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Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala: A school in Kerala is taking what may be called a revolutionary step towards revamping education with the introduction of Iris, claimed to be the first-ever AI teacher robot in the state.

The KTCT Higher Secondary School, a venture of the Kaduvayil Thangal Charitable Trust, unveiled Iris last month in collaboration with Makerlabs Edutech Private Limited. The Iris robot is designed to be more than just a robot. Built as part of the Atal Tinkering Lab (ATL) project by NITI Aayog, Iris is equipped to answer complex questions across various subjects in three different languages. It can also provide personalized voice assistance and facilitate interactive learning experiences.

From creating images, generating text, and enabling self-driving cars, the potential uses of artificial intelligence (AI) are vast and transformative. However, all this capability comes at a very high energy cost. For instance, estimates indicate that training OPEN AI’s popular GPT-3 model consumed over 1,287 MWh, enough to supply an average U.S. household for 120 years.

Covariant this week announced the launch of RFM-1 (Robotics Foundation Model 1). Peter Chen, the co-founder and CEO of the UC Berkeley artificial intelligence spinout tells TechCrunch the platform, “is basically a large language model (LLM), but for robot language.”

RFM-1 is the result of, among other things, a massive trove of data collected from the deployment of Covariant’s Brain AI platform. With customer consent, the startup has been building the robot equivalent of an LLM database.

“The vision of RFM-1 is to power the billions of robots to come,” Chen says. “We at Covariant have already deployed lots of robots at warehouses with success. But that is not the limit of where we want to get to. We really want to power robots in manufacturing, food processing, recycling, agriculture, the service industry and even into people’s homes.”