When bots have their ChatGPT moment, remember these tongs

Food handling is one area of ​​work that still relies heavily on humans. Fruits, vegetables, meat and other foods should be handled quickly but gently. It’s also difficult to automate because no two pieces of fruit, vegetables, or pieces of chicken look exactly the same.

Eka’s demos suggest the company may be on to something big. I found myself mentally comparing their bots to GPT-1, OpenAI’s first major language model, which was developed four years before ChatGPT. GPT-1 was often incoherent but showed glimpses of general linguistic intelligence.

The robots I’ve seen seem to have a similar kind of emergent physical intelligence. When I watched a video of someone trying to reach a set of keys in slow motion, I noticed that he did something that looked remarkably human: he touched the tips of his grippers to the table and moved them along the surface before making contact with the keys and holding them between his fingers. Ika’s algorithms seem to instinctively know how to recover from any confusion. This kind of thing is difficult for other robots to learn, unless the humans training them intentionally make a wide range of mistakes.

Unlike any other robot I can think of, it’s almost possible for me to imagine what the world would be like for a robot. Its sensors seem to sense the weight of his arm, and the inertia as it moves toward the keys and slows down. Once he has the keys in his grip, he seems to feel their weight hanging from his paw.

I don’t know if Ika’s approach is really the path to a ChatGPT-like breakthrough in robotics. Some smart experts believe that mixing human display with simulation will produce better results than simulation alone. Maybe it will eventually be necessary to combine the two approaches? But it seems clear that robots will eventually need to have the kind of tangible, physical intelligence that Ika is working on if they are to achieve human-like dexterity.

The same general approach should work for better treatment, Agrawal told me. For example, the extreme ingenuity required to build an iPhone can be achieved by building different actuators and sensors and practicing the task in a simulation.

After spending a few hours in Ica, I decided to stop by the restaurant downstairs. I watch from the counter as the staff prepares the food and makes the coffee. One of the descendants of the machine upstairs might be able to do these things just as well, if not better. But given how much I enjoy chatting with the people who work there, I think I’ll pay extra to keep humans around. Unless my hand gets automatically eliminated as well.

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