‘People are overestimating generative AI,’ MIT robotics pioneer Rodney Brooks says
What does Brooks have to say about AI?
MIT robotics pioneer Rodney Brooks thinks people are vastly overestimating generative AI. Brooks believes AI is an impressive technology, but maybe not quite as capable as many are suggesting.
According to TechCrunch, “I’m not saying LLMs are not important, but we have to be careful [with] how we evaluate them,” Brooks explained.
What does Brooks have to say about AI?
Rodney Brooks says the trouble with generative AI is that, while it’s perfectly capable of performing a certain set of tasks, it can’t do everything a human can. He believes that humans tend to overestimate its capabilities.
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Brooks explained that when a human finds that an AI system is able to perform a task, they immediately generalise it to things that are similar. Eventually they land up in making an estimate of the competence of the AI system. Brooks further added that ‘not just the performance on that, but the competence around that.’ Brooks believes that humans are usually very over-optimistic, and that’s because they use a model of a person’s performance on an AI task. He claimed that people see it as so capable they even want to use it for applications which don’t even make sense.
Currently Rodney Brooks is the Panasonic Professor of Robotics Emeritus at MIT. He is the co-founder of Rethink Robotics, iRobot and Robust.ai. He was also responsible for running the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) for a decade starting in 1997.
Is Generative AI a boon or bane?
As reported by TechCrunch, Brooks suggested that we need to automate in places where things have already been cleaned up. He also gave the example of his company where he is bringing automation in warehouses.
“The lighting doesn’t change with those big buildings. There’s not stuff lying around on the floor because the people pushing carts would run into that. There’s no floating plastic bags going around. And largely it’s not in the interest of the people who work there to be malicious to the robot,” he added further.
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Brooks highlighted that when it comes to robots and AI, you can’t try to do too much. Brooks believes LLM are not the issue, the issue can be maintaining those robots using LLMs. He believes that it can be hard to control the ‘control theory’ and all sorts of other hardcore math optimisation. Moreover, he seems to have suggested that both humans and robots should work together.
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