Updated: Feb 24, 2023
The ultimate achievement to some in the AI industry is creating a system with Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), or the ability to understand and learn any task that a human can. It has been suggested that AGI would bring about systems with the ability to reason, plan, learn, represent knowledge and communicate in natural language.
DeepMind, the Alphabet-backed research lab, took a step toward it this week with the release of an AI system called Gato.
Gato is what DeepMind describes as a “general-purpose” system, a system that can be taught to perform many different types of tasks. Researchers at DeepMind trained Gato to complete 604, to be exact, including captioning images, engaging in dialogue, stacking blocks with a real robot arm and playing Atari games.
Scott Reed, a research scientist at DeepMind and co-creator of Gato said, the significance of Gato is mainly that one agent with one model can do hundreds of very different tasks, including to control a real robot and do basic captioning and chat. Gato does not necessarily do these tasks well all the time. But on 450 of the 604 aforementioned tasks, DeepMind claims that Gato performs better than an expert more than half the time.
Perhaps even more remarkably, Gato is orders of magnitude smaller than single-task systems, including GPT-3, in terms of the parameter count. DeepMind researchers kept Gato purposefully small so the system could control a robot arm in real time. But they hypothesize that — if scaled up — Gato could tackle any “task, behavior, and embodiment of interest.”
Updated: Feb 24, 2023
Dyson the UK company oringally most famous for its vacuum cleaners before branching out it into other consumer orientated household electrical products such as fans and hair-driers has also been working on home robotics.
Recently, the firm expanded with a very original and unique face-mounted air purifier. While showcasing the product, Dyson highlighted some of the research behind it, and this offered a peek into their labs and roadmap for product portfolio. In May 2022, Dyson revealed secret robot prototypes that are part of broader research at the International Conference on Robotics and Automation in Philadelphia. The reveal included some shots of a robot arm that looks fairly similar to smaller industrial models from companies like ABB and Fanuc.
On the face of it, the big difference here is the attachments. This includes a hand with soft graspers that look like a human hand. Dyson has shown off a series of prototype robots it is developing, and announced plans to hire hundreds of engineers over the next five years in order to build robots capable of household chores. The images are designed to show off the fine motor skills of the machines, with arms capable of lifting plates out of a drying rack, vacuuming a sofa, or lifting up a children’s toy.
“This is a big bet on future robotic technology that will drive research across the whole of Dyson, in areas including mechanical engineering, vision systems, machine learning and energy storage,” said Jake Dyson, the company’s chief engineer and son of company founder. In 2020, Dyson announced plans to invest £2.75 billion in areas including robotics, new motor tech, and machine learning software by 2025. It plans to spend £600 million of that investment this year.
Updated: Feb 24, 2023
UK drivers will effectively be allowed to watch a movie while behind the wheel of a self-driving car, under new rules announced by the country’s Department for Transport. Drivers are currently restricted from viewing “non-driving related content” on a “television-receiving apparatus,” this rule would be waived under specific circumstances once the proposals come into force which could be mid-2022.
This ability to be entertained while watching a screen comes with some restrictions though. A car will need to be driving itself at the time, and the driver must be ready to take back control of the vehicle if required. Importantly, drivers will only be allowed to view content “through the vehicle’s built-in infotainment apparatus.” The thinking here is that the screen system can stop showing a TV show or film when the car needs the driver’s attention, unlike a phone. Using a handheld phone while driving, regardless of its use, will remain illegal.
Currently, perhaps the most significant restriction is that these proposed new rules only apply to cars that are registered as sself-drivingunder British law. At the moment, the page listing such vehicles is currently empty implying that at the present, there are no self-driving vehicles listed for use in the UK.
The proposed rules do make clear, though, that “self-driving” is different from cars with “assisted driving features,” which can handle some driving tasks but leave the driver responsible overall. Examples of these include cruise control and lane-keeping assistance.
The new rules are meant as an interim measure ahead of a full regulatory framework that’s due to be introduced in 2025. As well as changing the rules about screen-use, the Code is also being updated to clarify the differences between self-driving and driving assistance technologies that are an intermediary step.