Matt Ostlind

Incredible: Google announces it rebuilt its robotics division around LLMs the same day the "possibly unfixable" "mother of all LLM jailbreaks" was announced. “Google is plugging LLMs into robots, giving them … artificial brains. The secretive project has made the robots far smarter and given them new powers of understanding and problem-solving.” "A one-armed robot stood in front of a table. On the table sat three plastic figurines: a lion, a whale and a dinosaur. An engineer gave the robot an instruction: “Pick up the extinct animal.” The robot whirred for a moment, then its arm extended and its claw opened and descended. It grabbed the dinosaur. Until very recently, this demonstration would have been impossible. Robots weren’t able to reliably manipulate objects they had never seen before, and they certainly weren’t capable of making the logical leap from “extinct animal” to “plastic dinosaur.” If you’re the kind of person who worries about A.I. going rogue — and Hollywood has given us plenty of reasons to fear that scenario, from the original “Terminator” to last year’s “M3gan” — the idea of making robots that can reason, plan and improvise on the fly probably strikes you as a terrible idea. But at Google, it’s the kind of idea researchers are celebrating. After years in the wilderness, hardware robots are back — and they have their chatbot brains to thank."