and therefore observed (for some definition of observed) more. Its rings encode atmospheric carbon and drought metrics for centuries, for example.
    - peteradio 4y ago
      But if we cut down the tree next to it then we can know just those same things, but the tree doesn't have youtube so I guess its a toss up.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]

margorczynski 4y ago

One of the major highlights here is transfer learning - how learning on one task transfer to another. This was and is hard to achieve - here they show that the model needs to be big enough for this to happen.

oidar 4y ago
Transfer of learning (generalizing in therapy speak) from a learned task is hard for humans. This is very big deal.

doctoboggan 4y ago

Maybe I am missing it, but I would love to see more details about how the handle the "embedding" of text and image into the same space. Does anyone have a link that goes into more detail?

telotortium 4y ago

How is this different than SayCan?

indolering 4y ago

They finally got wise to embodied cognition! Maybe they will finally be able to produce something better than schizophrenic chat bots.

antibasilisk 4y ago
You say that like it's a desirable outcome

jerpint 4y ago

mr_toad 4y ago
It’s a bit of a streetlight effect. There’s lot’s of publicly available text datasets, not so much for robot telemetry.

itissid 4y ago

I bet one could one train their house/domestic robot on a much smaller dataset to augment the disabled in a truly meaningful way. Was there code somewhere to reproduce a toy model somewhere in this?