Fine-tuning

Think of a new babysitter who already knows how to look after children. Fine-tuning is the twenty minutes where you show them where the cups are and how your kid likes the bedtime story.

With home robots it works the same way. The maker trains a general model on lots of data, then adds the half hour of you guiding the arms around your own kitchen. That extra practice is the fine-tuning.

The upside is that one short lesson can make a robot usable in your house. The downside is that a model fine-tuned on your kitchen may fail in your neighbour’s.