Last year, Amazon announced its next steps in growing its robotic workforce. The new system, called Sequioa, connects robots across the warehouse into a single automation team, significantly increasing operational efficiency.
Tech giants are now looking to fund a newer, smarter generation of robots. In an interview with Financial TimesAmazon's Franziska Bossart said the company's multibillion-dollar Industrial Innovation Fund will accelerate investments in startups that combine AI and robotics.
“Generative AI holds a lot of promise for robotics and automation,” said Bossart, who leads the fund. “[It’s an area] “I will focus this year,” he said.
everything that is generative
Of course, generative AI is still hot.
Google, Microsoft, Meta and others are fighting for early leadership in the technology popularized by OpenAI's ChatGPT. Algorithms are well known for generating text, images, and videos. But researchers believe their potential is greater. Anything with a large enough amount of data is fair game. This could be the molecular structure of a protein, as we have seen, or it could be mechanical position data that helps the robot complete a real-world task.
Recent experiments combining generative AI and robotics are already starting to produce interesting results.
The simplest way is to provide a chatbot interface to an existing robot. Thanks to the Internet's valuable training data, robots can now recognize nearby objects and understand subtle commands. In a Boston Dynamics demo last year, one of the company's robots became a tour guide thanks to ChatGPT. Bots can assume different personalities and make surprising connections that aren't explicitly coded. For example, you can do things like suggest that they contact your IT desk for questions they can't answer.
Other potential applications of robotics include creating complex and diverse simulations to train robots how to move in the physical world. Likewise, generative algorithms can also be applied to systems that control the movement of robots. An early example is Dobb-E, a robot that learns tasks from iPhone video data.
Of course, AI for images, text, and video has clear benefits. Humanity has been stockpiling examples on the Internet for years. Data for robots? Not much. But that may no longer be true. Google and UC Berkeley's RT-X project is collecting data from 32 robotics labs to build a GPT-4-like base model for robotics.
All of this is starting to spark interest from researchers and investors. And Amazon, which has been developing and employing robots for a long time, seems to be no exception.
Amazon End Effector
A billion dollars isn't what it used to be. There are currently six technology companies valued at over $1 trillion. AI startups are attracting billions of dollars in investment. In fact, Amazon has separately pledged up to $4 billion to OpenAI competitor Anthropic.
Still, it's worth noting that Amazon plans to pour significant funds into AI and robotics startups. For startups, tens of millions of dollars can determine success. This is especially true considering the slowdown in venture capital investment across technology last year.
Amazon's Industrial Innovation Fund, announced in 2022, has already invested in robotics startups, including Agility Robotics. The company, which is testing Digit robots in Amazon warehouses, opened a factory last year to mass produce the robots. They also released a video showing how you can sprinkle some generative AI magic.
There are no official figures on how much cash the Amazon fund holds yet, but wall street journal Last year suggested there was quite a bit of room to run.
Bossart did not mention which companies might be interested or what kinds of tasks robots using generative AI could perform at Amazon. She said the fund will support startups that help Amazon's broader goals of improving efficiency, safety and speed of delivery. The investment will also include a focus on “last mile” delivery. (Agility's Digit robot made early headlines for its potential to deliver packages to your doorstep.)
Amazon is not alone in its efforts to combine AI and robotics. Google, OpenAI, and others are likewise investing in this field. But among the tech giants, Amazon has the most obvious and practical need for robotics in its operations. This can shape investment and even provide a ready market for new products in your warehouse or delivery van.
AI chatbots and image and video creation algorithms continue to make headlines, but AI in robotics is also worth paying attention to.
Image Credit: Agility