Researchers Explain Why Robotics Lags AI Advances
AI researcher Sara Hooker and professor Yue Wang discuss systemic barriers slowing robotics compared to software progress.
AI researcher Sara Hooker posted on X asking why AI moves at lightspeed while robotics feels slower. She explained that transformers unlocked vast text archives and code enabled instant verification, advantages robotics lacks because physical interactions go undocumented and lack clear rewards. Professor Yue Wang replied that robotics is a system problem with no societal infrastructure or stored knowledge. Hooker agreed 100%. Replies on X compared the gap to earlier vision-versus-NLP debates, noted hardware progress, and suggested robotics follows AI's trajectory several years behind.
My husband asked me yesterday why is AI moving at lightspeed while robotics feels slower? I think its a really interesting question and speaks to what unlocked mainstream AI over the last decade—and why physical robots can't easily tap into those same accelerants.
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6 posts@sarahookr My take is robotics is a system problem and there is no societal infrastructure, as you mentioned, no knowledge stored.
@sarahookr Remember how vision asked that about nlp?
@sarahookr It is because a severe lack of skill
@sarahookr Very interesting. I would say that robotics moves very fast, too but progress is mostly on the hardware side (e.g., the new sprint record couple of days ago). I guess it maybe also feels slower because fewer people work in it and use it, so we talk about it less?
@sarahookr Robotics isn't moving at lightspeed? It feels to me to be following a similar trajectory as AI but a few years behind basically. It's like we're in the GPT-3 era of robotics not the ChatGPT era. But I am an outsider here so I could very well be wrong!
