ALL MAJOR AI + Robotics NEWS April 2024 (All AI and Robotics Updates)

April 2024 was a massive month in terms of robotics, in terms of AR releases. So this video is going to show you guys every single major AI development and robotics development that happened in April of 2024. So this is a long one. Timestamps will be in the description, but don't forget to stick around because there might just be something that you did miss. So that was the rather impressive demo that has been going viral recently, and I think it's probably pretty, pretty surprising on how insane that robot is. Now, there's a lot of stuff that I do need to tell you, because it isn't just this demo. There's actually a decent amount of information that they've released with this robot. And I think we are about to see how crazy humanoid robots are about to get. So if you don't know this robot is the, I guess you could say the next generation in terms of what's to come. After they retired the initial version, which is of course the Atlas. Now, I think it is a little bit confusing that they just didn't call this Atlas V2 or Atlas Pro or something different, because their previous robot, a couple of days ago, they announced that they were going to be retiring this version. You remember this version of Atlas, the one that broke the Internet in terms of being completely viral, because it was a humanoid robot that moved as well as any human, or even better than some humans could, even in very, very hard tasks. And this was something that definitely broke the Internet. The videos have over hundreds and hundreds of millions of views. And it seems that now, since they've decided to retire this robot, they're going to be moving on into the humanoid robot space. Now, with this demo that we saw, we've got to be honest, this is very, very impressive for a variety of different reasons. The fluidity of the robot, the uncanniness of the movement. I mean, just how the robot was able to stand up right there is definitely something that you probably might see out of a Terminator movie. And then being able to just swivel on the joints right there shows us that this is a robot that can move very, very fluidly. Now, they also included some pieces of information with this robot, and there's a few key features that I do want to show you that you might have actually missed. So with the blog post and the video, they said that this is the latest iteration of the Atlas robot that builds on a long history of innovation and research and design, pushing the limits of whole body mobility and bimanual manipulation from Petman, testing protective Clothing to the recently retired HD Atlas performing Parkour. We have spent over a decade moving the state of the art forward with humanoid robotics. Now, of course, I've already shown you the video in which they talk about human the evolution of ATLAS and how they managed to get where they are today. But one thing I want you all to remember is that this version of atlas, the first video where it was doing the crazy, crazy movement, wasn't even recently. These kind of videos and demos have actually been around for quite some time. And we've even saw the recent Parkour video. It's essentially two years old. So this robot is likely probably a few years in the making and isn't just something that they've decided to come out with. They've certainly been working on this for a very, very long time now. Something that we always get in the robotics community is why on earth do they make robots that are in the humanoid form factor? So you can see right here that they say traditionally we are focused on legged robots because we wanted to build robots that could balance and move dynamically. Robots that could navigate unstructured, unknown or antagonistic terrain with ease. And the main factor here, the main reason that most people don't seem to think about, because most people just seem to decide to question why these robots are humanoid, because some people just think it just because they look cool. That's not the reason. The reason is, it's because the world is designed for humans. So if you're going to design a robot, you need to be able to design a robot that can be plug and play with our already established environments and one that works effectively. I mean, yes, you could build robot dogs, which is essentially what they've used to be focusing on. But if you build a humanoid robot and it works very effectively, you don't have to redesign the world around the robot. You just have to design the robot around the existing world. So robots with wheels don't really work well because of stairs, and robots that can't walk up stairs don't work well in certain environments. And you can see here that they said the humanoid form factor is a useful design for robots working in a world designed for people. So that's something that you should know. Now, in addition, in the blog post, they state some more interesting things. They state that this is going to exceed human capabilities, which is a little unsettling for those of you who may have watched too many videos. Terminator Movie. So it says, however, that form factor doesn't limit our vision of how a bipedal robot can Move what tools it needs to succeed and how it can help people accomplish more. We designed the electric version of ATLAS to be stronger, more dexterous and more agile. ATLAS may resemble a human form factor, but we're equipping the robot to move in the most efficient way possible to complete a task, rather than being constrained by a human range of motion. And that's why I have the picture of the robot here in the bottom left hand corner, because we all saw exactly how that robot stood up. It was probably the most uncanny thing I've ever seen. A robot being able to swivel on its hips and just standing up like something out of a horror movie. Definitely interesting. And I'm wondering how it's going to complete certain tasks when it's able to move and swivel its hips in a way that humans simply can't. And it says here that ATLAS will move in ways that exceed the human capabilities. Combining decades of practical experience with first principles, thinking we are confident in our ability to deliver a robot uniquely capable of tackling dull, dirty and dangerous tasks in real applications. And I think this is rather interesting because like I said, I can already see some applications for this kind of robot, because what we have here is a robot that is not limited to the human ranges of motion. And this is something that I think we are going to probably see in, in the new robots being developed. As far as I know, this is the only robot that is able to move so fluidly and so freely. You can see the head can do a full 360, the body can do a full 362, the legs as well. It's absolutely incredible the types of movement and the ranges of movement that this robot is going to be able to do. It's going to truly be an incredibly agile robot. Now, something that you may have missed, and there's a few more factors that I do want to show you is that one of the things I noticed was that this robot actually looks pretty far. And I think it's so fascinating to how quickly this robot is. And this is actually no surprise because if you remember the previous version of atlas, it was very, very, very quick. Now, I think this robot might actually set, the robot might actually set the world record for the world's fastest moving robot, because whilst it is just doing some standard walking there, that does seem to be pretty, pretty quickly. And if it's anything like its predecessor, the other atlas, it, it will certainly be able to run and be very, very quick. Now, there's also something that most people also didn't know. And that was the grippers. So when the robot is standing up, you can see its arms for a fraction of a second. And it seems that what we're looking at here is the newly designed grippers that were placed on the recently demoed Atlas. So if you may have not noticed recently, there was an update to Boston Dynamics ATLAS platform before it was retired, and they actually showcased an interesting style of grippers. So here we could see Atlas actually performing a kind of movement where it's being able to transport some kind of car strut into some shelf area. And it seems that it has some upgraded grippers to be able to perform this tasks. It doesn't look like a human hand whatsoever. What it does look like is three different grippers, fingers or prongs, whatever you want to call them. And I think this might be the most effective mode of gripping objects for these humanoid robots, because I can guarantee you guys, they've already tested this a bunch of different times. And I've seen humanoid robots, and not just humanoid robots, many other style of robots be able to move and grab objects with remarkable ease, even with just two pronged grippers. So it seems that this kind of grip is what is going to be present in this style of Atlas, and this is exactly how the robot is likely to be gripping. Now, something I also think is going to be possible is that they're going to be able to, you know, remove these grippers from the robot simply because it is likely going to be interchangeable. I doubt that this robot is going to just have one set of grippers fastened to the robot. I think they're going to be to be completely interchangeable at the side. And that is something that I recently saw in another robot demo, where at the start, the robot literally just slipped on its hand. And I think that would be really, really useful because if you want to use the robot in multiple different use cases, you can just literally slip on and off someone's hand in order to be able to apply it to different tasks. And I think that that is going to be pretty fascinating. Now, what does this actually hold for the future? The future, because whilst, yes, this robot is actually pretty insane, what is coming next? So, previously there was some kind of talk that was released where Boston Dynamics executives actually spoke about what this robot is going to be like in the future. Now, bear in mind this.

And of course, at some.

So the information might be a little bit out of date, but it still showcases the vision and where things could be heading.

And of course, at some point, you Know, maybe the robot will be able to do things that a general purpose humanoid robot is expected to do. And it's interesting, what's in this picture is probably not 50 years away. I don't think it's around the corner as some people might want to make you believe. But this is probably in the 10 year time frame. One of the biggest things that we are working feverishly to figure out is actually not the ability of the robot in terms of moving and obstacle avoidance and autonomy. Most of that we have figured out. One of the biggest things for a humanoid robot like that is of course, safety, because this is a strong robot and Spot can work side by side workers. I think most of us feel pretty comfortable with him being in this room here. And you know, the bigger the robots get, the more important safety will become.

So we can clearly see that there is a clear future of these humanoid robots being able to do a lot of things such as delivering parcels and many other household tasks. And like I said before, if it's going to be anything like what we've seen here, just imagining a humanoid robot form factor, being able to run across, you know, different parkour environments, being able to simply turn its hips in a way that we've never seen before, shows us that things are about to get really, really incred. I mean, if we look at the previous version of Atlas, we can see that it was limited by a huge pack on the back, a huge battery pack and a huge, huge wires on the legs, which does allow it to do the level of turning that this robot can do. Now I think this is going to be a huge wake up call for the robotics industry because I think people are now about to realize just how advanced robotics can be. With Boss Dynamics seemingly taking the lead in what is an already very, very competitive robotics industry. Companies like Figure Apollo, Unitree, Sanctuary AI and 1x Robotics all competing for the top spot as the world's most effective humanoid. And of course there was something here that we did see. The last part that I do want to mention is right here, which seems to be some kind of vision system. And I think this was pretty interesting because what we also did see was when this robot was essentially moving, we saw that as it stood up, this beam right here, it did light up. So I'm not sure what that was IDing or maybe it was just turning on, but I do think that that was rather fascinating. And we can see, I'm going to highlight this for you all, some cameras right here. I think we can see three different cameras that are for sensing the environment. So it will be interesting to see how those cameras are used. If they're going to be able to identify certain things, to be able to do certain tasks. If this robot is going to come with some kind of vision system, I mean, it's a very, very fascinating future. So with that being said, let me know what you thought about this robot. Do you think that this is fast? Do you think that things are going crazy? I think that this is pretty, pretty interesting for the future considering everything seems to be accelerating. All in the same timeline robot that they are dubbing Tiangong. It's apparently the world's first fully electric powered anthropomorphic full size humanoid robot. So essentially they've released a very short new demo in which they showcase this robot's abilities. And we're going to be diving into this and showcasing why this is so fascinating in terms of the world of AI. So let's take a look here at this short demo. So one of the things to note about this demo is that this demo wasn't exactly the longest kind of demo. This is there was another one released that I'll leave a link to in the description. But of course copyright is a big issue. So essentially the reason I think this humanoid robot is rather fascinating is because of how it is powered. They are stating that this is fully electric and that this is capable running solely on electric drive. Now this comes after a slew of announcements from China in terms of many other developments in the nation. And this one actually did come as a surprise because I do know that China does have other humanoid robots in there, like the GR1 and many other humanoid robot platforms. But this one was rather surprising. Now you can see here that the way how this robot walks, it does actually look very normal. And one of the capabilities they showcased about this robot was the ability for this to almost get up some steps. And it was pretty weird because one thing I noticed about this demo was the fact that as this robot is going up the steps and it accidentally. Well, I'm not even sure if this is accidentally or not, but I usually don't see this in robotics. But if we highlight this area here, you're going to see that this robot is kind of tripping as it goes up there. I don't know if you guys can see that, but it literally looked as if it was tripping. But I'm guessing that maybe this robot has some kind of advanced system where it's able to self correct as it goes up, which does mean that this robot is very Very stable in terms of the stability mechanics that they've used, which is very, very good. Now, in addition with that, what we do have is we do have a scenario where there are some key features mentioned. So one of the key features mentioned about this robot is of course, the fact that it can run through sloped terrain in blind mode. And I'm guessing that this is potentially a mode where they don't actually use the vision sensors, because if they're stating in blind mode, I'm guessing that the legs will are pre programmed to pretty much walk over any terrain. So that means that this robot is going to be very, very nimble and agile when it comes to navigating different environments, potentially environments that are foreign to this and environments that it wasn't trained on. And that is very good because there are always going to be unique scenarios in which a robot is going to have to walk up in essentially a zero shot context and be able to clear the path. So this does show us some really, really unique engineering. And I think something that people might miss is that as the robot walks down here, you can see that the level and the angle of the feet actually change. And the reason this is so important is because many of the times in demos that we've seen recently, we see robots and they walk around on the back here. Like for example, we'll see a robot walking around on this flat surface right here, but we won't see robots actually tackling going up and, and actually going downstairs. We'll see a cool demo with some hands, which is all very good and well, but what we don't see is this right here. And I know this is very subtle, which is why I'm trying to point it out to you, but as the robot goes down, you're going to see that the foot of the robot is of course, here. Then as it goes down, it slants its legs just like a human would, which is very, very important for adjusting your stability and ensuring you're stable. So you can see that as the robot goes down it, it then adjusts its legs so that it's very, very stable walking down. And this is something that's rather, rather important. And then we can see this being done here. And this is of course a very unique design and something that we didn't see in many of the other robot designs, which I think is actually very, very important. So this was a key thing that I actually saw that I was like, okay, they definitely worked on these legs for quite some time because they're very, very nimble. In being able to handle a majority of different situations. And I think it's really important that we do not underestimate how important that is. Now, there were some additional things that I did find to be completely interesting. One of those things was, of course, the fact that this humanoid robot is a bit lacking in the arm department. I'm guessing that this humanoid robot, they mainly did focus on, of course, the legs, because once again, the robot is able to run in this mode. And this shows us that this robot has actually a pretty quick step. To be honest with you guys, getting a robot to move this fast without any overhead hanging cable is a huge feat. That is not to be scoffed at because this definitely means that the stability mechanics of this robot are completely incredible. And of course, by the demo, we can see that it does oddly look as if this robot is kind of half developed. Not to take any shots at it, but it does seem that they've been working on the legs quite a lot more than they have the torso. The torso almost seems as if it's entirely made up of just a battery. And then of course, the hands look severely underdeveloped. Not in any kind of bad ways, but it just doesn't have anything too crazy on it. I mean, there's no arms. I guessing maybe you can have that in the future. But it definitely is a very interesting humanoid robot. Now, of course, with the cameras, it does actually talk about how there are several cameras there that it can be used to, of course, navigate certain environments. And this was developed by the Beijing Humanoid robot innovation center company. And it actually stands at a height of 1.63 meters and weighs 43 kilograms. It can also maintain a steady running speed of 6 kilometers per hour. And also the. And also the multiple vision perception sensors that are located here are high precision units of 550 trillion operations per second 3D vision sensors, and high precision 6 axis force sensors for accurate force feedback. Now, one of the things that I was actually doing some research on when I was looking into this robot was I found out that this robot is actually open source. So this was something that I think is rather fascinating because it's a bit different when you take a look at what robots are capable to do. Now, open source is pretty crazy because open source actually helps out the community in a very, very insane way. We can see that this demo, they're stating that Tiangong has open source and compatible scalability. Now, I do think that that is probably not the most accurate translation, but if this robot is open source and it is developed in that manner, this is going to be pretty crazy because open source projects actually benefit from contributions from a global community of developers and engineers. And this can accelerate innovation as more individuals and teams can experiment with and improve the robot's design and functionality. And now, of course, when they actually do open source this robot, it also does provide a layer of transparency because this allows people to truly understand how this robot works. And this means that you can build trust and reliability as users can verify the safety, the security and functionality of the robots. Considering the fact that many people are fearful of this technology and what's actually really, really good, and one of the things I think are really important for this, if it actually is open source, is the fact that an open source robot can actually be a valuable resource for educational institutions and research organizations and students and researchers can actually study the robot's design and operation, which can lead to educational advancements and new research projects. And one of the things that I'm truly, truly excited for with this robot is that if it is truly open source, this is going to foster a vast ecosystem of developers and, and innovators to be building on this platform where they can potentially customize the robot in certain ways that the initial creators may have not realized were useful or utilize it for certain things that could actually show us humanoid robotics moving in a completely new direction. So overall, what we have here was a extremely, extremely interesting humanoid robot. I've got to be honest with you guys, this thing looks absolutely incredible in terms of the design and, and in terms of the slickness. And I'm wondering if in the future, well, I'm guessing probably so that they may include some hands or some grippers that this robot may have as some functionality. Because right now it does seem a little bit underdeveloped in terms of that area. But maybe this robot is for different things I guess we will have to see. But so far this is looking very, very good. And I have to say China have been non stop with their releases recently in terms of China's first text AI video model. Now this is the recent announcement that they held and it's pretty, pretty incredible. Vidoo is capable of generating high definition 16 second videos in 1080p resolution with a single click. And it's actually positioned as a competitor to OpenAI's Sora text to video model with the ability to understand and generate Chinese specific content like pandas and dragons. Now what you're about to see is of course the full demo in which they showcase the abilities of these clips. And I personally do believe that this is something that is rather surprising. So take a look. And. So there we have the actual demo. And this demo has been received with many different mixed reactions and for a variety of different reasons. Now I'm someone who's pretty open to many different AI technologies and I've taken a look at many different video AI generators and something I do want to say is that this is a lot better than you do think. Okay? Like I know some people are stating that this isn't great, but trust me, video generation is extremely, extremely hard. And that's why many state of the art models that you can currently use for free don't have the ability to do what we're seeing in this clip. And you know, the things like we've seen in Sora. So what we have here guys, is a clear, clear indication that China has been slowly but surely ramping up its AI efforts. And this is of course something that we aren't surprised by. But I think this week is probably one of the most surprising weeks in terms of what China has been able to do in AI. First of all, they've got a robot which has actually been state of the art in terms of robotics. Second of all, they've then developed an LLM that was pretty state of the art in terms of vision systems, the small model systems, and of course their large language model systems surpassing GPT4. And then of course the third announcement that we did get from China was this vidoo, this text to video AI model that can pretty much surpass the state of the art in terms of what is freely available. Now the demonstrations shown here, some people might state that they are cherry picked, but I would argue that of course they're going to be with any kind of AI generation that you do get. Sometimes there are things that don't look right. So of course in any demo, things are going to be cherry picked for that demo. And I don't think that is a crazy, crazy thing at all. Now there's some more information and some key things that eagle eyed viewers actually may have missed. So I'm going to be showing you guys those key things that you probably did miss if you weren't paying attention to this actual video. So one of the things that you probably did miss about this trailer was this. Right here you can see that the creators of this text to video model clearly know that SORA is the biggest AI text to video system in terms of competition. And because of that, they are uniquely positioned in where they've placed certain clips in the trailer. And one of those clips that they played in the trailer was of course, the clip of the woman and the man walking down a busy street at night in Tokyo. Now we can see here that the one from OpenAI's Sora actually looks very, very good in terms of the temporal consistency and in terms of everything else. Now with regards to the video one, when they actually did show us this, it was only around 3 seconds in the trailer. But I do have to say that it is pretty good motion for their first ever system. I mean, maybe it's not the first ever system, but the first one that's gained notoriety due to the level of detail and level of consistency. Now, of course, as you can easily tell, you know, OpenAI Sora is miles ahead. And in fact, I wouldn't actually say miles ahead, I would say it's a decent bit ahead. But maybe with version 2, they could most certainly catch up to this model. And if we go back to the trailer, you're going to see that there are several different instances where things are quite similar. So for example, right here you can see that it's quite similar to, to the woman who's walking down in Tokyo. And of course, if we look onto the right, there is of course some morphing on the hands and of course on the legs. But I think we have to give credit where credit's due because if we actually look at the skirt right there, we can see that as the legs move up on the right hand side, there is a neat bit of deformation on the skirt that actually does look very, very normal. And it does look really, really correct. An example on the jacket, when the guy's walking, we can see that the jacket is actually swinging around and the hips and the motion right there actually do look pretty effective. So I know a lot of people were dunking on this, saying that this is, you know, objectively mediocre. And I've seen many different tweets stating that, but I would have to say that this is not mediocre at all. And this is definitely a state of the art level system, because if an AI company right now came out and released this in the west, this would definitely be heralded as something that is a SORA killer. So I think maybe. So I think maybe what we have here is a situation where things look very, very good, but people aren't really appreciating what it is just because it's not available for use yet. And because I'm guessing Sora exists. Now, there was another demonstration that was also pretty interesting. We did see OpenAI's Sora, if you do remember this clip that was initially released with Sora, they released this clip of a kind of Land Rover thing driving around the hillscape and, and it was pretty, pretty good. Now when you do compare it to the new one, of course the video, it of course doesn't look as good in the trailer, but I do have to say that it still is pretty decent based on what we've seen. Now you can see right here some of the things that I will say that this does get right and other systems don't is of course the temporal consistency. So for example, right here when we're looking at this clip and it's about to come up now, you can see like the bushes, they actually stay in motion and they move past as well as with the trees. And the only thing that I would say with this as well is that I downloaded the video. So I don't know if there's like a higher resolution version available online. So I can't really right now comment on the quality of this because the video has been shared around so many times with the original footage being hard to source. So I don't think that this is the of course is like the highest quality because even on this video clip, like even in the resolution that I have it now, there are some clear artifacts on this video, like here you can see that there is like light like breaking up. And that usually happens when a video has been downloaded and shared so many times. So it's pretty hard to find the original 1080p clips. And I think once, you know, they release them again on like maybe some official like YouTube type thing, then we can actually see how much better they are. Because a lot of people might say that the quality isn't good, the temporal consistency isn't good. I would disagree. And like I said, and this is a key thing because videos are being shared around, the resolution is getting lower and lower and that is going to impact how people actually do see this. And I think that is an important thing to remember when trying to be unbiased when viewing this. Now if we actually do take a look at something here, and this is what I'm stating, okay, is that if we look at this, OpenAI Sora isn't actually released yet. Which means that what this is is this is a state of the art system. Because if OpenAI Soare isn't available yet, and we know that this requires magnitudes more compute than we could even think about, this is something that we need to, you know, take a look at, because when you've seen Sora and of course, gen 2 combined slash compared, we can see that Runway, which is, you know, arguably the second slash, you know, to Pica Labs or whatever, we can see that Runway Generation two doesn't really have any good temporal consistency in the likes of what we've just seen. And I think it's important to note how crazy this actually is, because they're actually. I would argue that it's actually quite better than Runway Generation two. Runway Generation two. While, yes, it does have some good features.