“We’ve had a bit of a breakthrough.” Toyota, MIT and Columbia Engineering have shown off wild results from a new AI learning approach that massively accelerates how quickly robots can acquire new skills. It looks like a ChatGPT moment for robotics.
Category: robotics/AI – Page 951
World’s first factory for humanoid robots
A new factory will produce the human-centric, multi-purpose robot “Digit” at scale in the U.S.
Agility Robotics, creator of a groundbreaking bipedal robot called Digit, has revealed that the company is opening RoboFab, a robot manufacturing facility in Salem, Oregon with the capability to produce more than 10,000 robots per year.

Google’s Bard chatbot can now find answers in your Gmail, Docs, Drive
Google’s Bard AI chatbot is no longer limited to pulling answers from just the web — it can now scan your Gmail, Docs, and Drive to help you find the information you’re looking for. With the new integration, you can ask Bard to do things like find and summarize the contents of an email or even highlight the most important points of a document you have stored in Drive.
There’s a whole range of use cases for these integrations, which Google calls extensions, but they should save you from having to sift through a mountain of emails or documents to find a particular piece of information. You can then have Bard use that information in other ways, such as putting it into a chart or creating a bulleted summary. This feature is only available in English for now.


Musk’s Neuralink to start human trial of brain implant for paralysis patients
Time to link up or shut up.
Sept 19 (Reuters) — Billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk’s brain-chip startup Neuralink said on Tuesday it has received approval from an independent review board to begin recruitment for the first human trial of its brain implant for paralysis patients.
Those with paralysis due to cervical spinal cord injury or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis may qualify for the study, it said, but did not reveal how many participants would be enrolled in the trial, which will take about six years to complete.
The study will use a robot to surgically place a brain-computer interface (BCI) implant in a region of the brain that controls the intention to move, Neuralink said, adding that its initial goal is to enable people to control a computer cursor or keyboard using their thoughts alone.


Automation Anywhere unveils expanded Generative AI-powered automation platform to empower people and teams and accelerate enterprise productivity Gains
Automation Anywhere, the leader in intelligent automation, announced a historic expansion of its Automation Success Platform, enabling enterprises to accelerate their transformation journeys and put AI to work securely throughout their organizations. Automation Anywhere’s new tools and enhancements deliver AI-powered automation across every team, system and process. During Imagine 2023, the company unveiled a new Responsible AI Layer, and announced four key product updates including the brand-new Autopilot, which enables the rapid development of end-to-end automations from Process Discovery, using the power of generative AI. The company also announced new, expanded features in Automation Co-Pilot for Business Users, Automation Co-Pilot for Automators, and Document Automation.
“The combination of generative AI and intelligent automation represents the most transformational technology shift of our generation,” said Mihir Shukla, CEO and Co-Founder, Automation Anywhere. “Every company, every team, every individual will be able to re-imagine their system of work and automate the processes that hold them back. Great people, empowered with AI and intelligent automation will be absolutely transformative to their organizations as they increase their productivity, creativity and accelerate the business.”

Google brings its AI chatbot Bard into its inner circle, opening door to Gmail, Maps, YouTube
Google is introducing Bard, its artificially intelligent chatbot, to other members of its digital family—including Gmail, Maps and YouTube—as it seeks ward off competitive threats posed by similar technology run by Open AI and Microsoft.
Bard’s expanded capabilities announced Tuesday will be provided through an English-only extension that will enable users to allow the chatbot to mine information embedded in their Gmail accounts as well as pull directions from Google Maps and find helpful videos on YouTube. The extension will also open a door for Bard to fetch travel information from Google Flights and extract information from documents stored on Google Drive.
Google is promising to protect users’ privacy by prohibiting human reviewers from seeing the potentially sensitive information that Bard gets from Gmail or Drive, while also promising that the data won’t used as part of the main way the Mountain View, California, company makes money—selling ads tailored to people’s interests.


China aims to replicate human brain in bid to dominate global AI
Aiming to be first in the world to have the most advanced forms of artificial intelligence while also maintaining control over more than a billion people, elite Chinese scientists and their government have turned to something new, and very old, for inspiration—the human brain.
Equipped with surveillance and visual processing capabilities modelled on human vision, the new “brain” will be more effective, less energy hungry, and will “improve governance,” its developers say. “We call it bionic retina computing,” Gao Wen, a leading artificial intelligence researcher, wrote in the paper “City Brain: Challenges and Solution.”