Google DeepMind hired the former CTO of Boston Dynamics, part of an attempt to push forward with robotics.
AI’s rapid progress is less evident in robots. In 2021, DeepMind’s robotics chief said the field lagged the rest of AI by 10 years, limited in part by the problems of gathering data from the real world or simulation.
DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis wants to fix that, and to use his company’s multimodal Gemini model as a sort of operating system.
His new hire’s former company has developed some of the most advanced legged robots, and Hassabis told WIRED that AI-powered robotics “is going to have its breakthrough moment in the next couple of years.”