(New Yorker) A Revolution in How Robots Learn

Roboticists increasingly believe that their field is approaching its ChatGPT moment. (Robotics researcher) Tony Zhao told me that when he ran one of his latest creations he immediately thought of GPT-3. “It feels like something that I’ve never seen before,” he said. In the top labs, devices that once seemed crude and mechanical—robotic—are moving in a way that suggests intelligence. A.I.’s hands are coming online. “The last two years have been a dramatically steeper progress curve,” Carolina Parada, who runs the robotics team at Google DeepMind, told me. Parada’s group has been behind many of the most impressive recent robotics breakthroughs, particularly in dexterity. “This is the year that people really realized that you can build general-purpose robots,” she said. What is striking about these achievements is that they involve very little explicit programming. The robots’ behavior is learned.

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