I Saw the Future of AI in a Robot That Can Learn on the Spot | WIRED

摘要: Will Knight

Business

Aug 19, 2026 3:30 PM

I Saw the Future of AI in a Robot That Can Learn on the Spot

During a recent visit to Generalist AI, I w

正文

Will Knight

Business

Aug 19, 2026 3:30 PM

I Saw the Future of AI in a Robot That Can Learn on the Spot

During a recent visit to Generalist AI, I watched a robotic arm improvise and use a banana as a tool.

Photo-Illustration: WIRED Staff; Getty Images

Save Story

Save this story

Save Story

Save this story

Last week, I

ventured a whopping 15 minutes from my house to see

do some mind-boggling, jaw-dropping stuff.

I visited the Cambridge, Massachusetts, offices of a

Generalist AI

, where I watched robot arms perform

simple chores

like stacking cups, putting blocks into bowls, and the like. I was astonished by how quickly they figured things out—it was reminiscent of a flesh-and-blood person.

The arms mastered a range of tasks after ingesting a short, instructional video and, most impressively, no specific training for a given task. One of the most striking examples involved a robot that was instructed to sweep a block into a bowl using a dustpan and brush. When the brush was removed from the scene, the robot improvised by using the dustpan like a brush and flicking the block into the bowl.

Courtesy of Generalist AI

In another case, a two-armed robot watched a videoclip of someone unzipping a purse before removing some banknotes. I watched—somewhat slack-jawed—as the robot unzipped a different kind of purse and carefully removed the notes. Most amazingly, when it couldn’t grab the money, it switched from using its right gripper to its left to get a better angle of attack. “Ha,” said one engineer standing nearby. “It never did that before.”

“This is exactly the kind of thing people were really excited about with GPT-3,” Generalist cofounder and CEO Pete Florence told me, in reference to OpenAI’s breakthrough large language model, released in 2020. “You could take that model and just prompt it to do a new task and it would have a real shot at doing it.”

Generalist appears to be focused on teach

来源: Brave/wired.com