AI may need a body

One of the big things separating people from today’s smartest AI systems is that humans have bodies and machines don’t.

• Now, tech researchersare rushing to change that by pairing robots with AI brains, Axios’ Erica Pandey and Ina Fried write.

What’s happening: After being trained on troves of data — text, images and video — machines can mimic human responses to questions and carry out conversations.

• But they don’t have bodies —or a way to learn from the physical world as humans do. Now that could be changing, writes Oliver Whang, a reporting fellow for The New York Times.

Extreme AI: One project is trying to bridge the mind-body gap for machines.

• At a lab in Pasadena, Calif.,scientists are essentially putting the technology of ChatGPT into a robot body.
• The robot, called Moxie, can listen to you, process what you’re saying and communicate a response beyond just words.

 Reality check: Systems like ChatGPT are spitting out humanlike responses to questions. But they’re using probability, not reasoning. As a result, they have a propensity to be confidently wrong.

It’s alive! “Moxie’s eyes can move to console you for the loss of your dog, and it can smile to pump you up for school,” Whang writes:

“Robots of this kind, experts say, will be able to perform basic tasks without special programming. They could ostensibly pour you a glass of Coke, make you lunch or pick you up from the floor after a bad tumble, all in response to a series of simple commands.”

The bottom line: AI is moving faster than we can comprehend. Your mind doesn’t have to wander far to imagine truly off-the-rails outcomes.

Go deeper with Axios CEO Jim VandeHei’s column from last week: Be an AI realist.