Microsoft has released a new generative model, dubbed Magma, that can autonomously control an entire robot while processing information from its sensors — a fascinating step toward a world in which AI like ChatGPT could interact with the physical world using a robotic arm, a humanoid android, or something else entirely. In its announcement, the tech giant claims its latest AI can process multimodal data, including text, images, and video, while also being able to “plan and act in the visual-spatial world.” That means it could be used to “complete agentic tasks ranging from UI navigation to robot manipulation.” “Magma is able to formulate plans and execute actions to achieve it,” Microsoft wrote in its research paper documenting the new tool. “By effectively transferring knowledge from freely available visual and language data, Magma bridges verbal and spatial intelligence to navigate complex tasks.” Magma is part of a much broader transition from simple large language models and chatbots to “AI agents,” which can carry out tasks on behalf of their human overlords. But the tech still has nagging technical limitations; case in point, OpenAI’s recently-released AI agent, dubbed Operator, which was designed to navigate the internet to “perform tasks for you,” still requires plenty of adult supervision to get anything done. And navigating the physical world, let alone manipulating objects, will likely be no easy task either. Nonetheless, according to Microsoft’s tests, its Magma AI “creates new state-of-the-art results on UI navigation and robotic manipulation tasks, outperforming previous models that are…Microsoft Shows Off AI That Can Control an Entire Robot