When the Bots Have Their ChatGPT Moment, Remember These Pincers

Food management is still a very human-based activity. Fruits, vegetables, meat, and other foods should be handled quickly but gently. It’s difficult to machine because no two pieces of fruit, vegetables, or chicken nuggets look the same.

Eka’s demos show that the company may be on to something big. I found myself comparing their robots to GPT-1, OpenAI’s main prototype, which was developed four years before ChatGPT. GPT-1 was generally inconsistent but showed some cognitive language skills.

The robots I saw seemed to have similar physical intelligence. After watching a video of someone reaching for the keys in slow motion, I noticed that it did something that seemed human: It touched the tips of its grippers to the table and placed them on top before connecting to the keys and holding them between its digits. Eka’s algorithm seems to instinctively know how to recover from a fumble. These kinds of things are difficult for other robots to learn, unless the humans teaching them make mistakes on purpose.

Unlike any other robot I can think of, it is possible to imagine the world in a robot. His sensors seem to sense the weight of his arm, its force as it moves towards the keys and down. When it has the keys in its hands, it seems to feel the weight of the keys dangling from its claws.

I don’t know if Eka’s method is the way to ChatGPT as a success in robotics. Some highly intelligent experts believe that mixing human performance with simulation produces better results than simulation alone. Perhaps a combination of these two methods will be necessary? But it seems clear that robots will eventually need to have the kind of intelligence, intelligence that Eka is working on if they are to achieve human-like abilities.

Agrawal tells me that the same approach should work for quality control. The precision required to build an iPhone, for example, can be achieved by building different actuators and sensors and testing the performance in comparison.

After spending a few hours in Eka, I decided to stop by the restaurant downstairs. I look at the counter as the staff prepares the food and makes the coffee. A high-tech native can do these things just as well, if not better. But considering how much I enjoy interacting with the people who work there, I think I’ll pay the extra money to have people around. Unless, that is, my hands also turn themselves off.

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