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🦾Are we having a GPT-2 type revolutionary moment of robotics?

If there's one big lesson from the past year of AI development, it's this: models trained on a large set of generic data tend to outperform those trained on smaller, specialized chunks of data.

Want a specialized model? Kick things off with a general-purpose model and then tailor it to your specific task.

Here’s the deal with robotics right now: robots get trained over and over in labs around the world, often doing pretty similar stuff. But there are so many types of robots, each with its own sensors, datasets, and environments, that labs can’t easily build on each other’s work.

Taking a page out of the AI playbook, researchers started pretraining a general model for robots. Even though individual robot datasets tend to be narrow, mixing data from various labs, robots, and settings together whips up a variety of much-needed info.

In a study researchers introduced a dataset boasting over 1 million robot trajectories and covering 22 robot types - we're talking everything from robotic arms to those cool dog-like robots. This clever compilation weaves 60 existing datasets into a standard format.

So, what are the key takeaways?

The model gave robots skills they were never trained to do and boosted their performance success rate by 50-300% over original methods.

This fresh, consolidated dataset could be a game-changer, paving the way for extended multi-robot research.

It’s kind of like we’re having a GPT-2 moment for robots, showing that a robotic system can perform well across a wide range of tasks without needing task-specific training. And if this is indeed a GPT-2 moment, we might have robots performing more and more complex tasks with little training in the next few years. I sure hope they will be good in folding clothes soon.

ONE MORE THING

Another crazy use-case of GPT-4Vision

ChatGPT creates a functioning website based on a basic whiteboard flowchart. Click on the tweet, it’s a video.

⌚ If you have one more minute:

• Google Assistant Finally Gets a Generative AI Glow-Up

• Savoring Bytes: New AI Understands Our Tasty Desires

• Can AI Chatbots Ever Replace Human Therapists?

• The New AI Photo Tricks on the Pixel 8 Are Blowing My Mind

AI Art of the day 🎨

Someone posted pictures to the Midjourney subreddit of a black man fighting an alligator over a pizza, jokingly asking if it was real or AI-generated. The community ran with it and turned it into a meme. Here’s a funny series showing what it might look like if it were a game made for different gaming consoles, I loved the Playstation 1 version.

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That’s it folks!

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