AI 🤝🏼 Robots

Hey folks,

In today’s update:

📰 News: AI x Robots: Meet Google’s new RT-2 Robot

🛠️ Tools: Create personalized icons

🎲 Misc: Warehouses of the future

Reading time is 4 minutes. Let’s dive in 🤿

 Big Tech

AI x Robots: Meet Google’s new RT-2 Robot

A quiet revolution is underway in robotics: using AI to build and operate smarter robots!

Google’s RT-2 robot is powered by a new Vision-Language-Action (VAC) AI model that uses images and language to output a series of “action” steps for the robot.

Why it matters:

• Faster development: Programming robots was slow, expensive and labor-intensive. But using AI models, you could repurpose robots easily without heaps of training data.

• General-purpose Robots: Majority of the robots are specialized for a handful of industrial tasks, and are difficult to reprogram. But now you could build new general purpose robots and reprogram existing ones for a new task.

• Cheaper and Accessible: Robot can now learn a new task within minutes instead of months, they are cheaper and more useful. Plus, you don’t need a programming language to interact with the robots: If you can talk to a human, you could program a robot!

Bigger Picture:

Over the last couple of years, there has been an exponential increase in capabilities of industrial robots. For instance, Amazon is now adding more than a thousand robots per day to its warehouses and the robotics industry as a whole is expected to grow from $70 billion in 2022 to ~$9 trillion by 2030!

But industrial robots are programmed to perform only a handful of tasks and lack the ability to understand the world around them. That’s why you don’t see a robot serving you coffee or folding your laundry.

The integration of AI models with Vision and Language capabilities enables the robot to understand your commands and translate them into action.

LEVERAGE AI

Create personalized Icons

Imagin: A tool that helps you to craft your own personalized icons. You can craft professional icons using a clean UI, high customizability, and pre-configured styles.(link)

Improve Code Documentation

CodeSense AI: A visual studio code extension to enhance code documentation. It helps you to generate code comments, provide clear and concise explanations and maintain and update complex software systems.(link)

AI data notebook

Einblick: Meet the AI-native data notebook that writes and fixes code, plots beautiful charts and builds models. It builds entire data workflows with just one sentence.(link)

 MISC

What’s happening in Tech

• AI helps you find and order food: DoorDash is working on an AI chatbot, Dash AI, to speed up food ordering and help you find food options - Bloomberg

• Warehouses of the future: Take a look at Walmart's warehouse in Florida that uses automated robotic systems to handle most products - Wall Street Journal

• Starlink’s Space Dominance: Starlink is now operating 4,500+ satellites, or ~50% of all satellites, raising alarms about Elon Musk’s growing geopolitical sway - New York Times

• Smart guns are finally here: BioFire, a Colorado-based company will start shipping a $1,499 handgun that can only be fired by an authorized user - Wall Street Journal

• Tech Slowdown: US smartphone shipments fell 24% YoY in Q2 2023, the third consecutive quarter of decline; Samsung shipments fell 37% YoY, and Apple's fell 6% - CounterPoint Research