A roboticist breaks down common misconceptions about what’s hard and easy in robotics. A response to everyone asking “can’t we just stick a large language model into its brain to make it more capable?”

Contrary to the assumptions of many people, making robots perceive and move in the world in the way humans can turns out to be an extraordinarily hard problem to solve. While seemingly “hard” problems like scoring well on intelligence tests, winning at chess, and acing the GMAT turn out to be much easier.

Everyone thought it would be extremely hard and computationally expensive to teach computers language, and easy to teach them to identify objects visually. The opposite turned out to be true. This is known as Moravec’s Paradox .

Especially liked the ending where Dan explores why people are so resistant to the idea picking up a cup is more complex than solving logic puzzles. Partly anthropocentrism; humans are special because we can do higher order thinking. Any lowly animal can sense the world and move through it. Partly social class bias; people who work manual labour jobs using their bodies are less valued then people who sit still using their intellect to solve problems.

Researchers submitted entirely AI-generated exam answers to the undergraduate psychology department of a “reputable” UK university. The vast majority went undetected and the AI answers achieved higher scores than real students.

“We report a rigorous, blind study in which we injected 100% AI written submissions into the examinations system in five undergraduate modules, across all years of study, for a BSc degree in Psychology at a reputable UK university. We found that 94% of our AI submissions were undetected. The grades awarded to our AI submissions were on average half a grade boundary higher than that achieved by real students. Across modules there was an 83.4% chance that the AI submissions on a module would outperform a random selection of the same number of real student submissions.”

I have to assume educators are swiftly moving to hand-written exams under supervised conditions and oral exams. Anything else seems to negate the point of exams.

A browser extension that filters out engagement bait from your feed on Twixxer. Uses Llama 3.3 under the hood to analyse Tweets in real time and then blurs out sensationalist political content. Or whatever else you prompt it to blur – the system prompt is editable:

This is certainly a way to try and manage Twixxer’s slow demise into right-wing extremist content. Though I’m taking this more as a thought experiment and interesting prototype than a sincere suggestion we should spend precious energy burning GPUs on clickbait filtering. Integrating LLMs into the browsing experience and using them to selectively curate content for you is the more interesting move here.

Welcome to the smidgeon stream. This is a new kind of content on the Garden . One that was overdue. They’re called smidgeons. Teeny, tiny entries. The kinds of things I used to put in Tweets, before Twitter died a terrible death.

Most are only a few sentences long. They’re mainly links to notable things – good articles, papers, and ideas. I’ve been meaning to do this for a while, but a recent migration to Astro suddenly made it much easier.