This robot learns its assistant functions on its own thanks to the Web

Speak the voice command ” I’m hungry to a robot to fetch something to eat, that might seem almost normal or at least doable in 2022. And yet, when you consider that the robot in question was never programmed to figure out what to do to answer this queryit is still very impressive.

This household robotfrom the laboratories of Google and designed by Fei Xia, a researcher from the firm, has just demonstrated its capabilities. The robot is equipped with an Artificial Intelligence that allows it to transform a sentence that it does not know into a series of events physical. To achieve this, the robot will search for as much information as possible on the Web, in order to know what to do according to the sentence given. The robot can therefore grasp all the subtleties and complexities of language according to Google.

This means that there is no need to enrich the robot with many voice commands, as is the case with virtual assistants like Alexa, Siri or the Google Assistant. Thus, the researcher has shown that, when one overturns a liquidthe robot reacted by bringing a sponge when it had never done it before or even learned how to do it.

A powerful language engine

To understand and act, the robot relies on Google’s most powerful language model. He gate the name of PALM and absorbs huge amounts of text from books or the web using the generator of text OpenAI GPT-3. This is how he can enrich his language skills and react correctly to a sentence. PaLM is also able to explain in natural language how it arrives at a precise answer to a question.

On the hardware side, the architecture of the robot, that is to say a rolling column with an articulated arm with a gripper, comes from Everyday Robots, a subsidiary of Google working on a butler robot.

Even if this robot, integrating a boosted version of PaLM, is promising, it should not be forgotten that the AIs, even powerful ones, restore what they ingest on the Web. This is how the chatbot de Meta found himself responding racistly with conspiratorial tendencies after a few weeks of activity.