Two AI companies converging on (the mythical) AGI from different directions

On Wednesday I blogged about Adept, which is approaching general intelligence by way of creating natural language interfaces for software packages used by end users, in their terms, “a universal collaborator for every knowledge worker.” That makes sense because current systems acquire knowledge, not through hand-coding (like symbolic AI), but through learning. The software environment is ‘native’ for AI engines, whereas the physica world is not, and so they should be able to learn it efficiently so they can act in it.

This morning I found about Halodi Robotics. They’ve just hired Eric Jang as their VP for AI. Here’s what he says:

If your endgame is to build a Foundation Model that train on embodied real-world data, having a real robot that can visit every state and every affordance a human can visit is a tremendous advantage. Halodi has it already, and Tesla is working on theirs. My main priority at Halodi will be initially to train models to solve specific customer problems in mobile manipulation, but also to set the roadmap for AGI: how compressing large amounts of embodied, first-person data from a human-shaped form can give rise to things like general intelligence, theory of mind, and sense of self. [...]

Reality has a surprising amount of detail, and I believe that embodied humanoids can be used to index that all that untapped detail into data. Just as web crawlers index the world of bits, humanoid robots will index the world of atoms.

Jang is right. Reality does have a surprising amount of detail, and an AI engine can’t learn it by reading zillions and jillions of texts. It’s got to get out in the physical world and interact with it.

Here’s what I said two years ago:

So, the AGI of the future, let’s call it GPT-42, will be looking in two directions, toward the world of computers [that’s Adept] and toward the human world [that’s Halodi]. It will be learning in both, but in different styles and to different ends. In its interaction with other artificial computational entities GPT-42 is in its native milieu. In its interaction with us, well, we’ll necessarily be in the driver’s seat.

And, yes, I know, I’ve said that AGI is a chimera, the Philosopher’s Stone of alchemical AI. But if smart and imaginative people take a good run on it, they’re come up with something interesting in the process. Who cares if they don’t make it there. Maybe they’ll make it to Mars instead. They can great Elon when he lands.

Sign me up!