Al Jazeera looks at how AI-controlled robots will impact the human workforce at the the second annual Web Summit hosted by Qatar.

Doha

The release of Open AI's ChatGPT has accelerated the development of artificial intelligence and warnings about its impact on society.

Rise of AI

AI-controlled robots are advancing at a rapid pace, and the effects could be far-reaching for the human workforce. The second annual Web Summit hosted by Qatar has highlighted these developments. While the cost of robotics is decreasing, the infusion of generative AI from companies like OpenAI, Google, and DeepSeek means programming robots is more accessible than ever. These advancements allow small teams with limited budgets to build robots capable of navigation and decision-making in record time.

Generative AI models such as GPT-4-O-like systems have revolutionized how robots identify and interact with their surroundings. By leveraging massive data sets for basic training, robotics no longer requires starting from scratch. These innovations allow robots to perform tasks traditionally done by people, like analyzing animal behavior or even sporting activities, with increasing precision.

The operational capabilities of these robots are expanding, from navigating rough terrains to executing tasks in outdoor environments that are typically challenging for machines. As robots collect data through their learning processes, this information fuels further advancements. The ultimate aim is to create robots mimicking human movements in precision and agility, specifically in applications like kitchen robotics.



How AI-controlled robots will impact the human workforce

The recipe for building a good robot suddenly requires fewer ingredients. First, you need the body. A drone with a camera is a good start, but on land, a robo-dog will do. Both now cost just a few thousand dollars, or even less. Programming them used to be tedious, but now there's a shortcut. The key missing ingredient was data. Because for language and for vision, for images and for text, you have all this data on the internet. For robotics, where is this data? There's no internet of robot data. That free data from the web can be collected, labeled, and used for basic training. Now, mix in generative AI, OpenAI's ChatGPT, Google's Gemini, or DeepSeek's R1. They cost millions to build and have already made sense of huge data sets. No need any longer to start from scratch. If I ask the robot, hey, can you find me the Coke can? I don't need robot data to identify where the Coke can is on my table. A GPT-4-O-like model can sort of show you in the image where the Coke can is. The result? A small team with a little money can build a robot that can navigate the world, spot what it's looking for, and make decisions on its own. And all of that in record time. Training takes four hours, and in four hours, we develop this product. And nowadays, we are just training half an hour, and the robot is able to walk a little bit. You can see the difference between the days and days and the 30 minutes. It's able to walk. Now the fresh robot can focus on completing its tasks. It can even pack that learning into a tiny box. This small AI identifies animals that might cross train tracks. Then it flashes lights or shouts at them. We analyze the animal movements, direction, their behavior, eating, sleeping. They are aggressive. They are ignoring the alarm. And therefore, based on that, we start triggering different alarms. The brain is on the device. The outdoors are full of challenges for robots. Difficult terrain, changing sunlight, winds and weather. It's easy for humans, hard for machines. This isn't the first robot that can play a sport. But it is learning as we're going. And it's doing that thanks to a combination of in-house and off-the-shelf AI products. Beyond fun and games, as the robots learn, the data they collect will serve other purposes elsewhere. The idea here is to go further on the breakthrough of having robotic arms that are closer to human movements, the precision and agility of it. That is the goal here. The robotic kitchen is about to get a lot more crowded. Colin Baker, Al Jazeera, Doha, Qatar.

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Rise of AI