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Speaking robot: Our new AI model translates vision and language into robotic actions

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Summary

Google's new AI model, Robotics Transformer 2 (RT-2), is a vision-language-action model that allows robots to understand and perform tasks, both familiar and new. RT-2 is trained on text and images from the web and can directly output robotic actions. This model is a breakthrough in robotics technology, as robots can now learn more like humans do, transferring learned concepts to new situations. Through testing, RT-2 showed increased performance in novel, unseen scenarios and has the potential to enable more general-purpose robots in the future.

Q&As

What is RT-2?
RT-2 is a first-of-its-kind vision-language-action (VLA) model.

What has traditionally been required to train robots?
Traditionally, robots have been required to be trained on billions of data points, firsthand, across every single object, environment, task and situation in the physical world.

How does RT-2 make it easier for robots to understand and perform actions?
RT-2 removes the complexity of having to transfer information between high-level reasoning and low-level manipulation systems, and enables a single model to not only perform the complex reasoning seen in foundation models, but also output robot actions.

How does RT-2 compare to previous models?
In testing RT-2 models in more than 6,000 robotic trials, the team found that RT-2 functioned as well as our previous model, RT-1, on tasks in its training data, or “seen” tasks. And it almost doubled its performance on novel, unseen scenarios to 62% from RT-1’s 32%.

What does the future look like for robotics with RT-2?
RT-2's ability to transfer information to actions shows promise for robots to more rapidly adapt to novel situations and environments, and shows enormous promise for more general-purpose robots.

AI Comments

👍 This article does an amazing job of detailing the advances of AI and robotics with RT-2's ability to transfer information to actions. It is very exciting to think about the potential for more general-purpose robots in the future!

👎 Although this article does a good job of describing the advances of AI and robotics with RT-2, it fails to address some of the potential ethical concerns that come with the development of these technologies.

AI Discussion

Me: It's about a new AI model called RT-2 that helps robots more easily understand and perform actions. It's trained on text and images from the web and can directly output robotic actions.

Friend: Wow, that's really impressive. What are the implications of this technology?

Me: Well, it could potentially enable robots to more rapidly adapt to novel situations and environments, and it could lead to more general-purpose robots that can handle complex, abstract tasks. It could also make robots more helpful in human-centered environments. However, there is still a lot of work to be done before it can become a reality.

Action items

Research other advancements in robotics and AI to understand the potential of RT-2.
Explore the Google DeepMind blog to learn more about RT-2 and its applications.
Experiment with RT-2 to understand how it can be used to create more general-purpose robots.

Technical terms

AI: Artificial Intelligence.
VLA: Vision-Language-Action.
Transformer: A type of deep learning model used for natural language processing.
PaLM-E: A vision model used to help robots make better sense of their surroundings.
RT-1: A Transformer-based model trained on text and images from the web.
RT-2: Robotics Transformer 2, a first-of-its-kind vision-language-action (VLA) model.
Chain-of-thought prompting: A way to dissect multi-step problems.