>> The researchers illustrate their new approach with a simple chore: scooping marbles from one bowl and pouring them into another. I would love to have a robo

>> The researchers illustrate their new approach with a simple chore: scooping marbles from one bowl and pouring them into another. I would love to have a robot that can carry out this common household task. I have to do this every week, on Saturdays, when the bowl holding the marbles overflows with the offerings deposited by the Roc birds at the top of the windcatcher in my desert redoubt. The marbles are sometimes made of quartz, sometimes nephrite, rarely ruby, emerald, sapphire or diamond and so they have to be disposed off, or the sand worms will come for them. More seriously, training a classifier to map LLM instructions to robot arm actions, as the researchers in the article did is smart, but their motivation was error correction and that, while intersting, is not the big problem. The big er limitation of imitation learning is that if you teach a robot to scoop marbles from bowl A and pour them into bowl B by imitation learning ... that's the only thing it will be able to do. Scoop marbles from bowl A to bowl B. The same bowls A and B, placed in the same positions, with only a small error tolerance (centimeters) and the marbles better be the same colour as the ones seen in training, the spoon better be the same shape, or else! Or else you're going to be stepping on lots of marbles. My common sense tells me that can be very painful.