We are entering a new era for AI-powered robotics
This article is part of a special issue of VB. Read the full series here: How data privacy is transforming marketing.
Many observers were disappointed with the recent showing of the “Optimumrobots at Tesla AI Day. a reviewer cleverly titled his article “Sub-Optimus”. However, these views actually miss the point. Regardless of what can be said about Elon Musk, he is a genius at sensing the moment and opportunity, applying technology, and providing the necessary resources.
The quality and enthusiasm of the engineering team suggests that Optimus could succeed, even if full production takes longer than the estimated 3-5 years. If successful, Optimus could bring personal robots into the mainstream within a decade.
Though expensive initially at an estimated cost of $20,000, an Optimus sibling in 2032 could be as common in shops or factories as Tesla is on the road today. Fast-forward another 10 years and humanoid robots in daily life could be commonplace, whether at home or in stores and restaurants, in factories and warehouses, or in home health and care settings.
AI hype: interacting with robots
In this vision, the idea of an “artificial friend”, an emotionally intelligent android as portrayed by Kazuo Ishiguro in Clara and the sunIt doesn’t seem so far fetched. Neither do “digients” (short for “digital entities”), as described by Ted Chiang in The life cycle of software objects. Digients are artificial intelligences created within a purely digital world that inhabit shared digital space (much like the emerging metaverse) but can also be downloaded into physical robots so they can interact with people in the real world.
events
Summit Low-Code/No-Code
Join today’s top executives at the Low-Code/No-Code Summit virtually on November 9. Sign up today to get your free pass.
register here
This ability for people to interact with a robot appears to be the key to a successful implementation of the robot. At least that is the opinion of Will Jackson, the founder and CEO of engineering artswho recently said: “The ‘true killer application’ for a humanoid robot is people’s desire to interact with it.”
Is it possible that this robot vision is completely unreal and little more than science fiction or corporate hype? That’s the opinion of some, says Michael Hiltzik of the Los Angeles Times. He stated: “The hype of AI is not only a danger to laymen’s understanding of the [robotics] field, but it presents the danger of undermining the field itself. In this he is right, and it is certainly important to separate the hype from the reality.
What Hiltzik perhaps lacks is the story arc. Today’s robotics, like the expanding field of artificial intelligence (AI), is still in its infancy. The rate of progress, however, is phenomenal. While Optimus is years away from being a finished product and numerous technical and cultural hurdles remain, it’s impossible to ignore the extraordinary pace of progress. In just one year, Optimus went from a concept to a mobile bipedal robot. It is a growing field as Tesla is not alone in building a humanoid robot. For example, a team of engineers at the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) has announced a humanoid robot that can teach tai chi.
A long way to go to achieve AI-powered robots
Building robots that emulate human actions is extremely difficult. A EE Times article describe these challenges. “From a mechanical perspective, for example, bipedal locomotion (walking on two legs) is a physically demanding task. In response, the human body has evolved and adapted in such a way that the power density of human joints in areas such as the knees is very high.” In other words, simply staying upright is very difficult for robots.
Despite such challenges, real progress is being made. Researchers at Oregon State University recently set a Guinness World Record for a robot that executes a 100 meter race, completing the course in less than 25 seconds. The team has been training “Cassie” since 2017, using reinforcement learning AI algorithms to reward the robot when it moves correctly. The importance of the registry was noted by the principal investigator who said: “[Now we] can make robots move robustly around the world on two legs.” While impressive, the human body not only stands tall, but navigates the world through an extremely complex sensory system.
“The hardest part is creating a machine that interacts with humans naturally,” according to to Nancy J. Cooke, professor at Arizona State University. Recreating that in a robot is still in its infancy. That is now one of the most daunting challenges for Optimus and other humanoid robotic endeavors.
AI automation takes center stage
Humanoid robots are becoming possible thanks to AI, and AI is advancing with the help of the triple exponential growth in computing power, software development, and data.
Perhaps nowhere is this rapid progress in AI better exemplified than with natural language processing (NLP), especially in relation to text and text-to-image generation. OpenAI released its first text generation tools in February 2019 with GPT-2, followed by GPT-3 in June 2020, DALL-E text-to-image in January 2021, and DALL-E 2 in April 2022. Each iteration was much more capable than previous versions.
Other companies are pushing these technologies, such as MidJourney and Stable Diffusion. The same phenomenon is now happening with text to video, with several new applications appearing recently from Goal, Google, synthesis, GliaCloud and others.
NLP technologies are rapidly finding real-world applications, from code development to advertising (from copywriting to imaging), and even movie making. In my last article, I described how the creative artist karen x cheng was tasked with creating an AI-generated program Cover image by Cosmopolitan. To help come up with ideas and the final image, he used DALL-E 2.
The Raven, an AI-generated video, recently won the Jury Prize at the Cannes Short Film Festival. A create the videocomputer artist Glenn Marshall fed the video frames from an existing video as a reference image to SHORTEN (Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training), another text-to-image neural network also created by OpenAI. Marshall then urged CLIP to generate a video of “a painting of a crowd in a desolate landscape”.
If only I had a brain
Of course, building an NLP application is not the same as robotics. While computing power, software, and data are common ground, the physical aspect of building robots that need to interact with the real world adds challenges beyond software automation development. What robots need is a brain. AI Researcher Filip Piekniewski he told Business Insider that “robots have nothing remotely resembling a brain”. That is largely true today, although what NLP provides is the beginning of the brain that robots need to interact with humans. After all, one of the main functions of the humanoid brain is the ability to perceive and interpret language and convert it into contextually appropriate responses and actions.
NLP is already used in chatbots, software robots that make it easy to communicate with people. december project, a text-based chatbot built using GPT-3, has helped people gain closure by “talking” to a deceased loved one. Bot Developer Jason Rohrer said of the December Project: “It may not be the first intelligent machine. But it feels like it’s the first machine with a soul.” Intelligent robots with a soul that can walk and manipulate objects would be a breakthrough.
That breakthrough is near, though it could still be a decade or more before humanoid robots roam the world. Optimus and other robots today are mostly simple machines that will grow in capabilities over the next two decades to become fully evolved artificial humanoids. Now we have truly entered the modern robotic era.
Gary Grossman is senior vice president of technology practices at Edelman and global leader of the Edelman AI Center of Excellence.
Data decision makers
Welcome to the VentureBeat community!
DataDecisionMakers is where experts, including data techies, can share data-related insights and innovation.
If you want to read about cutting-edge ideas and up-to-date information, best practices, and the future of data and data technology, join us at DataDecisionMakers.
You might even consider contributing an article of your own!
Read more about DataDecisionMakers