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A ChatGPT moment for robots
The wow test
A video of a robot dog doing something crazy does not count, because people can talk themselves out of it. The moment that matters is one where most people feel a real wow that something important happened.
Why ChatGPT worked
ChatGPT passed that test because anyone could just go use it instead of believing someone who said AI was coming soon. The robotics version would be typing in a command, watching a robot do something crazy even from far away, and reacting the same way: whoa, it just did this thing.
The stakes
The stakes are high. The labor market is much bigger than the white-collar market, and without automated labor things get really crazy. If the role for people were to be the actuators of AI in the cloud, that would be very bad, which makes robotics an imperative.
Why are robots harder to train than chatbots?
Language models learn from trillions of words already written on the internet. No comparable archive exists of physical actions paired with what a robot sensed and did. Robots must also handle messy physics, such as slippery objects and unexpected obstacles, and a mistake can break something. Collecting data often means people operating robots by remote control, one demonstration at a time.
How do language models help robots act?
In 2023 Google DeepMind introduced RT-2, a model that combined web-scale image and text training with data from robot demonstrations. It could follow instructions involving objects and concepts absent from its robot data, such as picking up a rock to use as an improvised hammer. The approach treats robot actions as another kind of text that the model can output.
How fast did ChatGPT reach a mass audience?
ChatGPT launched on November 30, 2022. A UBS analysis reported in February 2023 estimated that it had reached 100 million monthly active users in about two months. According to the same analysis, TikTok had taken about nine months and Instagram about two and a half years to reach that mark.
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