The agent, which we refer to as Gato, works as a multi-modal, multi-task, multi-embodiment generalist policy. The same network with the same weights can play Atari, caption images, chat, stackblocks with a real robot arm and much more, deciding based on its context whether to output text, joint torques, button presses, or other tokens.
It's only 1.2 billion parameters. (!!!) They say this was to avoid latency in the robot control task.
It was trained offline, purely supervised, but could in principle be trained online, with RL, etc
Performance results:
The section on broader implications is interesting. Selected quote:
In addition, generalist agents can take actions in the the physical world; posing new challenges that may require novel mitigation strategies. For example, physical embodiment could lead to users anthropomorphizing the agent, leading to misplaced trust in the case of a malfunctioning system, or be exploitable by bad actors. Additionally, while cross-domain knowledge transfer is often a goal in ML research, it could create unexpected and undesired outcomes if certain behaviors (e.g. arcade game fighting) are transferred to the wrong context. The ethics and safety considerations of knowledge transfer may require substantial new research as generalist systems advance. Technical AGI safety (Bostrom, 2017) may also become more challenging when considering generalist agents that operate in many embodiments. For this reason, preference learning, uncertainty modeling and value alignment (Russell, 2019) are especially important for the design of human-compatible generalist agents. It may be possible to extend some of the value alignment approaches for language (Kenton et al., 2021; Ouyang et al., 2022) to generalist agents. However, even as technical solutions are developed for value alignment, generalist systems could still have negative societal impacts even with the intervention of well-intentioned designers, due to unforeseen circumstances or limited oversight (Amodei et al., 2016). This limitation underscores the need for a careful design and a deployment process that incorporates multiple disciplines and viewpoints.
They also do some scaling analysis and yup, you can make it smarter by making it bigger.
What do I think about all this?
Eh, I guess it was already priced in. I think me + most people in the AI safety community would have predicted this. I'm a bit surprised that it works as well as it does for only 1.2B parameters though.
In general I'm not that interested in these sorts of "generic agents" that can do all the things with one neural net and don't think they affect the relevant timelines very much; it seems like it will be far more economically useful to have separate neural nets doing each of the things and using each other as tools to accomplish particular tasks and so that's what I expect to see.
Aren't you worried about agents that can leverage extremely complex knowledge of the world (like Flamingo has) that they gained via text, picture, video, etc inputs, on a robotic controller? Think of an RL agent that can learn how to play Montezuma's Revenge extremely quickly, because it consumed so much internet data that it knows what a "key" and "rope" are, and that these in-game objects are analogous to those images it saw in pretraining. Something like that getting a malicious command in real life on a physical robot seems terrifying -- it would be able to form extremely complex plans in order to achieve a malicious goal, given its environment -- and at least from what I can tell from the Gato paper, the only missing ingredient at this point might be "more parameters/TPUs"
From the abstract, emphasis mine:
(Will edit to add more as I read. ETA: 1a3orn posted first.)
The section on broader implications is interesting. Selected quote:
They also do some scaling analysis and yup, you can make it smarter by making it bigger.
What do I think about all this?
Eh, I guess it was already priced in. I think me + most people in the AI safety community would have predicted this. I'm a bit surprised that it works as well as it does for only 1.2B parameters though.