[high_derivative]

I dont think this is cynical and I don't think it's a bad thing. OpenAI is not a huge org. The truth in 2021 is that not only is robotics 'just not there yet' in terms of being a useful vehicle for general intelligence research (obviously robotics research itself is still valuable), there is also nothing really pointing at this going to be the case in the next 5-10 years.

Given that, unless they want to commercialise fruit picking or warehouse robots, it seems sensible.

[bboygravity]

Sure. Yet consensus among "brain scientists" has long been that locomotion and the ability to explore the physical world is essential (or even central) to how consciousness develops and works in humans. Which in turn would seem pretty important for an institute working on cutting edge AI?

One of the reasons ML-based AI is pretty dumb still is possibly that this autonomous exploration side of AI is largely ignored.

It all seems to tie back into what Judea Pearl talks about in his "book of Why" (how you can't model intelligence without modelling learning of causal inference) or what Jeff Hawkins explores with his "reference frames of reference frames of the world" 1000 brains theory.

[BigBubbleButt]

> Given that, unless they want to commercialise fruit picking or warehouse robots, it seems sensible.

How successful do you think attempts to monetize this will be? Apart from Kiva at Amazon, I'm not even sure most shelf-moving robots are profitable enterprises (GreyOrange, Berkshire Grey, etcetera). I'm very skeptical of more general purpose warehouse robots such as you see from Covariance, Fetch, etcetera. I don't really know too much about fruit-picking other than grokking how hard it would be and how little it would pay.

To be clear, I'm not saying these companies make no money or have no customers. But it's not clear to me that any of them are profitable or likely will be soon, and robots are very expensive. I'm happy to learn why I'm wrong and these companies/technologies are further ahead than I realize.