Robotics Research Update, with Keerthana Gopalakrishnan and Ted Xiao of Google Deepmind

Today, I'm thrilled to be speaking with Keerthana Gopalakrishnan and Ted Xiao, researchers at Google DeepMind Robotics who are developing AI systems for general-purpose robotics. This is Keerthana's second appearance on the show – just a year ago, fresh off the publications of RT-1 and Palm-E, she described the state of AI for robotics as being between GPT-2 and GPT-3, noting that the lack of internet-scale data was a major barrier to progress. Since then, Keerthana, Ted, and their colleagues at Google Deepmind have published a remarkable flurry of papers, demonstrating new techniques that allow robots to leverage large multimodal modals, to control different physical forms, to learn more efficiently from human examples and instructions, and even to use a prototype "robot constitution" to guide their behavior.