“Robots are great specialists, but poor generalists,” according to Google DeepMind, which says models are typically trained for individual tasks, and changing a single variable can mean starting again from scratch. Now the London-based Alphabet subsidiary thinks it’s come up with a way to combine knowledge across robotics for a general purpose machine helper. In conjunction with 33 academic labs, Google DeepMind has pooled data from 22 different robot types to create the Open X-Embodiment dataset. Simultaneously, the group releases the RT-1-X robotics transformer (RT) model derived from RT-1. Continue reading DeepMind and Academics Advance General Purpose Robots