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Where Are the Intelligent Robots?
I recently watched a YouTube video where someone reacted to Sam Altman's
statements. One comment he made left me wondering if I've missed something in
the current "AI summer." Altman suggested that "robots will do all current jobs
on our behalf, and we humans must therefore find new things to do."
If I understood correctly, it seems like OpenAI's leader is implying that large
language models (LLMs) have something significant to contribute to robotics.
This strikes me as curious because, as far as I know, these are two very
different problem domains. Only one (LLMs) has experienced rapid advancements
recently, while the other (robotics) hasn’t.
Robotics in the physical world demands fast and precise responses. A robot
walking to a grocery store and picking up items, for example, needs quick
and accurate decision-making to avoid falling, breaking things, or picking up
the wrong items. LLMs, on the other hand, provide slow, approximate answers
that often resemble truth but can include hallucinations. This works well
for paraphrasing non-exact information but seems ill-suited to the precision
robotics requires.
So, my questions are:
1. Have LLMs contributed to advancements in robotics?
2. Is there any reason to believe they will?
From my understanding, the current paradigm of LLMs relies on scaling compute
power for diminishing returns, which is the opposite of what useful robotics
needs: efficient and accurate computation.
- necovek 2y agoAdvances in computing power will make some robotics applications feasible: hopefully that leads to advances we long hoped for in fluidity of motion and adaptability to the self-presence and the environment that come all too naturally to animals and humans (after some practice).
- tahoeskibum 2y agoTesla FSD (Supervised Self Driving) is arguably a robot with fast precise responses, in a computationally constrained environment. This is using a similar end to end neural net architecture and is being generalized to their Optimus robot.
- gibbitz 2y agoMake robots affordable alternatives to illegal immigrants or foreign factory workers and they'll be everywhere. Right now the R&D can't remotely compete so it's just tech bros acting like they're developing it to get seed money and sell to whomever will buy them later. Smoke and mirrors.