In a recent announcement by Meta, it was revealed that it will be unveiling an AI-powered push Robots that can learn directly from humans. This announcement has sent the tech world into a shock and many are freaking out with the thought that AI-powered robots might replace human in many sectors. However this is just in the developmental phase and has got a long way to replace human.
Generative AI has been on the discussion table of most tech firm in recent time and many more tech firm are jumping on the bandwagon. what is even more interesting is the fact that there are other aspect of AI that is still been researched into, this include areas such as General purpose AI.
These are the two areas where Meta has deep its claws on “Generative AI and General purpose AI” and are currently working on projects in this areas. One of the project is called an artificial visual cortex. Visual cortex is the part of the human brain that helps process images, and it allows humans to interact with things in our world. The visual cortex has another function known as adaptive skill coordination.
Meta developers are capitalizing on this two function of the visual cortex to help robots understand the world around them and to navigate their ways to carry out individual tasks. Meta developers are able to do this by coding an artificial visual cortex in a virtual world.
So with the artificial visual cortex, the AI-powered robots, are able to learn by watching videos from a person’s first person perspective and is then able to recognize what is “OK”. For example, If there’s a chair here and there’s a table over there. The AI-powered robots is able to avoid chairs, and If something changes in the room, the AI-powered robots will be able to avoid chairs and go complete a task and then go back to where it started.
Although before the AI, robots were able to do some task base on the adaptive skill coordination training given to them, for example the Boston Dynamic’s spot robots, this robot is able to navigate a room, recognizing things in the way, to go and pick up an object, a stuffed animal in this case, and then bring it back to another location.
However, this are simple task because they are set instructions as compared to the real world where things are more chaotic according to experts at Meta.
Meta pointed out also, that the development is currently at an incredibly slow pace, but the fact that they are able to do this with the available technology at this time is really impressive. Meta and other tech companies aim to bring robots with humanlike freedom to reality, this robots will be able to move around by them self without external control and be able to make decisions just like human. These tech companies see AI as key to achieving this in the nearest future.