Building AI-powered robots that can flexibly operate in the real world is going to take much longer than Silicon Valley believes and promises, according to the former head of Google’s robotics moonshot project, writing in Wired. Today’s generative AI revolution rests on the assumption that a multitude of long-awaited technologies — including humanoid robots, self-driving cars and superintelligent digital brains — are right around the corner. Hans Peter Brondmo, the former CEO of Everyday Robotics — a 7-year effort by Google parent Alphabet that was scuttled last year — writes in Wired that “giving AI a body in the real world is both an issue of national security and an enormous economic opportunity.” “The reason we called Everyday Robots a moonshot is that building highly complex systems at this scale went way beyond what venture-capital-funded startups have historically had the patience for.” Brondmo now fears the U.S. is squandering its lead in this field and Silicon Valley won’t be “patient enough to win the global race to give AI a robot body.” Experts and investors agree that the convergence of robotics and AI is inevitable. But progress in uniting the two has faced a chicken-and-egg problem: Robots need more world-savvy AI in order to get smarter, and AI needs smarter robots to understand the world. Robots rely on machine learning-based AI to develop the capacity to tackle goals and respond to unfamiliar situations and unexpected obstacles in the real world. But some experts also believe that today’s hallucination-prone AI models will need to be embodied — to encounter the physical world with limbs and sensors — in order to evolve an understanding of the line between reality and fantasy.

Full report : Building smart robots will be a slog, says Hans Peter Brondmo, the former CEO of Everyday Robotics and former Google leader.