What a Google Exec Learned After 7 Years Trying to Give AI a Robot Body

Wired published some thoughts from Hans Peter Brondmo, the former head of 'Google's seven-year mission to give AI a robot body'.

An anonymous reader shared this report from Axios:
Building AI-powered robots that can flexibly operate in the real world is going to take much longer than Silicon Valley believes and promises, according to the former head of Google's robotics moonshot project, writing in Wired...

Everyday Robotics spent seven years and a small Google fortune developing a one-armed robot on a wheeled platform. By the time Google pulled the plug on the project in February 2023, the robots were helping clean up researchers' desks and sorting trash during the daytime; in the evening, they were improvising dances. [Google hired a professional dancer as an artist-in-residence who teamed with 'a few other engineers' to build an AI algorithm trained on the dancer's choreography preferences...]

Google founder Larry Page — favored moving directly to 'end to end' (e2e) learning, where you'd hand robots a general task and they'd be able to figure out how to execute it. That, Page felt, was a goal worthy of a moonshot. But it also turned out to be out of reach. 'I have come to believe,' Brondmo writes, 'it will take many, many thousands, maybe even millions of robots doing stuff in the real world to collect enough data to train e2e models that make the robots do anything other than fairly narrow, well-defined tasks....' ['Building robots that perform useful services — like cleaning up and wiping all the tables in a restaurant, or making the beds in a hotel — will require both AI and traditional programming for a long time to come. In other words, don't expect robots to go running off outside our control, doing something they weren't programmed to do, anytime soon.']

The bottom line: So far, robot hype is outpacing robot reality. Boston Dynamics' back-flipping humanoid and quadruped bots have wowed YouTube viewers — but you wouldn't want to let them anywhere near your office or home.

It's an interesting look back. 'My job: help figure out what to do with the employees and technology left over from nine robot companies that Google had acquired,' Brondmo writes:
Andy 'the father of Android' Rubin, who had previously been in charge, had suddenly left. Larry Page and Sergey Brin kept trying to offer guidance and direction during occasional flybys in their 'spare time....' I knew from firsthand experience how hard it was to build a company that, in Steve Jobs' famous words, could put a dent in the universe, and I believed that Google was the right place to make certain big bets. AI-powered robots, the ones that will live and work alongside us one day, was one such audacious bet.

Eight and a half years later — and 18 months after Google decided to discontinue its largest bet in robotics and AI — it seems as if a new robotics startup pops up every week. I am more convinced than ever that the robots need to come. Yet I have concerns that Silicon Valley, with its focus on 'minimum viable products' and VCs' general aversion to investing in hardware, will be patient enough to win the global race to give AI a robot body. And much of the money that is being invested is focusing on the wrong things...

When I arrived, the lab had already hatched Waymo, Google Glass, and other science-fiction-sounding projects like flying energy windmills and stratospheric balloons that would provide internet access to the underserved... [But] in January 2023, two months after OpenAI introduced ChatGPT, Google shut down Everyday Robots, citing overall cost concerns. The robots and a small number of people eventually landed at Google DeepMind to conduct research. In spite of the high cost and the long timeline, everyone involved was shocked.

They'd tackled the problem with earnestness. ('[S]even robots working for months to learn how to pick up a rubber duckling? That wasn't going to cut it... So we built a cloud-based simulator and, in 2021, created more than 240 million robot instances in the sim.ma')
Brondmo adds this his mother had advanced Parkinson's disease, and hoped that one day robots could support her. 'Our frequent conversations toward the end of her life convinced me more than ever that a future version of what we started at Everyday Robots will be coming. In fact, it can't come soon enough.

'So the question we are left to ponder becomes: How does this kind of change and future happen? I remain curious, and concerned.'

Read more of this story at Slashdot.