Everyday Robots

» see everydayrobots.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

The robots were about the height of a person, rolled on a wheeled base, and had one arm. They wiped tables in Google cafeterias, sorted recycling out of trash, pushed meeting room chairs back under the table, and opened doors. Hans Peter Brøndmo took over the effort inside Alphabet's X in 2016 with the title Chief Robot Officer, and by November 2021 X was willing to say publicly that it had a fleet of more than a hundred prototypes operating autonomously around its offices.

The premise was deliberately awkward. Industrial robotics works because factories are built for robots: the lighting is controlled, the parts arrive in the same orientation every time, and the machine is bolted to the floor and does one motion forever. Everyday Robots was trying to build the opposite, a single general-purpose machine that learned tasks in rooms designed for people, where chairs move and cups are a different cup each time. The same gripper that picked up a mug was meant to learn to open a door, and the same base that sorted trash took a squeegee attachment to clean a table.

By the end the company had more than 200 employees and had graduated out of X into its own Alphabet subsidiary. It never shipped anything. Nobody outside Alphabet could buy one, rent one, or see one working except in a video.

~ the dossier ~

~ the bet ~

What makes the project worth a headstone rather than a footnote is that the bet was essentially correct and was cashed by somebody else. The robots were a platform for machine learning rather than a product, and the papers that came off them are the ones that moved the field: the work on language models issuing robot instructions, and the transformer models trained on the fleet's own accumulated demonstrations that showed a single network could drive a real arm through tasks it had not been explicitly programmed for. The hardware existed so there would be something to generate that data on.

~ january ~

On 20 January 2023 Alphabet announced it was cutting around 12,000 jobs, about six percent of its workforce. Everyday Robots did not survive that round. everydayrobots.com redirects today into X's own project page, and that page puts it in one sentence: "The Everyday Robot's technology was consolidated into DeepMind's robotics efforts in January 2023."

The public confirmation came five weeks after the layoffs, on 24 February 2023, when the company's director of marketing and communications said some of the technology and part of the team would be folded into existing robotics projects within Google Research. Alphabet did not say how many of the 200-plus staff that meant. Most coverage dates the closure to that February statement. It records when people found out, not when the decision landed.

~ the part that is close to my own work ~

This project sits closer to my own working life than almost anything else I have written up here. My job is computer vision and edge AI on unmanned aircraft, and the argument Everyday Robots spent seven years and a lot of Alphabet's money on is an argument I have at work: whether to build a narrow model that does one task reliably on the hardware you already have, or a general one that can be taught many tasks and needs far more compute and far more data before it is good at any of them.

The distance is of an unusual sort. These machines existed in a specific set of buildings in California and nowhere else on earth, so the version of the project that reached me was a paper and a video, same as it was for a reader in Tokyo or Lagos. The barrier was organizational rather than geographic. A robot that only ever worked inside its owner's own offices never had to survive a customer anywhere.

~ what replaced it ~

Google DeepMind's robotics group absorbed the surviving staff and the hardware, along with everything the fleet had recorded, and kept publishing. The follow-on model generations are direct descendants of what that fleet recorded while wiping tables. X's page now files the whole thing under "Graduated to Google" with the year 2023 beside it. That is a generous way of writing that the company was closed and its parts were useful.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »