Sergey Levine: prediction

Transcript context

…Because a human can label what's happening? Also because the human can help, the human can give hints. Let me tell you this story. When we were working on the π0.5 project, the paper that we released last April, we initially controlled our robots with teleoperation in a variety of different settings. At some point we actually realized that we can actually make significant headway, once the model was good enough, by supervising it not just with low-level actions but actually literally instructing it through language. Now you need a certain level of competence before you can do that, but once you have that level of competence, just standing there and telling the robot, "Okay, now pick up the cup, put the cup in the sink, put the dish in the sink," just with words already, actually gives the robot information that it can use to get better. Now imagine what this implies for the human plus robot dynamic. Now basically, learning for these systems is not just learning from raw actions, it's also learning from words. Eventually it’ll be learning from observing what people do from the kind of natural feedback that you receive when you're doing a job together with somebody else. This is also the kind of stuff where the prior knowledge that comes from these big models is tremendously valuable, because that lets you understand that interaction dynamic. There's a lot of potential for these kinds of human plus robot deployments to make the model better. In terms of robotics progress, why won't it be like self-driving cars. It's been more than 10 years since Google launched its… Wasn't it in 2009 that they launched the self-driving car initiative? I remember when I was a teenager, watching demos where we would go buy a Taco Bell and drive back. Only now do we have them actually deployed. Even then they may make mistakes, etc. Maybe it'll be many more years before most of the cars are self-driving. You're saying five years to this quite robust thing, but actually will it just feel like 20 years? Once we get the cool demo in five years, then it'll be another 10 years before we have the Waymo and the Tesla FSD working.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.