When you might start speaking to robots

There are lots of ways to incorporate AI into robots, starting with improving how they are trained to do tasks. But using large language models to give instructions, as Google has done, is particularly interesting. The robotics startup Figure went viral a year ago for a video in which humans gave instructions to a humanoid on how to put dishes away. Around the same time, a startup spun off from OpenAI, called Covariant, built something similar for robotic arms in warehouses. I saw a demo where you could give the robot instructions via images, text, or video to do things like "move the tennis balls from this bin to that one."