Is AI Ready For Robots?
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Support for NPR comes from the Cy Sims Foundation, since 1985, supporting advances in science, education, and the arts towards a fairer, more just, and civil society. More information is available at cysimsfoundation.org. You're listening to Shortwave from NPR.
Hey, short wavers. Regina Barber here. It seems like artificial intelligence is everywhere in our virtual lives. It's in our search results, our phones. It's trying to read my emails. But NPR science correspondent Jeff Brunfield has noticed that AI isn't just showing up online anymore. It's starting to creep into reality.
Yep. I don't know if you tuned in for Tesla's big marketing event last year, Regina. No. But AI was there.
Speaking of robots...
Tesla is obviously a car company, but Elon Musk, Tesla's CEO, made a big part of the event about a humanoid robot powered by AI and called Optimus.
The software, the AI inference computer, it all actually applies to a humanoid robot.
And Google just unveiled another humanoid robot that operates using AI.
We're bringing Gemini 2.0's intelligence to general-purpose robotic agents in the physical world.
OK, Jeff, but even before AI came along, people and companies have been making like big claims about robots.
They have. They have. And the robots, as I'm sure you know, Gina, have always disappointed compared to the vision.
Yeah, that's true.
And that's why I set out to understand the truth about AI and robotics. The truth. And I think I kind of found it in Ebola trail mix.
Today on the show, what happens when artificial intelligence moves out of the chat and into the real world?
We're looking at how AI could maybe revolutionize robotics.
You're listening to Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR.
Support for NPR comes from the Cy Sims Foundation. Since 1985, supporting advances in science, education, and the arts towards a fairer, more just, and civil society. More information is available at cysimsfoundation.org.
Okay, so Jeff, you were interested in finding out more about how AI works in robots. Where did you start?
Well, I didn't go to Tesla or Google, but I did drive right by them on my way to Stanford University.
Okay.
And specifically the IRIS laboratory, which stands for Intelligence Through Robotic Interaction at Scale. I got a tour from a graduate student named Moojin Kim. Moojin works on a new kind of robot powered by AI similar to the AI used in chatbots.
It's one step in the direction of like ChatGPT for robotics, but still a lot of work to do.
All right.
Well, you want to show me what I can do? Yeah, for sure.
So, Jeff, what did the robot look like?
Well, this wasn't some humanoid robot that the big tech companies are rolling out. It's just a pair of mechanical arms with pinchers.
Okay.
But what made it interesting was that it's powered by an AI model called OpenVLA. So first, we should probably just say quickly, you know, a regular robot must be very, very carefully programmed. An engineer has to write it detailed instructions for every task you want it to perform.
Yeah, and AI is supposed to change that.
Exactly. And that's what's going on here. This robot is powered by a teachable AI neural network. The neural network operates kind of how scientists think the human brain might work. Basically, there are these mathematical nodes in the network that have billions of connections to each other in a way similar to how neurons in the brain are connected together. And so when you go to program this sort of thing, it's simply about reinforcing the connections that matter between the nodes and weakening the other ones that don't. So in practice, this means Moojin can just teach OpenVLA a task by showing it.
So basically, whatever task you want to do, you just keep doing it over and over, maybe like 50 times or 100 times.
The robot's AI neural network becomes tuned to that task and then it can do it by itself.
Yeah, it makes me think of this like smiling robot story we did and that robot just watched like a lot of videos of people smiling. Then it learned how to do it.
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