It does all start to feel like we'd get fairly close to being able to convincingly emulate a lot of human or at least animal behavior on top of the existing generative stack, by using brain-like orchestration patterns ... if only inference was fast enough to do much more of it.
The gauge-reading example here is great, but in reality of course having the system synthesize that Python script, run the CV tasks, come back with the answer etc. is currently quite slow.
Once things go much faster, you can also start to use image generation to have models extrapolate possible futures from photos they take, and then describe them back to themselves and make decisions based on that, loops like this. I think the assumption is that our brains do similar things unconsciously, before we integrate into our conscious conception of mind.
I'm really curious what things we could build if we had 100x or 1000x inference throughput.
Idk if you've seen this already but Taalas does this interesting thing where they embed the model directly onto the chip, this leads to super-fast speeds (https://chatjimmy.ai) but the model they're using is an old small Llama model so the quality is pretty bad. But they say that it can scale, so if that's really true that'd be pretty insane and unlock the inference you're talking about.
Robotics/control systems is exactly what came to mind when I saw this release! What struck me is the possibility of look ahead search in real time, a bit like alphazero's mcts.
Actually pretty interesting to think: in a few years you might buy a raspberry pi style computer board with an extra chip on it with one of these types of embodiment models and you can slap it in a rover or something.
Is emulating human behavior really a valuable end goal though? Humans exist as the evolutionary endpoint of exhaustion hunting large pray and organic tool-making. We've built loads of industrial and residential automation tools in the last 100 years and none of them are humanoid. I'd imagine a household robot butler would be more like R2D2 with lots and lots of arms.
What if it turns out that "take care of this land" means the traditional way California was taken care of with regular small slow burns. After over 10k years of this type of management there are many important native species that won't even germinate without the presence of ash.
Or it could turn out to look like satayoma (Japanese peasant forests) or it could be more similar to the crop rotation that was traditionally practiced in many parts of Central Africa where roots were important.
In Russia before the Soviets forced "modern scientific agriculture" on peasants to modernize, they practiced things like contour farming (where they interplanted rows of crops against the contours of the land to slow water down) and maslins (where they intermixed multiple varieties of wheat and barleys in the same patch). Now contour farming are an active area of research for their ability to prevent topsoil loss and build soil health while maslins provide superior yield stability and use little to no pesticides.
That's not even getting into the over 40-120,000 varieties of rice we've documented. Most of which are hyper adapted to a very specific location—often even a single village.
My point is there is no one way to take care of a plot of land. It's all relative to a number of factors beyond just the abiotic characteristics of the land itself. Your goals and intentions matter and you will always find localized unique adaptations.
That's the opposite problem -- the agent doesn't have robot arms or legs or a parcel of land. It has to rely on people to get access to land and plant and harvest the corn, and those people are ignoring it.
Pointing a camera at a pressure gauge and recording a graph is something that I would have found useful and have thought about writing. Does software like that exist that’s available to consumers?
Nice. I couldn't find the part that I'm most interested in though, latency. This beats their frontier vision model for some identification tasks -- for a robotics model, I'm interested in hz. Since this is an "Embodied Reasoning" model, I'm assuming it's fairly slow - it's designed to match with on-robot faster cycle models.
In my quick image recognition testing on AI studio, it's performance seems similar to 3.1 pro, but is much much faster. It "thinks" but only for a few seconds.
Of course this is for counting animal legs while giving coordinates and reading analog clocks. Not coding or or solving puzzles. I imagine the image performance to model weight of this model is very high.
I’ve been thinking about AI robotics lately… if internally at labs they have a GPT-2, GPT-3 “equivalent” for robotics, you can’t really release that. If a robot unloading your dishwasher breaks one of your dishes once, this is a massive failure.
So there might be awesome progress behind the scenes, just not ready for the general public.
If someone paid 100 grand for you to load and unload the the dishwasher, and the research to be able to do it costed hundreds of billions, decades of research, hundreds of thousands of researchers, and that was the ONLY thing you could do, yes, you WOULD be a massive failure.
> If a robot unloading your dishwasher breaks one of your dishes once, this is a massive failure.
That's a bit exaggerated, no? Early roombas would get tangled in socks, drag pet poop all over the floor, break glass stuff and so on, and yet the market accepted that, evolved, and now we have plenty of cleaning robots from various companies, including cheap spying ones from china.
I actually think that there's a lot of value in being the first to deploy bots into homes, even if they aren't perfect. The amount of data you'd collect is invaluable, and by the looks of it, can't be synth generated in a lab.
I think the "safer" option is still the "bring them to factories first, offices next and homes last", but anyway I'm sure someone will jump straight to home deployments.
I ended up watching Bicentennial Man (1999) with Robin Williams over the weekend. If you haven't seen I thought it was a good and timely thing to watch and is kid friendly. Without giving away the plot, the scene where it was unloading the dishwasher...take my money!
VLA models essentially take a webcam screenshot + some text (think "put the red block in the right box") and output motor control instructions to achieve that.
Note: "Gemini Robotics-ER" is not a VLA, though Gemini does have a VLA model too: "Gemini Robotics".
Showing the murder dog reading a gauge using $$$ worth of model time is kinda not an amazing demo. We already know how to read gauges with machine vision. We also know how to order digital gauges out of industrial catalogs for under $50.
I think that where this gets interesting is when you can just drop these robotic systems into an environment that wasn't necessarily set up specifically to handle them. The $50 for your gauge isn't really the cost: it's engineering time to go through the whole environment and set it up so that the robotic system can deal with each of the specific tasks, each of which will require some bespoke setup.
Agree. I'm unclear what's the highlight of this post. Is the multimodality of the model (that can replace computer vision), is it the reasoning part, is it the overall wrapper that makes it very easy to develop on top?
The gauge-reading example here is great, but in reality of course having the system synthesize that Python script, run the CV tasks, come back with the answer etc. is currently quite slow.
Once things go much faster, you can also start to use image generation to have models extrapolate possible futures from photos they take, and then describe them back to themselves and make decisions based on that, loops like this. I think the assumption is that our brains do similar things unconsciously, before we integrate into our conscious conception of mind.
I'm really curious what things we could build if we had 100x or 1000x inference throughput.
A few robot legs and arms, big battery, off-the-shelf GPU. Solar panels.
Prompt: "Take care of all this land within its limits and grow some veggies."
Or it could turn out to look like satayoma (Japanese peasant forests) or it could be more similar to the crop rotation that was traditionally practiced in many parts of Central Africa where roots were important.
In Russia before the Soviets forced "modern scientific agriculture" on peasants to modernize, they practiced things like contour farming (where they interplanted rows of crops against the contours of the land to slow water down) and maslins (where they intermixed multiple varieties of wheat and barleys in the same patch). Now contour farming are an active area of research for their ability to prevent topsoil loss and build soil health while maslins provide superior yield stability and use little to no pesticides.
That's not even getting into the over 40-120,000 varieties of rice we've documented. Most of which are hyper adapted to a very specific location—often even a single village.
My point is there is no one way to take care of a plot of land. It's all relative to a number of factors beyond just the abiotic characteristics of the land itself. Your goals and intentions matter and you will always find localized unique adaptations.
Anyway, cool.
Of course this is for counting animal legs while giving coordinates and reading analog clocks. Not coding or or solving puzzles. I imagine the image performance to model weight of this model is very high.
So there might be awesome progress behind the scenes, just not ready for the general public.
My non-AI dishwasher can't even always keep the water inside. Nothing is perfect.
That's a bit exaggerated, no? Early roombas would get tangled in socks, drag pet poop all over the floor, break glass stuff and so on, and yet the market accepted that, evolved, and now we have plenty of cleaning robots from various companies, including cheap spying ones from china.
I actually think that there's a lot of value in being the first to deploy bots into homes, even if they aren't perfect. The amount of data you'd collect is invaluable, and by the looks of it, can't be synth generated in a lab.
I think the "safer" option is still the "bring them to factories first, offices next and homes last", but anyway I'm sure someone will jump straight to home deployments.
VLA models essentially take a webcam screenshot + some text (think "put the red block in the right box") and output motor control instructions to achieve that.
Note: "Gemini Robotics-ER" is not a VLA, though Gemini does have a VLA model too: "Gemini Robotics".
A demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DeBLc2D6bvg