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Will Scaling Solve Robotics? - IEEE Spectrum

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Google DeepMind researchers, along with partners from 33 academic labs, have created the Open X-Embodiment dataset. This post was originally published on the author’s personal blog. Last year’s Conference on Robot Learning (CoRL) was the biggest CoRL yet, with over 900 attendees, 11 workshops, and almost 200 accepted papers. While there were a lot of cool new ideas (see this great set of notes for an overview of technical content), one particular debate seemed to be front and center: Is training a large neural network on a very large dataset a feasible way to solve robotics?1 Of course, some version of this question has been on researchers’ minds for a few years now. However, in the aftermath of the unprecedented success of ChatGPT and other large-scale “foundation models” on tasks that were thought to be unsolvable just a few years ago, the question was especially topical at this year’s CoRL. Developing a general-purpose robot, one that can competently and robustly execute a wide vari

This post was originally published on the author’s personal blog. Last year’s Conference on Robot Learning (CoRL) was the biggest CoRL yet, with over 900 attendees, 11 workshops, and almost 200 accepted papers. While there were a lot of cool new ideas (see this great set of notes for an overview of technical content), one particular debate seemed to be front and center: Is training a large neural network on a very large dataset a feasible way to solve robotics?1 Of course, some version of this question has been on researchers’ minds for a few years now. However, in the aftermath of the…

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