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In brief OpenAI has disbanded its AI robotics team and is no longer trying to apply machine learning to physical machines. Wojciech Zaremba, co-founder of OpenAI, who led the robotics group confirmed that the company recently broke up the team to focus working on more promising areas of artificial general intelligence research. « Here’s a reveal… as of recently we changed the focus at OpenAI, and I actually disbanded the robotics team, » he said during an episode of the Weights & Biases podcast. Zaremba said a lack of training data was holding the robotics research back: there wasn’t enough information on hand to teach the systems to the level of intelligence desired. « From the perspective of what we want to achieve, which is to build AGI, I think there was actually some components missing, » he added. A spokesperson from OpenAI this week confirmed it had, indeed, stopped working on robotics. DeepMind released AlphaFold, the most advanced protein-structure-predicting machine-learning model yet, on GitHub, this week. If you want to play around with it, you’ll need to be familiar with Docker, and have the space to store hundreds of gigabytes of genetic sequencing data as well as the model. AlphaFold is trained to predict how a protein folds and takes shape given its constituent amino acids.
