Watch Jeff Bezos Play Robot Beer Pong at Invite-Only A.I. Show
Jeff Bezos has been getting his beer pong on.
The Amazon CEO spent Monday at the company’s invitation-only MARS 2018 artificial intelligence conference, which featured a variety of bots putting their skills to the test and demonstrating the sort of robots that are going to take over human jobs — like throwing a ping pong ball into a red Solo Cup.
The Machine-Learning (Home) Automation, Robotics and Space Exploration conference is an annual tradition for Amazon. This year’s event featured a talk by actor Michael J. Fox, a demonstration by Rocket Lab CEO Peter Beck and an Intel drone demonstration from CEO Brian Krzanich.
Bezos was also spotted walking around the Palm Springs, California event with a SpotMini robot dog. The Boston Dynamics creation, first revealed in June 2016, has come on leaps and bounds with its creators demonstrating a rear arm that can load a dishwasher and pick up cans. The machine weighs 60 pounds and uses four cameras to navigate, which it used to lead a procession of robots across the lawn:
Watch Bezos try his hand at robot beer pong:
Bezos also took the machine on at a game of bottle flipping:
Omron was also at the show, with its FORPHEUS ping pong machine. The bot has been demonstrated in varying forms since 2014, and recent adjustments have enabled it to smash serves back. Masayuki Koizumi, head sensing technology research at Omron, said at October’s CEATAC 2017 conference in Japan that the machine could reach the market by 2020;
It wasn’t just bots in the crowd. Beck demonstrated Rocket Labs’ 3D-printed rocket engine, complete with reusable ejected batteries:
Back to the Future star Michael J. Fox was also in attendance, giving a talk to the exclusive crowd:
It’s not the first time the MARS conference has made a big impression on robotics. At last year’s show, he was spotted weilding a giant Method-2 suit created by Hankook Mirae Technology. The 13-foot tall bipedal mech weighs 1.5 tons, each arm weighs 200 pounds, and the whole thing was created after a $200 million investment. Bezos said it made him feel “like Sigourney Weaver,” referencing the power loader suit in Aliens.
