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Elon Musk's Open Source OpenAI: We're Working On a Robot For Your Household Chores (zdnet.com)
An anonymous reader writes from a report via ZDNet: OpenAI, the artificial-intelligence non-profit backed by Elon Musk, Amazon Web Services, and others, is working on creating a physical robot that performs household chores. In a blog post Monday, OpenAI leaders said they don't want to manufacture the robot itself, but "enable a physical robot [...] to perform basic housework." The company says it is "inspired" by DeepMind's work in the deep learning and reinforcement learning field of AI, as displayed by its AlphaGo victory over human Go masters. OpenAI says it wants to "train an agent capable enough to solve any game," noting that significant advances in AI will be required in order for that to happen. In May, the company released a public beta of a new Open Source gym for computer programmers working on AI. They also have plans to build an agent that can understand natural language and seek clarification when following instructions to complete a task. OpenAI plans to build new algorithms that can advance this field. Finally, OpenAI wants to measure its progress across games, robotics, and language-based tasks, which is where OpenAI's Gym Beta will come into play.
What chores will Rosie do? Cooking? No, way too complex for decades yet: gathering foods from fridge and pantry, opening a variety of containers, exracting indredients of many shapes and consistencies in proper amounts (and avoiding those that are spoiled), prepping each (peeling, chopping, grating, sauteeing), and synchronized cooking before dishing up. All this without burning down the house or spilling and then having to clean up the messes. Not to mention the cleaning up of utensils and pans thereafter.
Cleaning? Not even. Vacuuming, dusting, tidying, navigating a dynamic ever changing floorplan and tabletops, without toppling and destroying all those expensive knick-knacks or running over the cat, and of course, not making an ever greater mess.
Washing the dog? Nursing the baby? Cleaning the windows? Mopping the floors? Beating the rugs? Washing the car? Mowing the yard? Clearing the gutters? Weeding the garden? Trimming the hedge? Edging the sidewalk? Taking the dog for a walk? Taking out the garbage? Yeahhhh...
Which subset of these chores does OpenAI choose for their Rosie Jetson? 'Cause she can't do them all. And how many Rosies can you sell if she costs more than a Segway but only can load the dishwasher and fetch beer from the fridge?
Reality check: an affordable domestic robot that's actually useful is hellaciously ambitious, especially when no robot on earth can do any of these things yet, not at any price.