VLA Models: What Vision-Language-Action Models Need from Training Data

The coding skills of AI models are about to make it much easier to build and deploy robots.

Some ads will have chatbots built in. | Image: Google Google's AI-powered Search era apparently also extends to its ads. Now, when you search for a product, Google's Gemini AI chatbot will surface relevant items and generate a "custom explainer" about why you should purchase a specific one. The update comes just one day after Google revealed a new Search box for larger, more conversational queries, along with a focus on AI-generated results. In an example shared by Google, someone searching for a "compact espresso pod machine" might see a Nespresso Vertuo Up under a "Sponsored Product" label, alongside an AI-generated description saying: For a quality machine, look for capsule compatibility … Read the full story at The Verge.

We want to know how A.I. chatbots are showing up in your personal life.

Three of five regional winners of the prestigious Commonwealth Short Story Prize are suspected of relying on chatbots. They're certainly not alone.

Google DeepMind is integrating Street View with Project Genie to create immersive, interactive world simulations for robotics, gaming, and travel, allowing users to explore environments, weather changes, and rare scenarios.

Robots can see. Internet-scale image datasets and a decade of refined models made that possible. But ask a robot to actually pick up a half-crushed carton, thread a cable, or hand a tool to a surgeon, and the wheels come off. Not because the cameras failed. Because nothing in the robot’s training ever taught it […]

The deal is one of the largest humanoid rollouts ever, according to the companies.

Now that real life has caught up with science fiction, the imminent danger isn’t malfunctioning cowboys, it’s the robots convincing us that we’re great and everything is totally fine All the best science fiction movies eventually get overtaken by reality. Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report predicted personalised advertising and biometric identification. Spike Jonze’s Her correctly guessed that AI would probably arrive as emotionally responsive digital companions that sound like Scarlett Johansson, rather than rampaging killer machines. RoboCop imagined militarised law enforcement on the streets of America long before the Pentagon decided to get in on the action. Could Westworld become the latest science fiction franchise to catch up to the future? Deadline reports this week that a new film based on Michael Crichton’s 1973 movie about rich thrill-seekers heading to a techno-pleasure park for violence, fantasy and consequence-free debauchery is in the works at Warner Bros, with David Koe