Google looks to give AI its arms and legs
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Google announced Wednesday it is bringing the broad knowledge of its Gemini large language models into the world of robotics.
Why it matters: The move could pave the way for robots that are vastly more versatile, but also opens up whole new categories of risks as AI systems take on physical capabilities.
Driving the news: Google announced two new Gemini Robotics models, pairing its Gemini 2.0 AI with robots capable of physical action.
- In video demos, Google showed robots handling an array of tasks.
- In one demo, a robot was able to understand and execute a command to dunk a miniature basketball in a toy hoop — a task for which it had not been trained. In another it was told to put fruit into a clear bowl and continued to revise its approach as a person moved the bowl around.
- Google said it has a partnership with Texas developer Apptronik to bring Gemini to Apptronik's humanoid robots. It's also working with several robotics companies as early "trusted testers," including Agile Robots, Agility Robotics, Enchanted Tools and Boston Dynamics, maker of the Spot robot dog.
- "In order for you to build really useful robots, they need to understand you," Google DeepMind senior director Carolina Parada told reporters during a briefing. "They need to understand the world around them, and then they need to be able to take safe action in a way that is general, interactive and dexterous."
The big picture: Google isn't the first to combine an LLM with robotics, but prior efforts have been far more limited.
- Moxie, the ill-fated kids' robot, for example, paired an LLM with a basic robot, but it couldn't do physical tasks.
- Others are also pursuing the intersection of robotics and AI, including OpenAI and World Labs, the startup run by Stanford professor Fei-Fei Li.
Between the lines: Early chatbots had a built-in safety limit; they could talk, but not act. That protection will vanish as AI gains the ability to make decisions and take physical actions — introducing new risks.
- This transformation has already begun with the move to give AI agentic powers — that is, the ability to take action without human intervention.
- Combining AI with the ability to interact with the physical world means robots could take actions for which they were not specifically programmed. That could be especially concerning if applied to areas like policing and the military.
- When asked about military use, Google stressed it was not building for that market, but rather for general purpose use.
The other side: Google says it is taking a multi-layered approach to safety, one that includes the content protections already in Gemini, industry standard rules for physical robots as well as a "constitutional AI" governing the system's overall behavior.
- And, by adding an AI brain, it says that robots can be more versatile and useful.
- "One of the big challenges in robotics — and a reason why you don't see useful robots everywhere — is that robots typically perform well in scenarios they've experienced before, but they really fail to generalize in unseen, new, unfamiliar scenarios," Google DeepMind principal scientist Kanishka Rao told reporters.
My thought bubble: This is a dangerous inflection point and giving a computer limbs is not a step to be taken lightly. If this were "Terminator 2," it would be the moment the heroes go back in time to shut it all down.
