Robots today have been programmed to vacuum the floor or perform a preset dance, but there is still much work to be done before they can achieve their full potential. This mainly has something to do with how robots are unable to recognize what is in their environment at a deep level and therefore cannot function properly without being told all of these details by humans. For instance, while it may seem like backup programming for when bumping into an object that would help prevent unwanted collisions from happening again, this idea isn’t actually based on understanding anything about chairs because the robot doesn’t know exactly what one is!
Facebook AI team just released Droidlet, a new platform that makes it easier for anyone to build their smart robot. It’s an open-source project explicitly designed with hobbyists and researchers in mind so you can quickly prototype your AI algorithms without having to spend countless hours coding everything from scratch. Read More
Tag Archives: Robotics
OSU Bipedal Robot First to Run 5K
The Metaverse: A brave, new (virtual) world
If we accept the premise that on the Internet “if you’re not paying, you’re the product”, in the Metaverse you will become a walking — talking billboard.
Intro: Video games now
Amongst the changes that “lockdowns” and “new normality” have brought, there is a revalorization of digital interactions as valuable and meaningful. Ironically, what was once regarded as isolationist or a poor substitute for “real life” (an expression used as an interchangeable semantic proxy for “in-person”) experiences, has become the glue that holds the social fabric together. Read More
The Jessica Simulation: Love and loss in the age of A.I.
The death of the woman he loved was too much to bear. Could a mysterious website allow him to speak with her once more?
Joshua Barbeau, a 33-year-old freelance writer living in Bradford, Canada provided old message exchanges from his wife, plus some necessary background information, a website called Project December, where you can talk to chatbots with state-of-the-art AI systems, to create a new bot, named “Jessica Courtney Pereira.” Read More
Dr. Lex Fridman: Machines, Creativity & Love | Huberman Lab Podcast #29
OpenAI disbands its robotics research team
OpenAI has disbanded its robotics team after years of research into machines that can learn to perform tasks like solving a Rubik’s Cube. Company cofounder Wojciech Zaremba quietly revealed on a podcast hosted by startup Weights & Biases that OpenAI has shifted its focus to other domains, where data is more readily available.
“So it turns out that we can make a gigantic progress whenever we have access to data. And I kept all of our machinery unsupervised, [using] reinforcement learning — [it] work[s] extremely well. There [are] actually plenty of domains that are very, very rich with data. And ultimately that was holding us back in terms of robotics,” Zaremba said. “The decision [to disband the robotics team] was quite hard for me. But I got the realization some time ago that actually, that’s for the best from the perspective of the company.” Read More
What could make AI conscious? with Wojciech Zaremba, co-founder of OpenAI
Singularity Street
Introducing Singularity Street. Follow the exploits of Robota Xi as he navigates the world of the future. Read More
AI ethicist Kate Darling: ‘Robots can be our partners’
The MIT researcher says that for humans to flourish we must move beyond thinking of robots as potential future competitors.
Dr Kate Darling is a research specialist in human-robot interaction, robot ethics and intellectual property theory and policy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Media Lab. In her new book, The New Breed, she argues that we would be better prepared for the future if we started thinking about robots and artificial intelligence (AI) like animals. Read More
The self-driving race between Elon Musk’s Tesla and Domino’s pizza robots
- Tesla and Elon Musk are pressing ahead with full self-driving even amid blown deadlines, safety issues, and multi-billion-dollar efforts from Alphabet-backed Waymo and GM-backed Cruise continue.
- But some autonomous vehicle start-ups are making big bets the future will be smaller, ‘zero-occupant’ vehicles including three-wheelers that deliver pizza.
- Refraction AI and Nuro are among the delivery technology innovators working with local restaurants in Texas and corporations including Domino’s Pizza.
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