In the last two years, large foundation models have proven capable of perceiving and reasoning about the world around us unlocking a key possibility for scaling robotics.

We introduce a AutoRT, a framework for orchestrating robotic agents in the wild using foundation models! AutoRT scales robot operation to new envs in O(1 day) and enables a 1:5 human:robot ratio, scaling data generation faster than O(human).

In AutoRT, a VLM describes the scene, an LLM generates robot goals and filters for affordance and safety, then routes execution to policies.

The irony of Effective Altruism is that the biggest idea they’re pushing right now is “slow down/pause AI” but almost the entirety of their existence is funded by money made from moving fast and breaking things. I was an EA until fall ‘22, helped organize multiple EAGs. Rewards absolutely shape core ideas of a community and ideas that evolve in an environment flush with donor cash often gets little pushback except from scandals. In rare instances where EA values have been evaluated against the market as EA companies, they’ve almost all failed.

Can AI automate a software engineer?

SWEs are expensive workers but their jobs often involve writing pull requests for uncomplicated features.

To ease the burden on SWEs, @nuwandavek and I built SwePT: given an instruction and a repo, AI opens a PR! github.com/keerthanpg/Swe… We use @OpenAI ‘s code-davinci-edit-001 to rewrite a code block given an edit instruction in text. Using AI generated diff and GitHub’s python API, one can send a PR to any repo on GitHub accessible with your GH token

Here’s a video on how to use SwePT:

The FTX/SBF/EA implosion story also puts light on inefficiency/nepotism from mission focused organizations not having boundaries between work/dating/social. This is an extension of EA culture at large and led me to take a break from socializing in EA.
keerthanapg.com/random/ea-wome… Predatory sexual behavior is extremely common in EA circles and the power enjoyed by these actors, the rate of occurrence and a lack of visible push back equals to a tacit and somewhat widespread backing for this conduct.