Gusz Eiben in Volkskrant: Real AI needs a body

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30 August 2024

For sure, when they hear of AI, people will first of all think of Chat GPT chatbots. However, some researchers want to go further. Gusz Eiben is one of them. Really intelligent AI needs a body and needs to evolve.

Looking at a robot in Eiben's bio inspired lab, you can't fail to notice that the creature first moves its legs left forward and right backward, then right forward and left backward.

The computer system came up with horse strides. Other robots move like snakes or scorpions.

Not because Eiben wanted it this way but because this is how they evolved.

The strength is hidden in the creativity. Ask a random person to think of an animal that doesn't resemble any other animal, they will come up with something that looks like existing animals.

"The best people can come up with is, combining two animals", says Eiben. Only evolution excels in creativity. "Whoever succeeds in controlling evolution, will be able to solve anything."

These are literally the first tiny steps on a long way that will eventually lead to intelligence. Not ordinary intelligence but the embodied evolutionary intelligence. There's no discussion about that - as far as Eiben is concerned these two should go hand in hand.

This opinion, willfully taken by Eiben, places him in a strongly deviant position in the dominant AI debate. The broad public and the investors consider AI equal to chatbots like ChatGPT, which are driven by complex language models - bits and bytes, stored in a zooming data centre with no body at all.

In companies like OpenAI people generally believe that in a few years AI will outsmart people in all fields. In their opinion AI is a super brain not in need of a body: as long as the answers given by artificial intelligence seem to be smart enough, they have achieved their goal.

Robots are a totally different story; they are not necessarily smart but they are increasingly good in performing certain tasks. E.g. the Optimus (Tesla's very first robot) eye-hand coordination is that precise that it can all by itself grab and egg and cook it.

The demo clip shows how Atlas, the new robot of Boston Dynamics, can get up after it's been lying by placing its feet next to its hips, which is something people can't do.

At first glance, the two worlds, robotics and AI seem to come together in a new generation of sexbots, to be shortly brought to market by the Chinese Starpery Technology company: metal skeletons with silicone skin, touch, and visual sensors, which can, thanks to the ChatGPT kind of brain, hold a conversation in a natural way.

Gradually, robotics is increasingly invading consumer market. The Chinese company, Unitree has already brought an Atlas-kind of robot to market, one that can lift heavy objects indoors and costs around 15.000 E. In the New York state, tens of thousands of robot dogs, cats en birds have been given away to the elderly to help them overcome loneliness.

However, this is not what Eiben aims at: his embodied intelligence emerges through evolution and not by embedding Google's OpenAI external language model into a robot.

Designing care and home robots with his evolutionary method is not effective. It's about something much more fundamental: creating AI which is actually intelligent.

Eiben received unexpected help. Jensen Huang from Nvidia stated recently that the next AI wave will be dominated by what he calls "physical AI". Company's president and CEO selling his hugely expensive AI-chips all over the world, talks about artificial intelligence which "understands the laws of physics". This is only possible with a learning body.

To read full article (in Dutch) click here.