Google DeepMind's Chatbot-Powered Robot Is Part of a Bigger Revolution

In a cluttered open-plan office in Mountain View, California, a tall and slender wheeled robot has been busy playing tour guide and informal office helper—thanks to a large language model upgrade, Google DeepMind revealed today. Gemini’s ability to handle video and text—in addition to its capacity to ingest large amounts of information in the form of previously recorded video tours of the office—allows the “Google helper” robot to make sense of its environment and navigate correctly when given commands that require some commonsense reasoning. Courtesy of Google DeepMind Photograph: Muinat Abdul; Google DeepMind The demo neatly illustrates the potential for large language models to reach into the physical world and do useful work. Several of the researchers involved with the Google project have since left the company to found a startup called Physical Intelligence, which received an initial $70 million in funding; it is working to combine large language models with real-world training to give robots general problem-solving abilities.