With human feedback, AI-driven robots learn tasks better and faster

At UC Berkeley, researchers in Sergey Levine's Robotic AI and Learning Lab eyed a table where a tower of 39 Jenga blocks stood perfectly stacked. Then a white-and-black robot, its single limb doubled over like a hunched-over giraffe, zoomed toward the tower, brandishing a black leather whip. Through what might have seemed to a casual viewer like a miracle of physics, the whip struck in precisely the right spot to send a single block flying from the stack while the rest of the tower remained structurally sound.