Geordie Rose (CEO) and Suzanne Gildert (CTO) look at their Phoenix™ humanoid robot and Carbon™– their AI that they are developing towards AGI (artificial general intelligence). They explore the role of simulation in achieving Artificial General Intelligence and other technical aspects of their path to AGI.
In March, Sanctuary AI announced it completed its first commercial deployment, a significant milestone in the company’s progress toward full commercialization. At that same time, Sanctuary AI announced it was taking an open and collaborative approach to building a new ecosystem in AI and robotics. To fulfill the ambitious mission of creating human-like intelligence in general-purpose robots, Sanctuary AI assembled a robust coalition of best-in-class vendors and partners — including Apptronik, Bell, Common Sense Machines, Contoro, Cycorp, Exonetik, HaptX, Magna, Tangible Research, Verizon Ventures, and Workday Ventures.
Their highest priority with the humanoid robots has been developing better robot hands. They are working a lot with simulation and agents but there is the need for realworld data to improve the simulations.
They discuss the problem of how Venture Capital funding is not aligned with making AGI and human like robots.
They discuss what is still missing to create Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) in an embodied system, including inner world perception, task planning, and motion planning. They discuss how a robot would be able to figure out what things do in the real world. It needs to figure out what all the objects are and what part of the objects do. There needs to be causal reasoning with an inner world model. It has to be beyond statistical analysis.
They give the example of creating an ontology for coffee machines.
There needs to be feedback sensors from the hands. Audio sensors are also a neglected aspect of AGI. Audio sources are highly important. There needs to be able to identify the correct audio source among many sounds in a cocktail party. This is an unsolved problem.
They are making the first version of the object centric SLAM in September of October of 2023. This would be a significant step to making an inner world model that could support AGI development. This is an incremental work in progress. Two-three years to make it very good and eight years to fully solve it.
There is a need for a semantic knowledge graph so that AGI can learn from being told information.
They talk about the need for a motion planner, task planner, instruction set.
Sanctuary AI is a company on a mission to create the world’s-first human-like intelligence in general-purpose robots, announced a major step forward with the unveiling of its sixth-generation general-purpose robot named Phoenix™. Phoenix is the world’s first humanoid general-purpose robot powered by Carbon™, a pioneering and unique AI control system, designed to give Phoenix human-like intelligence and enable it to do a wide range of work to help address the labor challenges affecting many organizations today. Sanctuary has been able to show that its technology is already capable of completing hundreds of tasks identified by customers from more than a dozen different industries.
“We designed Phoenix to be the most sensor-rich and physically capable humanoid ever built and to enable Carbon’s rapidly growing intelligence to perform the broadest set of work tasks possible,” said Geordie Rose, co-founder and CEO, Sanctuary AI. “We see a future where general-purpose robots are as ubiquitous as cars, helping people to do work that needs doing, in cases where there simply aren’t enough people to do that work.”
About Phoenix™
Human-like form and function: standing at 5’ 7” and weighing 155 lbs
Maximum payload of 55 lbs
Maximum speed of 3 miles per hour
Industry-leading robotic hands with increased degrees of freedom (20 in total) that rival human hand dexterity and fine manipulation with proprietary haptic technology that mimics the sense of touch
Improved aesthetics with a bolder color palette and elevated textures.
About Carbon™
A cognitive architecture and software platform for humanoid general-purpose robots
Integrates modern AI technologies to translate natural language into action in the real world
Enables Phoenix to think and act to complete tasks like a person
Explainable and auditable reasoning, task, and motion plans
Symbolic and logical reasoning coupled with modern LLMs (for general knowledge), domain-specific integrations, and extensions
Agency and goal-seeking behaviors
Uses Deep Learning & Reinforcement Learning
Photo-realistic and physics-realistic world simulations for robot training
Human-in-the-loop supervision, teleoperation, and fleet management
Brian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and a popular Science blogger with 1 million readers per month. His blog Nextbigfuture.com is ranked #1 Science News Blog. It covers many disruptive technology and trends including Space, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Medicine, Anti-aging Biotechnology, and Nanotechnology.
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Their goal is to create a comprehensible and collaborative artificial community capable of emulating human reasoning and behavior. It’s an intriguing project that has the potential to make significant advancements in the future development of artificial intelligence.