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Google robot can have a conversation but also fetch you a snack

A robot that is controlled by Google’s PaLM-E artificial intelligence language model can process images and text, respond to queries and even grab a bag of food for you from the kitchen

By Alex Wilkins

10 March 2023

Google's PaLM-e robot selecting a bag of snack from a drawer

Google’s PaLM-E robot selecting a bag of rice snacks

Robotics at Google/TU Berlin

A robot from Google has achieved a level of wide-ranging capability that hasn’t been seen before. It can converse with you like a chatbot, answer questions about pictures and even get the right snacks for you from a drawer.

The robot uses a version of a language model called PaLM, which Google researchers first created last year. This is similar to the GPT-3 model that powers ChatGPT, but has more parameters – the number of variables that can be tweaked to …

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