Elon Musk's Open Source OpenAI: We're Working On a Robot For Your Household Chores (zdnet.com) 64
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.
Can I make one rob a bank as it's win win (Score:2)
Can I make one rob a bank as it's win win. I get the cash or I get in to club fed with room / board and a doctor.
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There's an old proverb that says you might as well hang for a sheep as a lamb.
So make one that beats eight fucking bells out of hucksters who get rich by loan sharking and then try to pass themselves off as disruptive techno-unicorns by pissing away their ill-gotten gains on stupid shit.
Re:Can I make one rob a bank as it's win win (Score:5, Interesting)
This is actually going to be the biggest problem with robots that actually work in the way that sci-fi envisioned. If people can train them to do illegal acts, there's going to be a heck of a lot of government regulation and only the government and only the specially licensed and vetted who will be allowed to train them.
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No? They'll just arrest whomever told the robot to rob the bank.
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Right, though.
What about the data (Score:2)
When its about AI, open source is not enough in order to let people have an usable product. The open source license only covers the source code, not the training data. These data are much more important, and usually they have very restrictive licenses.
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Not waiting for them (Score:2)
They can't make a robot that's remotely capable of walking normally and opening a door. Not trusting any of that with my dishes. Less even FleshLight.
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Re:Not waiting for them (Score:5, Interesting)
Asimo takes an awkward, brute-force-it approach involving lots of complex rules and experimentally-determined data tables to control what position to move each servo/actuator to at each stage of a step relative to what feedback it's getting from its sensors. Every time you change anything about the scenario - the texture of something, the weight of something, etc - you need to go back to modifying tables and potentially adding whole new rules.
That is, of course, not how lifeforms learn to do things, and it's a serious hindrance to task diversity and development time. We don't work by saying, "bend this joint to 63.02 degrees, this one to 11.17 degrees and this one to 32.88 degrees because I've calculated that this will position your hand where it needs to be". We work kinematically - when there's a task we've never done before, we set our body in motion, get a rough estimate of where our body will end up, and increase or decrease forces, constantly re-evaluating how things our going. The more we do a task, the more our "neural net" gets used to what sort of forces will be needed to accomplish a given task and the less it needs to constantly re-evaluate and adjust. But the key is, we don't work by fixed positions and angles - we work through forces and velocities.
If we want robots to be able to interact with their world the way we do, we need to give them the sort of paradigm that we use. Give them adjustable-tensioned cable "muscles", or at least a good emulation of them. Don't precalculate what angles everything needs to end up in. Do give them the most advanced neural net you can. Do give the neural net the visual or other sensor hardware needed to get an accurate sense of where its extremities are, how they're moving, and where other objects in the scene are and how they're moving (relative to itself). With these things, you'll end up with a task-flexible robot with natural movement. Precalculated angles and positions will always have comparatively poor task flexibility and unnatural movement.
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any game? (Score:4, Funny)
Would you like to play Global Thermonuclear War?
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What side do you want?
1. United States
2. USRR
3. United Kingdom
4. France
5. China
6. India
7. Pakistan
8. North Korea
9. Israel
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10. Skynet
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You missed of Bel@#l.,&^
no carrier
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P.S. And South Afr
BRB, door. Or rather, several large men where the door was.
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P.P.S. I think you meant USSR, not USRR. Even if you did, it's wrong - they don't exist any m0.:@P';
Hey, knock it off you assholes. That's not a secret.
I'd buy one (Score:2)
If the cost of the robot is cheaper than the cost of a cleaning lady over the warranty period of the robot, why wouldn't you buy it? If a $5000 cleaning robot was introduced with a 5 year warranty, you'd be crazy not to buy it. That's way cheaper than a cleaning lady and it's something that a middle class person could probably afford and justify. If useful robots genuinely become available to the middle class, it's going to be a huge win for society.
Re:I'd buy one (Score:4, Funny)
. . .kids to clean their houses.
Ignoring the rest of your post, it's obvious from these five words that you don't have kids.
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His statement, I think, is still true. Unless one is an extremely overgenerous parent that has money to burn.
In terms of allowance, I think the most any of my kids ever earned iover the course of a year was maybe a few hundred bucks. Over 5 years that wouldn't come anywhere close to 5k.
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Once they make it illegal to clean your own house (and hide whatever you are trying to hide from the NSA/FBI) you will have no choice but to own a (backdoored) Certified House Inspection (I meant cleaning) Robot
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only with trump. The DEM wants to keep the Mexican immigrants working under the table.
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...friends with kids don't pay their kids anywhere near $5000 over 5 years for their kids to clean their houses.
Yea but upkeep and maintenance on kids is massively higher than $1K per year, and they don't even include a warranty or service plan as an option.
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Unless you don't live in a residence that requires you to do any housework (because presumably, it is already getting done by someone else), the only reasons I can imagine that you would be unable to use (ie, "can't use", as you put it) this tech is if you either actually sincerely enjoy housework, or else are someone who otherwise does not do their own housework at least somewhat begrudgingly.
Both of these reasons would put you in the "very atypical" category.
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He means he won't be able to afford it.
With EditorDavid gone? (Score:1)
The front page just flies with new bullshit.
GO CIA GO CIA GO CIA
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Rockets? Paypal? Electric cars? Residential solar systems?
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SpaceX? It's effectively a research group that does some real work on the side.
Tesla? Tesla is a an electric sports car company sucking at the teat of taxpayer subsidies and bailouts.
SolarCity? Another company skillfully navigating tax credit, rebates, and subsidies via public funding and extremely strict contracting.
Hyperloop? HA! HA HA HA! ha ha HA!
People need to stop seeing "rich" as equivalent to "genius".
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SpaceX said they're going to do commercially viable space travel and cargo delivery. Still workin' on it.
Tesla said they're going to sell THE EV for the masses and fund that endeavor by first selling EV sports cars to the rich. Well, they've eaten up a massive amount of masses' tax money to sell EVs to the rich and there's still not EV for those masses.
SolarCity, funny enou
Hired Girl, Inc, (Score:1)
It's got to be named "Hired Girl, Inc." Yes, it's slightly sexist, but with with all the anti-Islamist sentiment, "Aladdin Auto-Engineering" is definitely out.
Followed by... (Score:1)
To be followed by the latest fat at the gym: dustersize, wherein you carry out the motions of dusting.
That's the basic idea behind kettle bells--you're simulating physical labor in a formalized way. You could spend money on the robot and the gym, or you could just CLEAN YOUR FUCKING HOUSE and GET YOUR FAT ASS MOVING.
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It's a trap! (Score:2)
First he's going to get you to pay for an electric car. Then he's going to get you to pay for a household robot. Then he's going to get you to pay for solar panels to power the electric car and the autonomous AI robot.
What do you call a million independently powered autonomous AI household robots driving Tesla cars?
Elon Musk's private army!
Also, I have a newsletter you might be interested in.
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Ok ok, I obviously didn't have enough random capital letters and exclamation marks to have a newsletter. Still.
Rosie Jetson? Let's get real. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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A lot of these tasks are possible if you make them a bit more robot friendly. Like washing windows, it's not too difficult if you design your building to be washed by robots. As a retrofit it might be expensive, but for new high rise buildings it makes sense.
About 80% of vacuuming can already be done by a robot, which saves a lot of human effort. Stairs were a problem but now they are so cheap you can afford to have one for each floor. Rugs don't need to be beaten if you have a good enough vacuum with beate
Actual robots for actual chores? (Score:3, Interesting)
We already have robots to wash our laundry and dishes and floors. What we really need are robots that can safely fold clean laundry, stack clean dishes, and load washing machines and dishwashers and take out the trash. Bonus points if they can also kill pests and act as a guard dog.
I want one (Score:2)
If someone can make a robot that can clean my apartment good enough for my landlord not to get mad at rent inspections, I will be first in line...
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Its a standard practice here in Australia. Landlords have rent inspections every couple of months to make sure you haven't trashed the place (and to look for things that need fixing and stuff)