In case you missed it, GenAI promises to be a boon for robotics. One of the significant challenges in robotics is providing robots with a comprehensive understanding of the real world, which is often quite messy. By using multi-modal GenAI models, robots can gain a better understanding of their environment and respond more effectively.
Microsoft Research released Magma, a foundational model for multimodal AI agents:
Magma is a significant extension of vision-language (VL) models in that the former not only retains the VL understanding ability (verbal intelligence) of the latter, but is also equipped with the ability to plan and act in the visual-spatial world (spatial intelligence) and to complete agentic tasks ranging from UI navigation to robot manipulation. […] Magma creates new state-of-the-art results on UI navigation and robotic manipulation tasks, outperforming previous models that are tailored specifically to these tasks.
