OpenAI, a nonprofit created by Elon Musk and other tech entrepreneurs to make fundamental breakthroughs in artificial intelligence, has said that one of its big goals will be teaching robots to do the laundry and other household chores. OpenAI doesn’t want to make robot hardware itself but, rather, to supply the brains for off-the-shelf bots.
You might think that learning to fold underpants is a modest goal, but such dexterity and adaptability is one of the grand challenges of robotics. It also fits with the organization’s stated objective to “advance digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole.” Applying the sort of machine-learning techniques OpenAI is working on to robotics should, in fact, have huge practical benefits, and it will be a necessary component of any more general form of artificial intelligence.
OpenAI’s announcement is unsurprising given that it recently hired Pieter Abbeel, an academic who has pioneered the application of machine learning to robots. Abbeel and his students at the University of California, Berkeley, have been doing impressive work enabling robots to learn to perform complex tasks through trial and error, either in simulation or through real-world actions.
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