The Download: speaking to robots, and growing pharmaceutical mushrooms

Last week, Google made a somewhat surprising announcement. It launched a version of its AI model, Gemini, that can do things not just in the digital realm of chatbots and internet search but out here in the physical world, via robots. Gemini Robotics fuses the power of large language models with spatial reasoning, allowing you to tell a robotic arm to do something like “put the grapes in the clear glass bowl.” These verbal commands get filtered by the LLM, which identifies intentions from what you’re saying and then breaks them down into commands that the robot can carry out. You might be wondering if this means your home or workplace might one day be filled with robots you can bark orders at. Read our story to find out. —James O’Donnell This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. And to read more about how AI is making robots smarter, check out: + Fast-learning robots were one of the ... Read full article.