Is my knowledge out of date, or is this a step change in robotics capabilities? Boston Dynamics robots are impressive, but this seems way beyond what their robots have been able to do.
Saycan demonstrated similar functionality with PaLM 2 years ago (2.5 years first demo of cleaning up coke cans, etc):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ru23eWAQ6_E
Caveat - I am way out of my depth here as I focus on Software AI, but: I can't see any major breaks from SayCan looking at this information. When studying robotics, Degrees of Freedom/basic Arms and mechanisms (tension, grip, extension, types of joint etc) are a typical case study. However, I do not think there has been any practical progress (with the lack of data) in about 20 years now, besides increased refinement from materials science (e.g. detection of soft materials) allowing some better grip but not particularly better dynamic movement(e.g. walking remains badly solved compared to the efficiency/mechanism of humans).
With that said, Boston Dynamics is likely to have their own version of this in the works if not already live. They're videos just tend to highlight advancements in both hardware and software that are likely to go viral and connect with non-technical viewers.
You can already see it in some of BD's latest videos.
- changing a bike chain
- closing a jacket's zipper